The Evil Petting Zoo

Some time ago, back when the Church sex abuse scandal was still raging, Mother Cognito and I sat down to Chronicle, the Boston ABC affiliate's New England news magazine. The subject of the night was how to change the Catholic Church, and one guy had an interesting solution: send it back to the '50s. Mother Cognito and I both bitched and hurled things at the screen, until the guy said one particularly rage-inducing thing: that it was stupid to think of Jesus as "my friend, the Lord and Savior", and we should all treat him as some mysterious force up in the heavens. It was official: I'd hold him down, and Mother Cognito would punch him in the throat.

Now, I'm not surprised to see the same words come out of the AFA's mouthpiece regarding The Book of Daniel:

''They take our savior Jesus Christ and reflect him as an everyday Joe. How disrespectful," Sharp added. ''Our savior is to be worshipped and adored and not treated as your buddy riding down the street with you in the passenger seat of the car."

Okay, here's a question: What part of "born of Man" do you idolatrous fucknuggets not understand?

I'm sorry, but Jesus did not come to Earth just to be God's chosen superhero. Yes, that was a big part of it, but he also came to Earth to know what it was like to be one of those fleshy things that his father had some often bathed in fire and brimstone. He talked as a man, walked as a man, had friends as a man does, and experienced some of the same petty feelings men do. You ever read the Bible? There's a part in the Gospels where Jesus curses a fucking fig tree because it won't give him fruit. Sure, it may not be Messiah material, but as a man? It's understandable.

I want Jesus to be my buddy, and not in the, "So, am I getting past the Pearly Gates? Huh?" sense. I want to know that he went through a lot of the shit I do on a daily basis, despite being the Son of God. And I wouldn't have it any other way.