Fecking Christians II: Spider-Man is my Jesus…

All this reminds me of a time back in the day when I frightened some Christian Union types out of my bedroom. I went to a college in Ireland's equivalent of the fucking Bible belt. They were strong on wrecking your head about Christianity and pretty bad at, you know, doing anything vaguely decent towards other human beings. During holidays we were all kicked out of halls to make way for thousands of evangelical Christians so they could sit in a tent and talk about the Jesus. Anyway at one such time, my friend Danny and I got off the train at college after a jaunt to the 'big smoke' of Belfast, we were broke, it was pissing rain and we had to hitch about five miles to Portstewart. As ‘luck’ would have it, one of these God-love shindigs was just finishing. Excellent, we thought, surely some of these Christians would give us a lift. Hundreds of cars drove past. Behind windows emblazoned with inspirational quotes from the Bible, hundreds of these fairytale-believing fuckwits smiled and waved, but no one stopped.

Anyway, the Christian Union was pretty strong there so they used to come around your halls bedrooms to try and convert you. This bemused and entertained us Catholics from down south, we’ve had strict religion all our lives, we hardly want a fucking stricter religiosity top-up. Pride of place in my room was (and still is come to think of it)a large poster of Spider-Man by excellent British artist Simon Colby. I pointed to the poster and said to these CU mooks, that for me Spider-Man was a bit like Jesus (but with a better outfit), bestowed with powers he doesn’t quite understand, not quite human yet beset with human frailties, generally decent etc. etc. Lets just say, they high-tailed out of that prototype homuncu-lair pretty damn quick. I love to watch the God Channel; it’s a laugh riot of contradictions and bullshit, especially when they rag on science. How can anyone appear on television (which as we have established earlier, was indeed developed ‘by scientists’)and criticise science?