The Convention of States Action and The Trafalgar Group, Christian theocratic organizations, conducted a survey which shows 72.6% of respondents believe the "moral lessons found in the holidays of Easter and Passover" are either "somewhat important" or "very important" to guaranteeing a strong U.S. in the future.
Based on the Christian Bible and the anonymous authors of the Christian Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus was a religious Jew who believed Passover was very important, and that the Last Supper was a Passover Seder in celebration of the ungodly and cruel Passover story. However, the anonymous author of the Gospel of John contradicts the other three Christian Gospels regarding the Last Supper being a Passover Seder. This contradiction is not at all surprising, as the Christian Bible, as well as the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, are overflowing with self-contradictions.
The survey by the Christian theocratic organizations was about "moral lessons" that are allegedly taught in the Passover story and the Easter story. What are those lessons?
In the Passover story we are told that the ancient Jews were being held as slaves by the ancient Egyptians. There is no evidence to believe this foundational claim of the Passover story and of Judaism itself. However, looking at the Passover story in the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Old Testament, we see there are absolutely no moral lessons to be learned. Even prior to the actual Passover part of the Exodus story, we see God as setting a bad example for followers of God. The ancient Jewish clergymen who wrote the ungodly Hebrew Bible claim multiple times that God told Moses to tell Pharaoh to release the Jewish slaves, but that God would "harden Pharaoh's heart" so that he would not release the Jewish slaves (Exodus 4:21 among other places). This anti-God claim and teaching depicts God as being intent on not letting anything get in his way of slaughtering the firstborn of the Egyptian people and their cattle.
The actual Passover story is found in Exodus 12:21-36. It claims God instructed Moses to instruct the Jews to kill a lamb and put the lamb's blood on their doors. When God goes through Egypt to slaughter the firstborn of the Egyptians and their cattle, he will pass over the homes of the Jews with the lamb's blood on their doors. Verses 29 and 30 state:
"And it came to pass, that at midnight the LORD smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle. And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead."
Stop for a moment and imagine what that would have been like. The firstborn of everyone in Egypt, dead. The "firstborn" is not limited to babies, as there are many older children and adults who are the firstborn. Imagine the soul-crushing misery that would have unleased in all the people of Egypt. All because Pharaoh did not do what the Hebrew God made impossible for him to do. Believing in such a cruel and soulless god as the Hebrew and Christian bibles depict The Supreme Intelligence/God as being, can only help to make people who believe in that god cruel and soulless, too.
When we look at Easter, we see it is also, as Passover is, void of any moral lessons. Even though, with the exception of the probability that the religious Jew, Jesus, was celebrating the cruel and ungodly Passover story during the Last Supper, there are no mass killings at the hand of God, the Easter story still puts a wall between us and The Supreme Intelligence/God, our Creator. It does this by requiring us to turn our back on God's gift to us of our innate reason. You can only believe in the resurrection of Jesus if you reject your God-given reason. Add to this, Matthew 27:50-53 which spits in the face of anyone who values and uses their God-given reason by claiming that when Jesus died on a cross on a Friday afternoon, dead people buried in graves around Jerusalem came back to life and hung out at their graves until Sunday morning when Jesus also came back to life (click here for an in-depth look at this ridiculous biblical claim). In addition to these reasons, the examples of contradictions regarding the Bible story of Jesus' resurrection, such as how many women came to Jesus' sepulcher that Sunday morning, and it's very obvious we cannot believe in the Easter story without rejecting our God-given reason.
We need to take the advice of the revolutionary and Deist Thomas Paine who wrote in The Age of Reason, The Complete Edition:
"Nonsense ought to be treated as nonsense, wherever it be found; and had this been done in the rational manner it ought to be done, instead of intimating and mincing the matter, as has been too much the case, the nonsense and false doctrine of the Bible, with all the aid that priestcraft can give, could never have stood their ground against the divine reason that God has given to man."
If we reject cruelty and superstition and value reason, there is no logical way we can believe in or belong to a "revealed" religion. Thankfully, God gave us reason, not religion.
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