What Do You Do with a Chocolate Jesus? PDF
Preview What Do You Do with a Chocolate Jesus?
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 Title Page Copyright Page Introduction What Do You Do with a Chocolate Jesus? 1. You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down A Brief History of Creation Resurrection Hall of Fame And Now for Something Completely Familiar 2. The Amazing Adventures of Joshua the Anointed Marketing the Messiah The New Testament The Year of Living Dangerously 3. Stumping for God The Sermon on the Mount 4. Road Show Tricks of the Trade Will it Play in Jerusalem? Passion Play 5. Anno Domini From Jesus to Christianity Values Scorecard 6. How I Learned to Love the End of the World The End to End All Endings 7. Baptizing the West Preaching to the Unconverted Goin’ Medieval 8. America’s Pagan Values God’s Country? Values Test The Joys of Secular Humanism Acknowledgments Bibliography 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 INTRODUCTION 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,
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