I must admit, I love The Gods Are Bored.

Today, the Fabulous Goat Judge took on the issue of Jesus’s pursestrings.

Sometimes when I’ve contemplated the world’s great and fabulous cathedrals, I’ve wondered who paid Jesus’s bills. We all know he preached outdoors (we heartily endorse this practice). At best he might have spoken in some modest synagogues. But even the biggest Bible moron knows that when he went to the fancy Temple in Jerusalem he more or less freaked.

Here was a guy and twelve of his closest friends. Thirteen men needing three hots and a cot every day for three years. I’m a goat judge, not a mathematician, but that adds up to 1095 days. I don’t know if they had leap years then.

Who picked up the tab? Was Jesus like Salieri, with a rich patron, or was he like Mozart, scraping together the rent month to month?

The Bible is strangely silent on this issue. (Gods Are Bored)

I’ve often wondered about this too. Whatever Christ did in the Temple that day was seen by the Romans as an act of political sedition, and we don’t know WHAT it was. The Gospels, frankly, don’t tell us. However, one can suspect from Jesus’s insistence on poverty that building huge edifices for his glory wasn’t quite the result he had in mind when he went a little nutso and laid his life on the line for a principle.

Anne goes on to take the gold in the high dive:

To be brutally frank, I’d rather hold out for worship in the forest on a shoestring with a leader who wants to be there but can’t because he’s now freelance and needs to make ends meet. It has been thus with the Druids, I feel, since the Christian occupation of their lands. And it was probably thus with Jesus, or at least his early followers, back in the day. (Gods Are Bored)

There’s nothing wrong with feeding and housing the people who take talking to the gods and spreading love and joy seriously. But most established religions are mostly engines for the fiscal rape of the poor, not to mention engines for the collection of temporal power (po-TAT-to, po-TAH-to…) Is there a particular point where ecstasy stops and the power-brokering begins? Could a religion find that point and stop just short, or implement means of breaking that vicious cycle?

I suppose there might be, but good luck getting any established religion to take it seriously.

Or, as Anne puts it:

Religion plus harsh reality equals authentic correspondence with the gods. Remember that this fall when you settle into your pew for the annual round of stewardship sermons.

Amen.