Come visit with me and Amos Kennedy, America’s favorite printer, Thursday July 9 at 2pm PT. We’ll be talking about my book. It’s on Zoom, and it’s free. Also, fun.

This week’s question comes to us from Thomas Druecker:

Was Jesus Christ an actual real person and the actual Son of God, or is it all crapola?

As some of our longtime readers may know, I spent eight years in Catholic school as a kid. So yes, I have opinions on this and those opinions were earned. But like most opinions I grew up with, I try to re-examine them every once in a while. And the idea of faith is always ripe for reexamination, no matter what your relationship to faith might be.

To be clear, I do not believe in God. To be pedantic, the previous statement takes the idea of a “Jesus Christ” off the table. Which leaves the idea of a Jesus, sans Christ, as the only possible truth left in your question. Was there some solid good person who walked the Earth 2,000 years ago and told people to be nice to one another? Personally, I’d like to believe there was more than one. Did he think he was the Son of God? I’ve met people, even good people, who thought weirder shit about themselves. So, maybe? But it’s more likely that whoever was writing his story either believed it themselves, or took artistic license in the storytelling. (Which I am somewhat familiar with myself.) Was this basically decent dude punished by an autocratic regime for getting people all riled up with his ideas of “being kind to one another?” Well, it’s 2026 and we’re sentencing people to prison for distributing zines, so I’ll say that’s incredibly likely, as that’s what fascists do.

I think a better question than whether these things—God, divinity, etc—are real is whether they are useful.

My mother is a believer because she needs to believe that there is something better waiting for her in the afterlife. Like all Portuguese mothers her age, she has a plate hanging on her kitchen wall that says “Sêr mãe é facil, basta sofrer.” (“Being a mother is easy, you just have to suffer.” Literal eye roll.) I once asked her where the plate came from. She said her mother gave it to her. (Be right back, calling my therapist.) My mother spent her life sacrificing herself (and her children) to my father. And while I can feel the anger seeping out through my fingertips while I write that, I also try to retain some empathy towards her situation, but it takes a lot. My mother was raised in a culture that taught her to be subservient and stripped her of agency. She was married to a man that she wanted to be married to, but who didn’t want to be married to her. He married her because the culture demanded it of him. He abused her because he resented not having the strength to break from that culture’s demands. She took it because, to be fair, a woman of her again, from that culture, didn’t see a lot of options. And in allowing myself to feel that sadness in her heart I manage to find a little empathy for her. God is useful to her, because God is the promise that her suffering is the price she needs to pay to get through the door to heaven. And thus suffering is useful. God exists for her because she needs him to, and the idea that he isn’t there is too brutal to contemplate.

For some people God is a symbol that justifies their mistreatment of others.

When I was in Catholic school, we had religion class every day. Always the first class of the day. Mostly we read. We took turns reading The Bible. (Which I am capitalizing and italicizing here as I would any book title.) You’d get called on, stand up, do the sign of the cross (we had to do the sign of the cross a thousand times a day), and you’d read a few passages, until the nun (religion class was always taught by a nun) leading the class abruptly called out another kid’s name—and it was always the kid she knew was paying the least amount of attention, and then he’d get a yardstick across the knuckles for not knowing what chapter and verse we were on, and she’d move on to another kid. We mostly glazed through the Old Testament, because the New Testament is the Catholic bread and butter. After the class read for a bit, and there were at least four kids crying and rubbing their knuckles, the nun would explain the lesson for the day. Which, as I got older, I began to realize didn’t always match up to what we’d read, but ok. Let’s put a hold on that because I don’t want a yardstick to the knuckles. On Fridays the last 30 minutes of class was spent pre-filling out the envelope we’d be putting in the offering basket during Sunday services, which included going down the line alphabetically and asking each kid how much money they’d be putting in the envelope. If your number was low, the other kids laughed at you, which I don’t remember a nun ever discouraging.

