so for anyone out there not familiar with the Christian faith, this is what this holiday is all about in the shell of a nut:

# mankind is sinful – this is a pretty easy one to verify – read a newspaper, watch the news, hang out with yourself for a 24 hour period or anyone else that you like or specifically some people you don’t – you don’t need test tubes in a lab to verify that we are not perfect, none of us – we mess up, we hurt people, we hurt ourselves, we do stupid things, and we often fail to do good and right things

# the punishment for sin is death – this is a harder one to verify [our reasoning is ‘because the Bible says so’ and that is enough for me, but it may not be enough for you, and that’s okay, this is where faith and belief start to kick in] although i would say not completely. if you follow the natural progression of sin in someone’s life it always leads to a death of some type – death of trust, of relationship, of good health, of life possibility etc. however, we are talking about a spiritual/eternal death – we believe that one day every person will stand in front of God and be judged and that those who have not dealt with their sin will receive an eternal death or punishment

# that paints a pretty bleak picture because if all of us have sinned and the punishment is death, that means we all have to die – if the story ends here, we’re all in a lot of trouble and that is kind of the picture of Good Friday – Jesus Christ, who many believed to be the Messiah who had come to save the world [many of the jews believed He had simply come to free them from roman control and persecution] hanging on a cross, dying the worst kind of death known to man. It all looked like a bit of an epic universal fail.

[which is why you should not stop reading here – it gets better – click somewhere over here]