I always criticise Christianity — the Catholic Church in particular — and that’s because in my view they operate like a criminal organisation protecting paedophiles as they do.
I also question the story of Jesus itself; I used to think it was a tale of “I told you so.”
What I mean is this: he was asked to defend and prove that he was the Son of God, and he refused — which, in its own way, was both defiant and unreasonable. But the point is, he was crucified, and then came back to life, and in doing so it almost feels like he was saying, “I told you so.” And there’s something about that I don’t like.
But on the flip side of that, he was the poor carpenter’s son from Galilee who spent his short life turning the world upside down with radical love — love that crossed boundaries, defied power, and saw dignity where others saw none.
He sought out the people everyone else ignored — the sick, the poor, women, foreigners, and outcasts — and sat with them as equals. He preached that the kingdom of God belonged not to the powerful but to the meek, the merciful, and the peacemakers.
He was fierce against hypocrisy and wealth, gentle with the broken, and utterly uncompromising in his compassion. He owned nothing, feared no authority, and left behind no institution — just a way of living that challenged injustice and lifted the forgotten.
I know a lot of Christians turn to Jesus as the Son of God — or even as God himself. They ask for things in prayer, they seek forgiveness, they want eternal life. It all seems to be about what people can get from Jesus.
But if you stop and think about it, even if he couldn’t give you a single thing — no miracles, no promises, no afterlife — Jesus, on his own, was simply a pretty good bloke. In fact, he was the best kind of bloke. Everything that he stands for is what I hold true in this life. Not the divine Christ but Jesus the man.
The man, the beautiful, passionate revolutionary, the rebel. I don't know how I missed this. I spent my whole life thinking about the equality of man and the value of each life, and he was right in front of me, teaching me that we are all the same.
I’ll never become part of a structured Christian church. I’ve been to many, and when I was younger I had this real sense of arrogance, thinking I knew better than what they were preaching or teaching. I also don’t like organised religion. I think someone should start a religion just about Jesus the man. People should teach about the example he set for us all while he was alive, and not talk about what we want from him.
Something I always used to say was that crucifixion was simply the form of capital punishment used in Roman-occupied Palestine at the time. By crucifying Jesus, they weren’t doing anything special; they were just doing what they did to countless others.
But maybe that’s what makes it so extraordinary — that he was, on the surface, just any old guy. A carpenter’s son, making up stories that he was the Son of God, claiming powers that could raise the dead. And yet he went through all that physical and emotional agony for us. He took on the weight of human cruelty, the full measure of suffering, and died a violent, humiliating death — so that, according to the story, we could all go to heaven.
But there’s a reason Jesus did that for us. And even if none of it were true — even if he wasn’t the Son of God — he believed he was taking on the sins of the world for the sake of something better, for the hope of redemption. He carried that burden because he thought it might save everyone else. It takes a pretty extraordinary person to do that — or at the very least, a heart big enough to try.
Jesus was a good man. He was a rebel and I like that.
Tonight Mum told me that when she was a journalist at Channel 7, her chief of staff was a devout Catholic. She said Catholics aren’t supposed to eat meat on Fridays — not just Good Friday, but every Friday — and she and her colleagues used to invite him to join them for lunch, knowing full well what they were doing. They’d bring beautiful plates of meat he couldn’t touch. In other words, they antagonised the poor man.
I actually think that’s a pretty shitty thing to do, but Mum said he had a good sense of humour about it all.
I’ll close by saying this about Jesus: he was a teacher of radical compassion, a companion of the poor. He challenged hypocrisy, and he told the powerful that they had forgotten love. He lived a humble, rebellious life — and after he died, the Catholic Church turned his story into the very thing he stood against.