The thing is, I kinda liked the stories. They were like weird adventure stories of a land far away, a long time ago, and some dude who tried to do right by people, while also keeping his crew in line. Yes, I just described Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Some stories get told over and over because they work. I’d also read the stories at home on my own time, and at church because reading was more fun than following along with whatever was going on up there, and no one at church would give you a second look for reading a Bible. Also, being a curious child with a bad home life and a library card, I soon discovered that there were multiple versions of the Bible available to read, and that was interesting. Even more interesting, there were other books about God(s) used by other religions that also had some good stories in them, sometimes with the same characters! Those were not discussed in religion class.

Towards the end of my time in Catholic school, I was now filled with new information, feeling very curious, and overrun with a lifelong desire to see how much trouble I could get in, or at least to test the boundary of where trouble began. (Also, the knuckle beating nuns with the boxy wimples (that’s the hat) had mostly been replaced by acoustic guitar playing nuns with the soft wimples, who seemed kinder.) I started asking questions. I doubt they were smart questions, or anything groundbreaking, but it quickly became clear to me that asking questions would only be tolerated to a point, and I’d reached it quickly. By the time I left Catholic school, and opted out of the Catholic high school my parents wanted me to attend, I was done with God and the idea of anything of a divine nature.

I decided that God was a con, and that anyone who fell for the con was a fool. When you are young, and newly free, but still plenty dumb, the world tends to be black and white. And so you write GOD IS DEAD on the back of your thrift store Army jacket, much to your mother’s chagrin, and you walk out into the world with the confidence of an idiot who believes he’s figured it all out by the ripe age of fourteen or fifteen, which of course you haven’t, but it sure feels good to know you’re right. Why is everybody else so dumb?

God exists because people need him/her/them to, and the idea that he/her/them isn’t there is too brutal to contemplate.

I do not believe that life is suffering, or that suffering is necessary to live a good life, but I do believe there is suffering in the world. Also, it’s obviously unevenly distributed. But it comes for all of us in its own way. The cracks may indeed be how the light gets in, but something still has to cause the cracks. Some suffering is caused by others, and some suffering is just the price of living. And while there is much we can do about the former, there tends to be less we can do about the latter. But when the richest nation on earth decides its resources are better spent bombing school children, rather than providing them breakfast, the brutality is so irrational that I cannot be surprised that people start looking for solace in what I might consider irrational. When you are holding your dead child in your arms God might become necessary. When you can point to the person who bombed your child, God might become not just your solace, but your vengeance.

I do not believe in God, but I cannot blame anyone who needs to.

We are living in a world of horror. Perhaps this is the natural state of the world, but I really don’t want it to be. The world feels bereft of justice, but I don’t really want it to be. The world feels like it’s lacking a moral code, but I don’t really want it to be. I do not think God exists, but there are days when I wish he/she/they did, if only for a brief second. Because there are days when I need not just something bigger than me, but I need something bigger than monsters.

My issue is not with people who believe in God, but in the people who hijack those beliefs to justify the mistreatment of others. Back when I was young, reading the stories of Jesus, I didn’t read any stories about mistreating others. I didn’t read any stories about excluding others. In fact, I read the opposite. The stories in The Bible taught me to love the poor. They taught me to love the marginalized. They taught me to love refugees. (The main character was a brown-skinned refugee!) And these are good lessons regardless of whether you believe they were delivered by a divine entity, or by some random nice dude, real or invented, who was basically—as the song says—one of us. Personally, I hope it isn’t necessary to be divine to be kind. I want kindness to be ordinary. I want love to be ordinary. I want inclusion to be ordinary.

Because if these were the actions of one of us? They can certainly become the actions of more of us.

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🩺 Need some one-on-one advice? You can talk to me.

📣 Erika is teaching her workshop, Let’s Do Design Research Right, on July 15, at 11am PT. It’s very much worth your time.

🧺 Get a Gilly pin. Better than a crucifix!

🍉 Please help the children of Gaza. They are being murdered by bombs we paid for.

🏳️‍⚧️ Fuck the Supreme Court. Protect trans kids.