i coulda been in a lot of places in the end of the ’80s

i could have gone to UCLA, i coulda gone anywhere.

i could have gone to UCSB quicker but i woulda missed being in the dorms with the people who are still my friends to this day.

i dont wanna believe that God futzes with the gameplan.

i want to believe in Free Will

but it’s so hard for me to believe that i just luckily had to spend an extra year in junior college.

because that was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me.

what happened there was a domino effect to every cool person i would end up meeting for decades.

including meeting you.

found myself in a sauna tonight

i felt like i was catching a cold or a flu and someone said go take a shvitz

so i did!

and while i was there, bored to death, cuz i was alone, without a phone, nothing to read,

i started praying.

God please bless mom and angie and her kids and amber and the cubs and and and and

soon that was over so i just watched the sweat happen.

and to be honest with you, recently i have had a little challenge to my religious beliefs

but there in the sauna i started thinking about sweating and how incredible it is

almost by magic the body says, whoops, that fool is overheating,

hey water that’s inside the body, lets get some of you to the surface of the body

so it will cool it off.

i mean, how genius is that?

its impossible for me to believe that there was a gaseous explosion somewhere in space

and all of a sudden there were humans WITH SWEAT GLANDS just incase we start overheating.

not only was that created by a higher intelligence, but by a super intelligent being

the engineering of the body is, to me, the biggest tell of a divine creator.

then i took a long long shower, shaved, came back to amber and told her God exists

and she said oh cool.

this is a real place on a real day now, here

you are a real person, living in this real place, and just as beautiful.

your mom carried you around in her belly, she fed you before you were born.

she took care of you after and after and after and after

all the wise men traveled to see you, the cows mooed and the donkeys said hi

above the angels cooed, the stars twinkled and the clouds parted so we could all see better

not because you were capable of magic

but because you just being here, all by itself is a reflection of the best magic of all

the miracle of life.

when your jeans rip or you slip on ice or lose your phone on a snowy day

it’s ok

because those wise men are still bearing gifts, the angels are still in awe

and the good Lord is still bragging, quietly to himself, saying

look what I made.

and smiling.

do you know i love you? i do

by you i mean of course Jesus. for dying for our sins today.

i love a lot of people. probably more than i should.

but when it comes to suffering for them, i dont do a very good job of that. i would have made a pretty rotten Jesus.

one thing i love about the bible is Jesus, and God before Him, wasnt the peace lovin hippie that people paint him out as being. there was a lot of ass kicking in the old testament and the new testament shows an often gruff Jesus snapping at people and talking in circles and showing a bunch of “tough love” as opposed to flowery Deep Thoughts.

thats a Messiah i can get behind because when you think about it, He was here for some serious ass business, so when people didnt automatically believe in Him it made sense that he got pissed off and irritated and angry and vengeful – despite himself.

to me that brings credence to the difficult idea of man being made in God’s image.

we get pissed off and irritated and angry when people dont “get it”. Effers im God – quit making clay “gods” and burning incense to them when you get scared – im RIGHT EFFING HERE! peter denied him three times before the cock crowed, phillip asked him to show him the Father – and these were disciples!

good friday was good because He didn’t have to slum around with us any more. He did his time as a man and he was out. in fact he couldnt leave fast enough. when He was on the cross and He hadn’t died yet He yelled to the sky “why has thou forsaken me!”

or as Rancid sings “waitin for the busses but the busses wont come.”

its good friday but im working because the news has gotta come out. im working because God has blessed me with exactly what i asked for, and you really should be careful for what you ask for because sometimes God will answer yr prayers, and often He will chuckle as He does it.

Jesus through the eyes of Google

today being Easter, i thought it would be a good idea to blog a little about Jesus Christ, who many believe rose from the dead on this day (give or take) several centuries ago. thousands of years after his death, Jesus still remains one of the most influential and powerful men on Earth, and certainly in the USA.

one cannot, for example, believe that they can win the election for President of the United States unless one is a Christian, which is a belief that Jesus was and is God. Indeed one of the ways that detractors of Barack Obama’s campaign are using to try to raise doubt among Americans is to suggest that the senator is an omg Muslim. meanwhile some believe that because one-time front-runner Mitt Romney believed in an unusual sect of Christianity, Mormanism, that thats what turned him off to many conservative americans.

although it has only been around a few years, there are very few things online more influential than Google and its internet search. in this post i will be showing you the five top results when you type “Jesus” into Google and click the Image tab.

above is the #1 result which i believe also typifies most people’s ideas about Jesus. in this image he has no real details, he appears to be in Heaven or ascending into Heaven, he’s dressed in white, all is calm, but still there appears to be something Bigger that he is in the presence of.

this is Jesus the Son, as opposed to Jesus the Man or the Spirit or God. it’s an idea that many believers can probably feel comfortable with as it’s an overall approach to the subject, and one that probably best aligns with how they imagine the concept of Jesus.

surprisingly the #2 Jesus on Google is the “Black Jesus” depiction.

although there are very few physical descriptions of Jesus in the new testament, the one that many in the Jesus-was-Black corner lean on is from Revelation 1:15 that says: “And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and His voice as the sound of many waters.”

truth of the matter is Jesus was born in a part of the world that was the crossroads of the world, and much closer to Africa than Sweden. in fact days after he was born his parents hustled him to Egypt so he could escape King Herod who wanted him dead when word was sent to him that the King of Kings was about to be born.

also there was the fact that when Jesus was in hiding in Africa he was never identified and never stood out. coincidence?

did he look like the lenny kravitz dude in the painting to the right? probably not, but he also probably didn’t look like the blue eyed Jesus that we will see next.

