I'm writing this one on Easter Sunday because, well, I can. Before I delve head-first into this topic I'm sure I'll get crap for, let me say that I believe in Jesus in the capacity that he was a guy who lived a really long time ago, and he was, how do you say, more morally inept than most people, certainly during that period of time. But the Jesus thing always got to me because people always told me he was able to do things that, well, don't make much sense.
I've always been the sort of person who needed to see something to believe it. I don't believe in ghosts because I've yet to see one. Sasquatch is a figment because I haven't met him. So why on earth would I believe that Jesus was able to walk on water? Or turn water into wine? Or anything of that nature? I saw David Copperfield make the Great Wall of China disappear on television once, but that's as close as I've ever come. Or maybe he just walked through it... oh well, who cares. Anyway, whenever I think of Jesus's apparently magical, son-of-god tricks of the trade, I'm taken back to Kindergarten when we played a game called "telephone." "Sue likes Billy" became "Sue likes billy-goats" became "sue ate a billy goat" became "Sue and a billy-goat ate the teacher" and so on. My money is on a big game of telephone being played for about 100 some-odd years, and normal things that Jesus did became these mythical acts of power. Jesus waded through a river, and that became, through this twisted grapevine of word alterations, Jesus walking on water. Jesus didn't want to get drunk so he watered down some wine. Bang... Jesus turns water into wine. I'm sure all of his tales could be attributed to such phenomena.
Does this mean I have a lack of respect for Jesus? No. I think Jesus was a nifty cat; the guy spread morality throughout the ancient world and inspired some of the greatest accomplishments mankind has to brag about, and influences millions of people to do good things for others every single day. I don't find anyting wrong in honoring a guy with that sort of track record... I think people like him should always be remembered. But I wonder if 2,000 years from now we'll be saying that JFK was eaten by a dragon, or Martin Luther King led a billion people around the world on a small push raft. Stories change over time, and every single person whose reading this has at some point in their lives participated in or fell victim to similar sentence re-structuring. I'm sure I offended a few thousand people with this article... but if you're offended, it means you're thinking, and if you're thinking, then my rant was worth it. So this means I'll be asked to not write something like this again, which means I was threatened with bodily harm, which means I was threatened with murder, which means I was beat up, which means I was shot, which means a nuclear bomb was set off in my crotch, which means my home planet was hit by an asteroid, which means................ |
