Book #25 (**Blasphemy Warning**)

Venti Jesus, Please
by Greg Stier (Who doesn't actually deserve an author credit as this is not actually what I would call a book. But let's not be too picky.)

So a student of mine, a student who loves Jeezuss, gave me a book to read. He said it was really interesting, and since it related to coffee, ha ha, maybe I would like it. And he hands me this thing, this tiny little paperback, maybe 80 narrow pages front to back, called Venti Jesus, Please. So what the hell, I tell him I'll read it. And I did.

Suffice it to say: I remain a non-Christian. I was not convinced by the "But you have faith in the Big Bang and macroevolution, so surely that means my faith in six-day Creationism is equally valid!" argument, nor was I convinced by the argument that Jesus had to die for humanity's sins because God is perfect justice as well as being perfect love, and so he had to follow the rules of cause and effect in the universe he created, which means he couldn't simply wipe out all of our sin because he felt like it. Though I admit I was intrigued by that last one. He made some comment about how Jesus had to be the sacrifice because he was human and so he could die, but he was also God and so his sacrifice was infinite; that's what allows his death to make up for every other human being's sins and evil. That was an interesting way to look at it, I thought. Still bullshit, of course -- because if Jesus was truly divine then the sacrifice of his mortal self was not much of a sacrifice, especially since he knew he would rise from the dead and be assumed into Heaven, which he was (and if the issue is that he doubted, then his sacrifice was not truly the sacrifice of a divine being because at the time of his martyrdom he was merely a limited human capable of doubt -- you can't have it both ways) -- but still interesting. I was unmoved by the Christian character's "deception" when he was caught sending text messages to his youth pastor in order to get answers to his friends' tough questions (because the friends were too dumb to ask the really tough questions, like "How can you believe that the corrupted, oft-translated, politically manipulated King James Bible you hold is still the original word of God?" No, they asked, "How come Christians are such hypocrites, huh? Huh? What about that, huh?") and I was just annoyed by the title "skit," which featured a Starbucks of religion, with people ordering all sorts of various religious-themed punny drink names (Muslim-mochaccino, that kind of crap) but not being allowed to order the Venti Straight-Up Jesus because it gave them such a shot of pure Truth that their thirst was ever satisfied and they never ordered another drink, and this was offered as if it actually gave any kind of an answer to anyone's doubts about the validity of Christianity. But what the heck, I spent a total of maybe an hour reading the thing. I got a few chuckles. What more can I ask of Jeezuss?