Updates!

Jesus is the Most Dangerous Game

OK, here’s the deal. I’m off celebrating Easter by hunting down the returned Jesus. Beyonce’ and Jay-Z’s demon baby is paying me to kill him so that Christianity will die and our Illuminati Secret Religion can once again rule the world. Since Jesus supposedly spent a lot of time hanging out with prostitutes back in the day, hunting him now involves spending a lot of time in adult entertainment stores. Especially the kind that have private booths you pay for in quarters every 15 minutes.

So long story short, there’s no real column this week. Instead, you get a short list of updates of stories I’ve covered in this space over the past few months.

Help, Help, I’m Being Repressed!

The persecution complex goes back to the roots of Christianity. It’s one of the few ideas an early follower would recognize from today’s Christianity. If memes are like genes, then the idea that Christianity is so dangerous to the status quo and must be stamped out is like the genome of a shark or a crocodile. It plays its role so well in its own proliferation that very little adaptation has been required regardless of changes to its environment. As far as the New Testament goes, it starts in what biblical scholars consider to be the earliest of the four Gospels:

 And ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake: but he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.

And it goes on through the latest. Jesus liked the idea of being persecuted so much he got all hipster about it in John 15:18

If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you.