DPF's Annual Easter Trading Rant and Helen Clark

Every year David Farrar lets loose with a rant on how it's unfair that people aren't allowed to work on Easter Sunday. His rationale this year is that it's a recession and therefore any opportunity for shop workers to earn extra money should not be stomped on by the strong arm of the law. The law which, enforces a religious holiday, not a public holiday. I think it's this last bit that is supposed to be the nail in the coffin.

*sigh*

All I really have to say is that if NZ enforcing a religious holiday that harks back to the distant past when Sunday was a no-work day and one of the last vestiges of our Christian heritage, if that is a bad thing, then God help us.

Seriously, there are worse things than having one Sunday of the year enforced as a mandatory day off. And once it is removed, because I'm sure any reminder of our religious past tends to send most liberals into spasms of shopping deprivation, then their inability to see that once something is removed, what steps into the void is not necessarily better. And quite often it can be worse, far worse.

In other words, if the pride of place that Easter has in our national calendar is removed, a void will be created. People need something greater than themselves to connect to. Even though there are not so many in NZ that believe that Easter is the day that we celebrate our God rising from the dead, at least while Easter exists as a quasi-public holiday anomaly, then the void is held back. Remove Christianity from a country and the void lets in superstition instead (as can be seen by a recent survey in NZ where more people believe in faith healers and tarot card readers than God).

For instance, what if sometime in the distant future in order to create another day of significance, Helen Clark is glorified with her own day that we must all take off, a public holiday in her honour. Oh no, no, surely that would never happen, you say. Um, well, look at what our ex-PM leader is wearing. A 100-year-old cloak that used to belong to the late Maori Queen. Very disturbing symbolism.

Related Links: My annual rant on Easter trading ~ Kiwiblog
Cloak but no daggers as Clark checks out ~ NZ Herald

See also ZenTiger's Freedom II Shop ~ NZ Conservative