The New York Times has decided to be part of the religious insanity problem.

I WROTE THIS COMMENT:

"Listen: I do not know if an actual person named Jesus rose from the dead. I hope that this is true, but I don’t know. I wasn’t there."

Why is this childish nonsense in the New York Times?

I know the decomposing Jeebus didn't magically rise from the dead because it's impossible. And I certainly would not hope magic is real.

Religions are good for nothing but brainwashing (child abuse), stupidity, and never ending violence. The New York Times has decided to be part of the problem.

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WHAT SOMEONE ELSE WROTE:

"Listen: I do not know if an actual person named Jesus rose from the dead. I hope that this is true, but I don’t know. I wasn’t there."

Oh, Jennifer....there's simply no reason to lose your sense of reason just because life is beautiful, nature is breathtaking and humans are the absolute worst suckers for storytelling.

Humanity is finally starting to ease out of the medieval religious darkness that has been concussed into human brains for eons and there you go getting all mentally weak-kneed as you have a mini-relapse during one of Christianity's 'holy weeks'.

Reason has come a long way over the centuries, but there is much more work to be done and 'thoughts and prayers' are about as useful good men doing nothing in the face of evil.

Sure the buildings and the music are nice, but the logic fails...badly.

Snap out it, get a hold of yourself, think things through, and come to your senses.

Use your head.

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THIS IS THE RIDICULOUS NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE:

The Agony of Faith

Jennifer Finney Boylan MARCH 28, 2018

We were back at the shore, after almost 50 years, and I was telling the story of the talking donkey.

The five of us — Link, John, Mark, Kenny and me — had met in seventh grade, in 1970, and over the ensuing years we had gathered many times at this vacation house in Ventnor, N.J. Now, as we face our 60th birthdays, we had come together again, to celebrate our long friendships, and to look back.

The first night, the conversation unexpectedly turned to faith. I noted that it had been the story in Numbers 22 that had first shattered my nascent Christianity. This is the story in which Balaam beats his donkey, and the donkey, exasperated, turns to him and says, “What did I ever do to you?” And Balaam replies, “You’ve made a fool of me!”

“That’s not what anyone would say in that situation!” I complained.

“No? What would you have said?” asked Link.

“I’d have said, ‘Whoa! I have a talking donkey! I’m going to be rich!’”

This was the same objection I had raised to this story — and to the larger question of the reliability of Scripture — with my mother, decades before. When we were children, she dutifully dragged my sister and me to the Lutheran church in Broomall, Pa., where we sat in scratchy clothes, listening to stories of talking donkeys, parting seas, multitudes being fed with a single loaf of bread. A portrait of Christ in Gethsemane, — “Agony in the Garden,” hung on one wall.

My sister and I would have none of it. Eventually, a day came when we refused to go, and my mother realized there was no point in forcing us. Later, as my friends were confirmed in their faiths — John joined the Presbyterians, Kenny was bar mitzvahed — my mother felt that she had failed us. “I should have had you confirmed,” she lamented. “You could always have been atheists afterward.”

Back then, I thought that doubt (also known as “common sense”) was my roadblock to a spiritual life. Now, these many years later, I have come to believe that doubt is, in fact, the drive wheel of faith, not its obstacle. BULLSHIT.

One Sunday morning a few years ago, I wandered out of my apartment in New York without having a clear sense of where I was going. The next thing I knew I had pulled into a nearby church, where I looked around suspiciously, and thought, “Please, God, don’t make me do it.” I sat in a pew.

The sermon that day was not about talking donkeys. It was about feeding the hungry. It was about working for equality. It was about justice for minorities, and gay and lesbian and bisexual and trans people. It was about giving refuge to people — including immigrants and refugees — who do not have a home.

It was, in the end, about only one thing: the necessity of loving one another.

Well, Jesus, I thought. I could get behind that.

Later, on the way out of church, I saw that same old painting of Christ in the garden, hanging in a small chapel. And I suddenly realized what I had been looking at, even while I was a child in the Lutheran church.

It was a portrait of a man thinking, “Please God, don’t make me do it.” And yet he did it anyway, in spite of his doubt.

We have had hard lives, my old friends and I, in some ways. Since we first met in 1970, there have been all kinds of misfortunes. There have been car accidents and job losses, divorces and heartbreaks, newborn babies whose lives were endangered. One of us is in a wheelchair now.

But here we all are, on the threshold of 60, and still deeply connected to one another. That day in New Jersey, as I sat there with these precious souls at the shore — can I call them anything but old men now? — it occurred to me that I have seen things a lot more improbable than talking donkeys turn out to be true. What greater miracle could there be than friendships that last a lifetime?

The next morning, my friend Kenny and I were up early enough to see the sun rise over the Atlantic, standing on the same beach where we had stood, nearly half a century before, as teenage boys. Thirty years ago, before I came out as trans, he’d been my best man.

He is still my best man.

Listen: I do not know if an actual person named Jesus rose from the dead. I hope that this is true, but I don’t know. I wasn’t there.

I know this though: On Sunday morning I stood on a beach with the friend of my youth, our arms around each other’s shoulders. The rising sun burst over the ocean, and the light shone on our faces.

“Agony in the Garden,” a 15th-century painting by Pietro Perugino.