Finger licking forgiveness..

It sure is a funny old world we live in. I happened across this little article today it's about an ancient Jewish ceremony called Kapparot. The purpose of the ritual is to transfer sins to a hapless animal and then kill the animal. To do this the adherent Jew swings his poor old cock around his head (lucky him!) mumbling some magic spell then the bird has it's throat cut.

You would be forgiven for thinking that this is some ancient long debunked ritual that's symbolically re-enacted for purposes of nostalgia or sentimentality, but no, this is a real thing that's inflicted on real chickens by orthodox Jews in 2016!

This transference of sin idea is very pervasive in Middle Eastern religions, even the main Christian story seems to be based on this notion. The concept of a "scapegoat" is a primitive and perverse idea, allowing people to feel OK about doing evil things in the knowledge that a quick magic mumble and some spilt mammal blood can make everything all right again, surely the moral thing to do would be to take responsibility for your actions and not palm them off on some innocent animal? Our Abrahamic brothers and sisters seem to all have similar notions, no doubt copied from earlier traditions. Everyone wants to clean their slate in order to get into heaven, but I can't help thinking, if heaven is real then it's going to stink of chickens and goats.