Adios Easter Bunny

That’s what ya get for stealing eggs

Possibly one of the cruelest hoaxes we play on our children and grandchildren is the concept of the Easter Bunny — one that delivers presumably stolen eggs at that! In a culture that’s obsessed with being inoffensive, we perpetuate the myth that Easter is about some seemingly benign critter stealing, boiling, decorating, and delivering the unborn children of various unfortunate hens to us in pretty baskets along with assorted chocolate treats on a yearly basis.

But let’s face it. Nature is amoral and it assigns no guilt to the rabbit who steals from Farmer Brown’s garden (or hens) instead of planting and harvesting its own crops. Nor does nature judge the hungry hawk who snatches the loving mother bunny away while she’s in the very act of suckling her newborn babies … and tears her guts out with its sharp talons … and devours her bloody still-beating heart while it’s yet warm … leaving those defenseless, keening offspring as an appetizer for the local racoon.

Nature is not our friend. Nor is it our enemy. It kills by chance, and it saves by chance. Some of us have been extremely lucky and evaded the Grim Reaper for well past half a century. Others have been less fortunate. Only the densest and most self-absorbed would fail to stop at some point and ask why.

Last week, I got an email notifying me that an old friend had recently died from a cataclysmic heart attack. He was younger and healthier than I am. He was likely a better husband and father than I am. He was a far more successful innovator than I ever hope to be. In short, he brought much more to nature’s table than I ever will. Why then, is he beneath the dirt while this old man continues to devour the planet’s dwindling resources?

If those first four paragraphs didn’t depress you, then you need to cut back on the Xanax and Scotch. Life is hard, and broken humanity isn’t making it any easier. If this life is nothing but a crapshoot and once the lights go out, the party’s over … then we should all load up our guns, commandeer what we want from our neighbors, and crack open another beer because there is no real meaning other than self-aggrandizement, dominance, and excess.

But, and you know I like big buts

(the ones with only one “t”).
I don’t know about your worldview but everything around me says there’s more going on than just the coin-toss of nature. Every single law of physics says we should not exist in a crapshoot universe.

• Shave a few millionths of a percentage point off the inverse/square law of gravity and the universe would have kept expanding without ever forming planets.
• Increase or decrease the size of this planet only marginally and our atmosphere would either be too dense to breathe or so thin as to be non-existent.
• If H2O were not an aberration among compounds — and froze from the bottom up like its constituents — our oceans would be dead.

The odds against humanity ever existing in the first place are astronomical; we exist on the infinitely honed razor’s edge of probability — or by design. When I look around at the vast complexity of the universe and the absolute precision of the atom, I am incontrovertibly convinced that a higher intelligence than we will ever comprehend, is and has been at work on our behalf through the millennia. (Perhaps on behalf of others as well)

That, my friends is the story of Easter — not that some sociopathic bunny would provide us with stolen eggs, but that the Infinite Creator of all existence would take an interest in the welfare of human beings who are battling the hazards of an evolving planet, and that He would sacrifice Himself to offer us a meaningful existence amidst the long odds of happenstance.

Maybe you agree with me. Maybe you think I’m nuts. Either way, let’s have coffee and talk about it.

Meanwhile, Happy Easter!
And stay away from those eggs.

A meeting of great minds who think alike