What Do You Do with a Chocolate Jesus?

252 Pages·2010·1.32 MB·English

by  Thomas Quinn

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,