Graphic By: Julie Brennan

However, according to Christianity, there is a cure, and that's Jesus. The idea is that when Jesus died on the cross and was resurrected three days later, it paid the price for the death sentence we were all handed at birth. The notion of original sin is critical to this, because it is what makes us spiritually dead at birth. Your spirit is supposed to be like a power cell. If you're born with a dead battery, you've either got to shut down, or you've got to seek an outside source of fuel to power you and (hopefully) recharge your battery.

Acceptance of Christ fulfills the penalty for all sin, but does so through fulfilling your original sin. The original sin was eating the fruit of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. In other words, we took on a knowledge we were not designed to have. Once we had that knowledge, we were expected to perform to certain standards. In other words, by accepting Christ's sacrifice, our spirits are changed to a living spirit, because, since the original sin of knowledge is erased, God views us as both holy and blameless, even with a knowledge of Good and Evil. Since we aren't being judged based upon our actions, we are all viewed as what God judged man when He first created him: Good. If you don't believe this, yet proclaim to be Christian, I think the fundamental question you have to answer is "What did Jesus do?" Because if you feel that your salvation can be switched on and off constantly, then you've just entered into an even more confusing and worthless covenant with God through Religious Law.

So what's the difference between the living & the dead? Well, if we're gonna look back to our zombie analogy, we can see three things that denote being a walking undead brain eater. These things are, of course, a state of perpetual woundedness, no true control over one's own actions and a constant need to feed on the flesh of the living and thereby spread your disease. The living, on the other hand, can heal, can walk the way they want and don't have the need to feed on the flesh of the living. Now, that brings us to the true relevance of The Bible to Christians: it is no longer a set of standards, rules and laws to be judged by because the judgment has been fulfilled by Christ. Instead, The Bible, for a Christian, can be compared to an instruction manual for Walking as the Living Should.

If you are a Christian, you spend all of your life prior to Christ walking as the dead do because your spirit was dead. When you come under Christ, you become alive again. But as you've never truly known life, your behavior will default to acting like you're dead. The Bible will tell you how to really know you're connecting with God through your living spirit, how to heal your wounds, how to discern by your actions if you're truly doing that and in what areas you need help walking right.

So then, I must ask a really important question to those proclaiming to be Christian, but meandering around like the dead, yet talking like our good friend Dr. Logan in Day of the Dead. (And that description, of course, is referring to the right-wing legalistic bend of the Christian spectrum.) The question should be obvious, but I'll ask it anyway: "If they're Walking Dead, why are you trying to get them to behave according to the religious law when they simply cannot; and, if they're Living, why are you trying to condemn them with religious law through governmental law instead of trying to help them walk right?" The whole notion of this fundamentalist bend that has been screaming loudly while failing at every miserable turn needs to quit relying on self-righteous indignation and start relying on God-righteous love and concern.

Now, I'm not trying to promote bad behavior, nor am I trying to say that disciplining or rebuking cannot be done in love. What I am saying is that neither of these things can be done in love by creating more artificial laws or by addressing an audience while refusing to be amongst them. How can fundamentalists and the right-wing extremists who've taken over the public mouthpiece say that their words and actions are expressing the spirit of love and grace and the passion for life that our God has? These constant attempts at condemnation of those walking in death, or like the dead, with spiritual wounds that are not healed is not behavior that comes from a living spirit of a Loving God, but of a self-righteous dead spirit that has given up hope for God and has turned back down the path of demanding behavior modification alone.

Being "in the world but not of the world" is not a demand to put up barriers, but merely a reminder that that those redeemed through Christ are the living in a Land of the Dead and should act accordingly. Many will use the mantra of "loving the sinner but hating the sin" as a self-righteous justification to abandon a person who is not behaving the way they want them to, but the truth is exactly the opposite. Christ's way of hating the sin was to conquer it on our behalf, and the way he conquered it was through the most extreme self-sacrifice a man could make. Instead, we squander the sacrificial gift of a loving God by creating boundaries that are supposed to dress up that dead and self-righteous spirit that you struggle with. Yet those actions, done in self-righteousness, fail because you cannot make the dead look alive. Instead of attempting to appease the wounded areas of your soul, which are birthed in the fear that the living spirit you've been granted cannot conquer the remnants of your dead desires, you should be walking towards God in the faith that he will equip you for the path he is wanting you to follow and that his grace is sufficient for when you fall or go off track.

There is nothing more ridiculous that Christian self-righteousness, because it makes you walk like you're dead. You're so concerned with getting temporarily wounded and not walking right that you are spiritually staring down at your feet, taking herky-jerky baby steps and putting your arms out so you don't bump into anything while your eyes totally concentrate on where your feet are. That is stupid. You've just created a situation where you're the dead imitating the living instead of the living imitating the dead. Instead, you should be seeking God, because if you are seeking God, the path you walk will lead you between the snares, traps and attacks that will be in your life. The direction of your walk will be an inherent protection, thereby freeing up your arms for doing more than just monitoring if you're about to bump into something.

The other side of self-righteousness is that you are trying to make everyone walk with the same stride as you. How are you sure that you're walking in the right direction? You're too busy looking at your own feet to know exactly where you are headed. Furthermore, with the way you're walking, you can't see anyone in need of help. Someone who heads off in the wrong direction is inherently going to appear to be severely wounded (which also reeks of being undead), but you can't help your living brother or sister out because you're walking with your face toward the dirt, and the only advice you can give is "walk like I'm walking," so they wind up walking in what is definitely the wrong direction, just treading very carefully. So you look dead, and the only thing you can tell people is "walk like this," which equates to them looking very dead.

Now, I'm far from having this whole good walk down, and I'll blatantly admit that my direction will go off on tangents that land me in places and situations where I shouldn't be, and I've been hurt by them. However, I refuse to act like the dead. I also refuse to demand that the dead act like the living. The ridiculousness of those two dispositions is something that needs to stop if we ever plan on being what God wants us to be. I refuse, because if I do not try to walk like the living, how will the dead know that I am living; and, if I demand that the dead act like the living, how will they know the living from the dead? How can I effectively spread the cure if I barricade the dead from walking near me?