I enjoy chatting with Martian anthropologists. [1] They visit Earth without preconceptions and they ask obvious questions.
Recently, I encountered a Martian anthropologist who was struggling to understand what Easter was all about. I tried to explain it in simple terms. I first tried to tell the Martian Anthropologist (I think it was a “she,” so I’ll use the feminine pronoun) about Good Friday. [2]I told her that a magic fellow named Jesus dies every year on Good Friday and the Christians get all glum, even though He doesn’t really die every year, and we’re not entirely sure that there was a Jesus or that he was truly magic.
I paused, then explained further. I told her that Catholics are my favorite kind of Christians because I was raised Catholic and because they strive so hard to not eat meat on Good Friday. She asked why they didn’t eat meat and I said I didn’t know, especially since they eat fish and fish seems to be meat. At church, it gets even stranger, I explained. Catholics eat bread that they claim was “transubstantiated” into the actual body of Jesus (even though it still looks and tastes like bread. The ironic twist is that this bread is supposedly meat and the Catholics eat it on Good Friday, even though they promise not to eat meat on Good Friday.
Then, every year on Easter Sunday Jesus is said to rise from the dead and save us, even though we weren’t the one’s who pissed off God by trying to eat fruit from the tree that would help us understand things better. I needed to clarify. Actually, Jesus only saves some people. Any people who doubt that Jesus was God are forced to go to hell, a place where they are cursed with eternal suffering rather than being allowed to die. I told her that I’m one of those people because I don’t understand why God had to allow his son to be killed in order to save us, even though we didn’t commit “original sin.” What’s hard for Martian anthropologists to grasp is that good-hearted people who doubt that Jesus was God also go to hell, despite being good-hearted, which is the core teaching of Jesus.
The Martian Anthropologist, hearing of this powerful and sometimes sadistic God, told me that she didn’t want to have anything to do with churches. Getting to close to anything religious just sounded much too dangerous to her. I told her that religion was important to humans because it scares them too, and keeps them from hurting each other except when they start wars where they argue about things like whether the mother of Jesus ever had sex. She told me that human societies were “interesting.” Then she asked why humans don’t simply try harder to be nice to one another rather than believe in life after death, and other forms of magic. I told her that I didn’t know.
Then she asked me to tell her about eggs and marshmallow chickens. I immediately recognized that she wanted to know what Americans really believed rather than what they said they believed. Therefore, off we went to Walgreen’s to fully understand the florescent American holiday of Easter.
[3]
She asked what Jesus had to do with Easter baskets and whether God the Father was named “Disney.” I told her that I just didn’t know either of these things. She asked whether there were bunnies at the manger or at the crucifixion. I didn’t know. Does the Bible talk about coloring eggs 2,000? I didn’t know.
[4]
She asked why the bunnies were made out of chocolate and whether Jesus purportedly ate chocolate. I didn’t know.
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She asked why the children didn’t receive gifts of stuffed replicas of Jesus dying on the cross rather than stuffed rabbits and lambs or horses. I didn’t know.
[5]
She asked whether there could still be an Easter if someone managed to steal all of the candy and toys. I told her “No,” not in modern America. It’s just like Christmas [6](and see here [7]) and almost every other holiday. In American, we celebrate holy days by purchasing things we don’t need. [8]
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The Martian anthropologist then asked whether I would show her how to celebrate an authentic American Easter with her. Absolutely, I said. So I bought her a big basket of jelly beans and malted mik eggs and we sat down and overate.
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