What Do You Do With a Chocolate Jesus?
Read What Do You Do With a Chocolate Jesus? Online
Authors: Thomas Quinn
Tags: #Religion, #Biblical Criticism & Interpretation, #New Testament
What Do You Do with a Chocolate Jesus?
© 2010 by Thomas Quinn
Los Angeles, CA
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by any means, without the express written consent of the author.
…… ……
For more information, please go to:
TRQuinn.com
Cover Art:
Celestine Conover
Brice Shultz
Tom Kelly
ISBN 1-4392-6425-2
Kindle ISBN: 978-1-61550-778-8
To Mom, Dad, Robin and David,
who are always there.
NOTE ABOUT TERMINOLOGY:
Scholars have recently taken to using B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (the Common Era) to reckon the years in order to avoid what some see as the Christian bias of using B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini, meaning “in the year of our Lord”) when discussing the history of more than one religion. Personally, I’ve never met anyone who lost sleep over this. Whenever I see “B.C.” I think of The Flintstones.
The newer terms are more awkward to read and to say. Further, they’re not really a solution to the bias problem. The Common Era begins with the presumed birth year of Jesus Christ, so it’s still a Christianity-based counting system. Hence, I’ll go with the more familiar and readable “B.C.” and “A.D.” This will also help distinguish my book from scholarly works—as if there were any danger of confusion.
Table of Contents
What Do You Do with a Chocolate Jesus?
1. You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down
And Now for Something Completely Familiar
2. The Amazing Adventures of Joshua the Anointed
The Year of Living Dangerously
6. How I Learned to Love the End of the World
Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion.
Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
—Thomas Jefferson
Even the gods love jokes.
—Plato
What Do You Do with a Chocolate Jesus?
It was the last thing I expected from my high school party buddy. I was a sophomore at a Midwestern university and he called to invite me down to the art college he was attending in Florida, and to accompany him to a Christian revival fair. I thought he was kidding. He wasn’t. Over the previous year, he had become a born-again Christian. “Jesus freaks” we called them. Hippies buzzed on Christ.
Clueless me had grown up in what I always figured was a Christian household. I said the Lord’s Prayer every night. I cried when my Catholic mother told me the story of Jesus. Like most good Christians, we celebrated Christmas with evergreen trees and Easter with colored eggs. As for the Bible, I thought of it as kind of like
Aesop’s Fables;
a collection of folktales that taught me to be nice to strangers and to not cheat on my math tests. (The results were mixed.) But the religion stuff pretty much ended there.
When it came to hardcore practices like faith healing or speaking in tongues, I thought that only happened on TV. The only seriously religious people I ever met were the unnaturally well-groomed folks who’d knock on our front door every Sunday afternoon wanting to talk about God. So it was a little shocking to me that a well-educated party animal like my friend had veered down this evangelical path.
Still, I was curious. Hell, I was in college. I was up for any new experience if it didn’t cost too much. I thought of myself as a truth-seeker, and had dabbled in stuff like Transcendental Meditation, New Age metaphysics, Buddhist chanting, and anything else I could fit between girlfriends and bong hits. (As a sophomore, it rarely occurred to me to find enlightenment at the campus bookstore.)
Now, suddenly, here I was on a balmy Florida evening with my friend, driving to a big fundamentalist gathering that he promised would change my life. He was glassy-eyed with the spirit and certain that every green light we hit was a personal favor from heaven.
The revival event was huge. It was set in a city park with large white circus tents full of worshippers who took turns witnessing on how Jesus had healed their ills, saved their marriages, or warned them off liberal congressmen. It was a festive affair, like a traveling carnival, and along with amusement rides and primitive Christian rock bands, there were kiosks with all kinds of churchy paraphernalia for sale—including a hand-sized portrait of Jesus made of chocolate.
Strange. I had never seen a marshmallow Mohammad or a Gummi Bear Buddha, so I wasn’t sure what to make of it. But it did raise a question: What do you
do
with a chocolate Jesus? How do you eat something like that? Do you work your way up the legs or go right for the halo? Do you worship it? Share it with twelve friends as the Last Dessert? Was it like a communion wafer that became the flesh of Christ before it hit your lips? And if so, did that make it okay for a low-carb diet?
