Christian Groups Protest Chocolatey Wang of Christ

The Easter holiday season is cluttered with so many references to rabbits and eggs and chocolate and that episode of Vicar of Dibley where Dawn French wackily dresses up in a bunny costume and some old lady dies, that it seems we’ve forgotten what Easter is really all about: the promotional campaign for Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.

But Passion of the Christ has come, snatched about a zillion dollars from the wallets of a million gullible idiots enlightened filmgoers and gone and still we’re stuck with this mediocre holiday and all it’s weirdly homo-erotic statues of Jesus in a loin cloth bleeding from his wrists like some sort of half-naked middle class Emo teenager in the middle of a “cry for help”.

Now, most people I know decide to celebrate Easter by getting drunk on Good Friday then spending the rest of the long weekend lying in a puddle of drool, watching the special features on their Goonies DVDs and convulsing involuntarily every time an add for booze comes on the telly. Allegedly, other people celebrate Easter by eating chocolate eggs brought by diseased myxomatosis suffering animals and by going to Church to hear stories about a man getting nails rammed through his hands and feet.

But a whole bunch of people in the USA have decided to dispense with their usual Easter traditions in favour of shouting a lot at an American artist for sculpting a block of chocolate into a statue of Jesus’ holy piss rod and then displaying it in an art gallery.

Reports CNN: “A life-size sculpture of a naked Jesus made out of chocolate has angered a Roman Catholic organization and forced a Manhattan art gallery to reconsider exhibiting it during Easter week.

The sculpture "My Sweet Lord" by Cosimo Cavallaro was to be exhibited for two hours each day next week in a street-level window of the Roger Smith Lab Gallery in Midtown Manhattan."

This is an assault on Christians during Holy Week," said Kiera McCaffrey, director of communications for the league, which describes itself the largest U.S. Catholic civil rights group. "They would never dare do something similar with a chocolate statue of the prophet Mohammad naked with his genitals exposed during Ramadan."

What with all the angry catholics, the liberal use of the word ‘genitals’ and the references to ‘chocolate’ one could be forgiven for thinking the artist had crafted some sort of hideous sculpture of Jesus in the act of conceiving Amelie like in that Da Vinci Code movie, maybe with a bit of Screech endorsed Dirty Sanchez thrown in for good measure. But in reality, it’s just another statue of a mostly naked Jesus except unusually made out of chocolate and with a nice wink to the least overrated Beatle George Harrison in the title.

Yet it looks like this is set to become the biggest public furore over an exposed penis since the last time Harry Potter decided to flap his dong about like a Yoyo. The sculpture has already been taken down, the gallery’s creative director has quit in protest and Americans are running around shrieking the words “Free Speech” like it’s the latest catch phrase on My Name is Earl or something.

But let’s face facts people, 98% of everyone bothered by this are actually pissed off because the artist decided to sculpt JC out of dark chocolate instead of white. Yeah, you read that correctly. Which really raises the big question: where the hell is Mel Gibson on all this? I thought giving a voice to all those wacky, unspoken, latent bigotries in certain religious communities was Mel Gibson’s raison d'existence!

Tom Cruise: Apparently the New Messiah

Tom Cruise has always had a bit of an inflated ego hasn't he? When he's not telling women how to deal with their post-partum depression, he's arrogantly discounting the entire school of psychology as 'glib'. But the size of Tom Cruise's self opinion has reached such an all time high that scientist are speculating that Global Warming is actually caused by the dangerous gravitational pull of his giant oversized head. You see, accordng to The Church of Scientology, Tom Cruise now believes that he is Jesus Christ.

Long considered just "some stupid science fiction cult", it has taken a lot of special back massages at natural disasters for Scientologists to overcome the fact that their religion sort of reads like an X-Files fan-ficition written by an 11 year old. But despite the fact that Scientologists are still struggling for credibility these days, their leader David Miscavige has decided to reveal this week that a man all women hate is their "christ-like figure". As quoted by The Sun: “Tom has been told he is Scientology’s Christ-like figure. Like Christ, he’s been criticised for his views. But future generations will realise he was right."

You just know that John Travolta is standing around somewhere angrily drawing an unflattering moustache and glasses on a photo of Tom Cruise then furiously tearing it into tiny pieces.

I have to say, I'm a little sceptical myself. Besides the fact that my mother always told me never to trust a man whose name rhymes with 'miscarriage', I'm really struggling to see what Tom Cruise has done to elevate himself to Messiah status. Yell at women for taking drugs that stop them from smothering their babies? Yell at Dustin Hoffman for two hours for being retarded? Try and sue some men who squirted him in the face with a water pistol? I'm really not seeing it.

Well...now that I think about it, Tom Cruise does have a few god-like qualities. For example, divine intervention is the only way I account for public opinion of Tom Cruise plummeting from most popular celebrity ever to most hated man in the whole world within about three weeks. And it was more than a little spooky when he somehow got "no sex before marriage" supporter Katie Holmes pregnant a whole year before they actually got married.

But it doesn't matter what I think about a man who became famous by starring in a movie about a boy losing his virginity to a prostitute being declared a christ-like figure because I'm not religious. From an objective stand-point however, this revelation has interesting cultural ramifications. For example, this weird linking of Christianity and Scientology actually means that Battlefield Earth can now be considered a prequel to Passion of the Christ.

Similarly, this whole story really highlights the inherent problems with the deification of historical figures. I mean, these days we think of Jesus as a strapping handsome young gentleman with sexy blue eyes and a lovely, flowing well conditioned mane of hair and beard. But I bet if we used a DeLorean to go back in time to oldey time Jerusalem we would probably find that Jesus was a creepy, obnoxious, short, middle-aged man with a funny nose and a weird, glassy-eyed child bride. Likewise, in a thousand years people will probably believe that Tom Cruise was some sort of tall, charismatic genius instead of just that plonker who jumped up and down on Oprah's sofa.

Unfortunately for Tom Cruise, I actually think that he is supposed to die before he can be considered a messianic figure. Now, David Miscavige didn't reveal whether or not they were going to go for the traditional nailed to a plank of wood. But if they're looking for ideas for Tom Cruise's inevitable martyrdom, I'm offering keelhauled or crushed in heavy machinery.