And Jesus probably did have some African links – after all the conventional theory is that he lived as a child in Egypt where, presumably, his appearance did not make him stand out.

The New Nation takes it further: “Ethiopian Christianity, which pre-dates European Christianity, always depicts Christ as an African and it generally agreed that people of the region where Jesus came from looked nothing like Boris Johnson,” the paper says. As light-hearted evidence that Jesus was black, it adds that he “called everybody ‘brother’, liked Gospel, and couldn’t get a fair trial”. – BBC

to the left we have the so-called Classic Jesus. looking far more like an American hippie than a Middle Eastern or Egyptian man, this Jesus is a shave and a haircut away for posing in any number of Abecrombie or Gap ads. Looking up as if listening to God, he is peaceful and confident, and ready for whatever order The Father has for him.

the receding hairline doesn’t say 33 (the age he allegedly was when he was killed) as much as it says “im ready for my crown of thorns. lets do this thing”. but the long locks suggest sensitivity, rebellion, and anti-establishment.

it’s hard to believe that this image doesnt rank higher in Google, but maybe it’s because it’s such a typical portrayal, and thus lacks any edge.

speaking of soft, here’s the #4 return of Jesus on Google, the good shepard with his lamb.

whats interesting here is the rudimentary photoshop spotlight around the subject – a sort of cheesy halo effect.

whats missing is any middle eastern or north african features to the model. who needs history to tell you how to paint a historic figure?

although Jesus was known more for his preaching, turning over of moneychanging tables, and carpentry, the idea that he loved to hold baby sheep is a curious staple of artist renditions.

often you will see him with a sheep over his shoulder, or in this case as if it was an infant. never do we see him embrace the sick or the dead or the lost *people* of his life, it’s usually the barnyard crowd.

for some reason.

lastly we have the heart in sand with the word jesus image coming in at #5 on Google images.

it’s not the sultry sacred heart jesus,

it’s not the freaky and detailed heart of thorns jesus,

it’s not any of the countless baby jesus with mary images,

it’s not even the most famous of all the Jesus paintings – the last supper,
instead we get this simple dealie that could have been done by anyone at any time.

which might be exactly why people like it.

happy easter!

at least guns, cigarettes and Ticketmaster’s monopoly are still legal.

kitten today some pussy ass federal appeals court in Frisco ruled that the Pledge of Allegiance was unconstitutional.

i keep telling you people, anything is possible.

i wont even get into the ridiculousness of this nonsense since im sure all the cool lawyers with blogs will rip this apart in many ways in a much more educated manner.

but, thanks for the fodder, frisco. at least now bloggers can write about something other than calling newspaper columnists asswipes for dissing blogging.

and since this is probably the only blog you’ll click to written by a Christian minister, simply put, i think that spirituality is a Vitally important part of a human being’s experience on Earth.

duh.

deny it all you want, this country was built on many of the good foundations of Christianity but the words “one nation under God” is so watered-down and bogus that only a bunch of pasty asses in a courtroom by the bay could find something wrong with it. But you know what they say, seek and ye shall find.

yes, kids shouldnt be forced to do anything religious that they dont want to do, but when was the last time a kid really was forced to do shit in school?

and isnt the Pledge a nazish indoctrination anyway? and a highly ineffective one at that? how many of us LOVE america because of standing up with our hands over our tits mumbling some robotic drivel at 7:50 in the morning when we were 10?

kids are better at resisting orders than anyone. thats why theyre not in the Army.

frisco, hang your heads in shame. if some freaking foreigner tried to rip the Good Word from our great land, we as a whole would rise up and defnd it in a fight that would be talked about for eternity.

but when this group of “Americans,” or that group, or the courts slowly nibble away at it like vermin, we sit on our hands like doped-up vagrants waiting for our superheroes to appear above the horizon.

ain’t none on the horizon, Believers of God, ain’t none.

drink your microbeers on the Marina, youre the court that brought down Napster.

youre the court that will get slapped in the face by the Supreme Court.

youre the court that people will point at and laugh in the very near future.

everyone knows that making kids say Anything in school isnt a state endorsement of shit. does the state endorse that homo Shakespeare when they make kids stand up and recite Macbeth?

Nine months later Allah has won another round.

63. Intricate Plot

64. kitty bukakke

65. Get A Clue!