well jesus says "bear your cross and follow me" so maybe that's what they think they're doing :p:

They are really just celebrating human sacrifice, with the hope that you might do the same. Then they will express their joy in song as they celebrate every drop of blood that was spilled/every lash that was taken on your behalf for the good of God's Almighty Kingdom. Go to an Easter service and you will experience an interesting spectacle of sadomasochism.

In a certain sense you are right, the cross and crucifixions in ancient time has the same horrific image to the people then as the guillotine during the Reign of Terror. Whether God "endorsed" it is a tough question for me, because crucfixion is evil and how can God "endorse" an evil, and on the otherhand most theologians will say it was in God's will from from the fall or of man (or from all eternity) that Jesus was to be crucified. I don't know the mind of God, so I don't focus on whether or not God "endorse" it or not, but rather I focus on the inner spiritual life of Jesus during his suffering and death. To me Jesus' suffering (which is sometimes called the Passion of Christ) was the perfect example of His virture (Justice, Fortitude, Prudence and Termperance.) The crucifixion was one of the worst hardship anyone could endure in the ancient times. The fact that Jesus allowed Himself to be crucified shows that He shared in the suffering of other people, during His time and even through time no matter what the hardship is.... So the crufix as jewelery is symbol of Jesus' love.... The term carrying ones "cross" has come to mean the endurance of a hardship.

So I hoped that helped you in some way. Maybe I could explain it better, I don't know. It's hard to condense two thousand years into one paragraph. I know it might sound strange and many people would disagree.

Dear christ, did your parents beat you as a child or something? And that's not even what Easter celebrates.

Have you ever been to an Easter sermon? They talk about drinking Jesus's blood and eating his body. Then they go on to describe in detail what happened to him leading up to the cross and while he was on it. The whole time you are either supposed to be sad because you feel his pain (which doesn't make sense because God can't die anyway amirite?) or you are supposed to look past it an see that his pain and suffering for the whole world was a good thing. And afterward, it is your turn to take up the cross.

It is a religion of human sacrifice. It may seem like I am attacking things as if I am taking what they said as literal, but really think about what is going on. What do you do with virtue? You sacrifice it for the less virtuous.

Virtue is sacrifice, you don't sacrifice virtue... And the whole death/rebirth thing is pretty universal... you have to suffer to perfect yourself, so it goes. Insofar as God is love and love is outside of space and time, no, God can't die. But insofar as love can find a human shell and turn it into something divine that shell can and probably will die.

You can say sacrifice is a virtue. However, saying virtue is a a sacrifice makes it seem a bit more absolute. As far as I know, there is no rational basis in the idea that self-sacrifice is a virtue.

I assume by "rational basis" you mean it can be logically deduced from a set of axioms, and I suppose whether or not self-sacrifice=virtue is a valid statement depends on the set of moral axioms you're working with. What set of moral axioms are you working with? (I mean, if your behavior is at all rational (systematic) it must reduce to moral axioms, right?)

We can see if the notion of self-sacrifice conflicts with your axioms, and if it does, we can see if your axioms are consistent with each other, and if they are, we can ask whether they are unquestionably valid or assumptions. And if you don't have any axioms, then this conversation is more or less meaningless.

Is rationality the only thing you have to fall back on? No matter what argument, what sphere of conversation or how badly you're losing you can always throw out that same old gem. How is it that you haven't learned that there is no such thing as rationality, no such thing as logical conclusions or reasoning that isn't completely and irrevocably subjective. It's impossible to separate the two, and that's the great fallacy of objective reasoning. Your rationale is based on naive absolutes that remain untested by even your methods, be they metaphysical or scientific, because of the infallible logic that they are "inherent in nature, therefore they don't have to be tested." You're like a broken record, and my ears are beginning to bleed.

Have you? It sounds like you're completely mistaken about what Easter actually is.

Good Friday is the memorial of Christ's crucifixion, Easter is the celebration of his resurrection. There is nothing sad, or mournful, or "sadomasochistic" (which is pretty laughable in the first place) about Easter, that's why there's such a huge rebirth and reincarnation theme with it. It has nothing to do with drinking Christ's blood (you're referring to transubstantiation, correct?), at least not in the Protestant sense. And in the twenty Easter sermons I have heard not one of them has dipped toes in calling the crucifix a figure of self-sacrifice.

I will admit it's a bit patronizing how the consumer industry has taken advantage of it, but Easter comes NOWHERE near how pathetically materialistic Christmas has become. By most standards Easter is still a fairly laudable religious holiday.