Talk about insulting God

Since Bill Donohue of the Catholic League was so immensely successful at preventing "My Sweet Lord," aka Chocolate Jesus, from showing up in a New York art gallery, I'd like to suggest two other targets.

The first is the 16th (!!!) and allegedly final installment of the Left Behind series, which has got to be the most verbose insult to God ever perpetrated by any human being, believer or non-believer. Left Behind authors and evangelicals Timothy LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins claim to have based their thousands of pages on the Book of Revelation (which has only 20 or so chapters), though I think most of the verbiage is the product of a disturbingly punitive and violent religious imagination. In the 15th book, Glorious Appearing, after years of the usual plagues, Jesus finally shows up looking like Jesse Ventura in full wrestling drag to drown the army of the Antichrist in rivers of their own blood (and their horses blood); he evidently didn't finish the job though, because this final book, Kingdom Come, features ongoing battles between the forces of Satan and the Tribulation Force--the good guys who didn't get Raptured out but made up for it by becoming terrorists for Jesus. Really. You can read all about it in this LA Times piece.

Dudes, have you ever heard of metaphor? Unfortunately, there's something like 40 million copies of the series in print, which means we'll never get rid of them. Burning them, which as a rule I'm against, would only contribute to global warming.

Second, the new Hilary Swank flick, The Reaping, tries to do visually what Left Behind does in clunky prose, except with the Exodus plagues. Once again, the Great Heavenly Punisher turns rivers to blood, plagues a town with locusts, kills the firstborn etc., as our heroine tries to figure out what she's supposed to do to turn Him off. Either that, or a demon girl is doing it.

Both in time for Easter. And I'm sure those publicists actually knew that it was Easter.

Now, you've got to feel bad for God in all this. How would you like it if someone kept making movies about you, only loosely based on discredited interpretations of ancient texts, depicting you as a bloodthirsty monster, hungry to punish wayward humans with grotesque and bizarre natural phenomena?

Who will speak up for God? Or deep down do we really think that's how God is? I think that's what scares me the most.