“I was raised, as a Christian, on inviting Jesus into your heart and giving over your life to him, and he will make you whole again, undo your pain, and shield and protect you from real hardship and trouble. Nobody ever expressed it quite as bluntly or as superficially as that, but that was the message I heard anyway. Jesus will make everything all better. You won’t have to be afraid of life anymore…

“The more I have thought about Jesus in his own context, and tried to understand him as his disciples would have, as his contemporaries would have, the more disconnected he has become from the Christ of my Christian youth. The more sense Jesus made as a 1st century Jew, the less plausible he became as a timeless big brother intent on undoing the litany of errors I am so gifted at making…

“I realised that there really wasn’t a place for my Casper-the-friendly-second-person-of-the-Trinity-messiah any more. He didn’t exist, he wasn’t real.” (>>)