Easter Sunday marks the "day Christians believe Jesus Christ was resurrected from the dead, and 78 percent of Americans share that belief," according to a new Rasmussen poll, as reported by Newsmax yesterday.

This is positive news, but perhaps not entirely so. Because "belief" today is a very weak sister of the concrete and wholistic spiritual strength required of the human being at all times, but especially so in a day such as ours, so harmed by the impact of secularism upon the modern world.   

Note: The information we have from eyewitnesses is that the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is not a matter of private faith but of public fact. It is based on empirical evidence, not on private hopes and dreams. And it is part of a public orientation that has positive and humane implications for all of life, including media, science, politics, creativity, and fulfilling personal relationships.

Merely private hopes and dreams belong to pie-in-the-sky secularists such as Barack Obama, who is running around the country using emotionalism and sales gimmicks to sell (or otherwise impose) the old-time religion of socialist political mythology to the American people. Free-thinkers "red and yellow, black and white" -- all of them created in the image of God -- demand evidence and are willing to follow the evidence wherever it might lead. Even if Marx, Engels, Rev. Wright, and Preacher Obama are offended.

In stark contrast to cults of politics is the realism of the information we have from eyewitnesses of the empirically empty tomb and the empiricaly available Man from Nazareth who was alive at point A, dead as a doornail at point B, and alive again at point C. None of this is a matter of the privatized, nonbiblical, and inhumane concept of "faith" expected so much in politics, in extremist religion, and in other expressions of the secular kneejerk believism so prevalent in big city anti-existence today. 

The fact of the empirical resurrection in space and time challenges every mere belief system, no matter how large its mailing list -- or how mighty the star power of its A-List celebrity lineup. That kind of fact is superior to groundless religiousity which neverthess is an effective tool politicians employ to win friends, manipulate enemies, "heal" nations, and overthrow governments.

If 78% of Americans ever affirm and live by the resurrection as the fact of history that it is, the various regimes of pretend messiahs setting up shop in Washington, D.C., will be done with. There is but one fact-based risen Messiah, and despite what extremist fundraising letters and formerly mainstream media outlets tell you, he does not live in the White House. A manger in Bethlehem is more his style, and besides, the White House is too small in spirit.

Life lived in community with God and neighbor has little use for the merely religious, for the hardshell secularist afraid to let the faithful think for themselves outside the peer-approved political box, or for other pretenders walking to and fro, seeking whom they might devour in our moment of history.

That's what the real Resurrection is all about: The space-time facticity of life after death. Something physically shocking yet biologically reasonable as an effect the Creator and originator of life would be able to pull off because he has the power of animating being within himself. 

This scandalizes the dogma of the secularist, who when not imposing his private religion upon society is counting the number of atoms dancing atop the tip of meaninglessness. Better to grab ahold of the empirically verifiable Nazarene alive from the dead, if you too would live free and think whole.

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