I don’t get this whole “Can’t eat meat on Friday, lest we make the baby Jesus cry.” I didn’t get it when I was Catholic, and I don’t get it now.
I want some pepperonis on my pizza bitches!
And bacon. Where would the world be if we didn’t have bacon? In a much healthier place, no doubt, but would that place be worth living in? No!
So why the hatred on swine, and meat on Friday?
According to KenCollins dot com,
In the first century, Jews fasted on Mondays and Thursdays. The original Christians were all Jewish and were used to the fasting as a spiritual discipline. They moved the fast days to Wednesdays and Fridays, because Judas engineered Jesus’ arrest on a Wednesday and Jesus was crucified on a Friday. Most often that fast took the form of avoiding meat in the diet. In those days, meat was a luxury food. You either had to buy it in a market or you had to own enough land to keep cattle. On the other hand, anyone could grow vegetables or forage for them, and anyone could catch a fish in a lake or a stream. You could buy better fish and vegetables, but the point is that you could eat without money if you were poor. So meat was rich people’s food and fish was poor people’s food. That is why the most common form of fasting was to omit meat and eat fish.
So doesn’t this mean that Catholics need to pick a new “luxury food”? Given the cost of seafood, even in a port town like Baltimore, shouldn’t fish be the new “meat”?
Or maybe, just lobster, scallops, Baked Alaska, and truffles should be outlawed. Are there any luxury foods anymore, really?
Maybe instead of holding to a tradition that doesn’t make any sense given the current economic market, and the ability of most people to easily purchase meat, a new tradition could be developed. Perhaps that tradition could be called, “Let’s actually do something for the needy instead of giving them cans of old sauerkraut and kidney beans.”
Take Mother Teresa for example. This is what she did:
This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. Mother Theresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had beenshe preferred California clinics when she got sick herselfand her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?
The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for “the poorest of the poor.” People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions. Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the “Missionaries of Charity,” but they had no audience for their story. George Orwell’s admonition in his essay on Gandhithat saints should always be presumed guilty until proved innocentwas drowned in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda.
One of the curses of India, as of other poor countries, is the quack medicine man, who fleeces the sufferer by promises of miraculous healing. Sunday was a great day for these parasites, who saw their crummy methods endorsed by his holiness and given a more or less free ride in the international press. Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. More than that, we witnessed the elevation and consecration of extreme dogmatism, blinkered faith, and the cult of a mediocre human personality. Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions.*
So I say, stop the silly tradition of fasting, and do a little investigation before you give money to a supposedly “needy” organization. Instead use the money that you would have spent on a luxury and give it to an organization that actually helps people.
Have a happy celebration of a pagan fertility ritual co-opted by the church to coincide with the resurrection of Jesus.**
And make sure the Easter Bunny gives your kids some candy.
*Shock your relatives this Easter with your newfound knowledge of the real Mother Teresa. Who am I kidding? About 90% of you won’t believe it anyway. She’s not a good person people! She let hundreds of the worlds poorest people die in pain!
**Insert the following quotation marks as you see fit in the asterisked sentence-
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