Honestly, there are times when I really feel sorry for Jesus Christ - and his 'Dad'. I don't just mean because of what those nasty Romans did to him (with a little help from the Pharisees!), no, I mean what the Christians have done to him and his memory ever since! For example, I will quote from an impeccable source, er, me, actually, writing back in March:
Talking about this with a friend before Christmas prompted her to buy me another book, The History of Christian Thought by Jonathan Hill. I am only partway through it but already, like God in my title above, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. If indeed God did despatch his Son to earth to preach a simple but hugely powerful and persuasive message of morality to be easily understood by the great unwashed and ignorant, then surely he must have realised that it would only be a matter of time - a very, very short time - before the intellectuals got at it! Amongst the first was Justin Martyr, about a hundred years after Christ, and after Justin it was downhill all the way. Endless 'picking of nits' and 'dancing on
the heads of pins' was undertaken by sundry bloody intellectuals so that the
simplicity of the original message was buried under a slag-heap of contradictory
interpretations, many of which would in time be enforced by axe, sword and
fire.
That was a general criticism but now I would like to point you at an X-rated specific, well, X-rated if you have a scintilla of taste and discernment inside you, like being able to spot the difference between beauty and the truly, monumentally, hideously ugly! What, for example, do you think this:
A high security prison, perhaps; or possibly one of those ghastly new conference centres where big companies and big politicians meet to schmooze? Or maybe you're guessing that it's the headquarters of the American NSA or FBI. Nah, you're so wrong, it's a cathedral! To be precise, it is the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. I was directed to it by a commenter over at Liberty Belle's place. I suggested in the comments that perhaps the architect was a secret atheist!
Anyway, apropos my title, of course, I would not wish to have the place blown up at the risk to human life and welfare but, on the other hand, if God saw fit to strike 555 W. Temple Street, Los Angeles with a hefty earthquake, of the sort which reduced the old Cathedral to rubble, well, it might go someway to curing my agnosticism!