They were stupid questions, but they made me realize that there was a huge subculture in America that took these things very seriously. They talked about the Bible as if it were a history book. They believed in miracles. And they saw Jesus in everything. They claimed my values and my freedoms came from God—freedom being the last thing I ever associated with the stifling rituals of church. More disturbingly, they wanted to pass laws banning lots of things that, frankly, struck me as none of their business.
My first reaction to this was to think: Haven’t these people heard of the twentieth century? But the experience launched me onto a personal journey to seriously explore this religion thing.
It was very unlike me. I was into science and skepticism, not to mention sleeping late, and most religions love to drag you up at the crack of dawn. But I made the effort. I attended services at different churches to find one that “spoke to me.” I read the Bible every night, and read books about the Bible. I took religious history classes, and joined a little Jesus group. I experienced the wave of love during services, saw the affection among worshippers, and came to realize how religion gave people hope in dark times, and a sense of purpose in this life beyond leaving a carbon footprint. It was kind of nice.
But as time went on, things got increasingly strange, and then a little scary. I mingled with folks who prayed to God when deciding how much to charge clients in their car upholstery repair business. I met a young woman who talked in hushed tones because she was “heavily into humility.” (A lot of unreligious thoughts ran through my head.) And then there were the elders, who firmly believed that God supported tax cuts, semiautomatic weapons, the Alaska pipeline, and whatever war America had stumbled into at the time.
No issue in life was too grand or too trivial for them to consult Jesus about and, whatever he decided for them, it could not be questioned. Their personal agenda was now ordained by heaven.
I was expected to take stories about talking snakes and walking on water literally. I was supposed to put Jesus at the center of my life. I was instructed to rely upon God for everything. And I had to give up sex with my smokin’ hot Jewish girlfriend. That one really hurt.
Then I saw a fascinating little Australian film called
The Devil’s Playground
. Set in a 19
th
century boarding school, it featured a preacher lecturing to a roomful of horny pubescent boys about damnation, and about how long their eternity in hell would feel if they sinned. He asked them to imagine a ball of steel the size of the sun, and how once every ten thousand years a sparrow would fly by and graze a wing against it. By the time that ball had worn away to nothing, he said, only the tiniest fraction of their suffering would have elapsed. The guy could have given motivational training to Tony Robbins.
It eventually occurred to me that I wasn’t exploring religion so much as I was buying it wholesale, and it seemed an ill fit. If I was going to dive into the deep end of this pool, I had to take a break from questioning my own sinful self and, instead, question the people who put all this together. Who were they? How did I know they were right? What made them any smarter than me?
I decided to submit all this religion stuff to the same harsh grilling my born-again friends applied to everyone else’s beliefs. How well would it all stand up to…oh, let’s call it an Inquisition?
My evangelical friends responded that I was a prisoner of the intellect. I needed to liberate myself from the “pride and arrogance” of reason and skepticism, and instead become a dutiful servant of Christ, who specialized in goodness and niceness and alcohol-free beer.
The arrogance of
reason?
I thought about how science established its ideas. Someone observes nature for awhile and thinks he sees a pattern. He hypothesizes that a natural law might account for it. He then does experiments to test his idea. If it holds up, he publishes a paper, and his colleagues get busy dissecting his work. Eventually, after more testing and debate, if the idea still holds up, it’s accepted as a genuine discovery. That’s a fairly humbling process. Nobody takes anyone’s word for anything.
Contrast this with the way religion comes up with its own sacred truths. Historically, one guy has an emotional, subjective, shattering experience that
he
claims is personal contact with the Creator of the Universe. Then he stands up on a hill, or in a church, or outside a Michael Moore movie, and rails about it to anyone who will listen. If he’s articulate, a crowd gathers around and someone says, “Hey, he sounds pretty good. Somebody write this down!” And suddenly we have sacred scripture and eternal truth.
Sure we do.
I finally came to see that religion was an invention, not a revelation. It was a choice, not a discovery. Yet, according to Reverend Ted Haggard (shortly before he was caught snorting methamphetamine with a male prostitute), a new megachurch goes up every couple of days in the United States. And most of them are evangelical.