(God's column appears in this space, at this point, pretty much whenever He feels like it.)

A lot of you have been wondering: Is God Dead? Throughout history man has grappled with this question. It always seems that the times in which you live are less Godly than the olden times. Of course, if you read the bible carefully you know it’s really a book about flooding, plagues, pestilence, famine, and the occasional doomsday prophecy. In short, kind of like modern day New Orleans, without the boobies. So it isn’t as if things have gotten slowly bleaker over the past 3500 years, despite how pessimistic you may find yourself…

Of course, the zealous few of you who are most adamant that God remains in your midst seem to have an almost sexualized fetish with end times and the destruction of mankind, which if you ask Me, is pornography of the worst kind. You seem to want everyone ELSE to die, in order to prove you’ve been right all along about your faith in Me.

Hint: you are not right. God takes no pleasure in the prospect of a fiery hell on earth, and I wonder why some of you who think you are close to Me find that notion so beguiling. Maybe, if you fetishize a fiery hell on earth, you’re actually doing the work of that other fella. The one with the fancy suit and the trident.

Has God forsaken thee? No, I never do that. When I am away, it is generally because you have forsaken Me. Sometimes, it is because I want you to be alone with your thoughts for a spell. Why might I want that? Well, you have to look inside to figure that out. That’s kind of the point, isn’t it?

Anyway, I'm here now, and I'm jazzed! am I the only one who is all a-twitter over the release of the Da Vinci Code? I’ve already seen it twice. (I hate to spoil the ending, but let’s just say: the Catholics did it.) As usual, Ron Howard pulls his punches, and almost makes a really good movie.

Of course, debunking the book has become a cottage industry. Don’t people realize that the very fact that a work of fiction seems to merit debunking proves, a priori (pun intended), that there’s something here?

Let Me separate fact from fiction for you.

You can’t use “because it says so in the bible” to prove anything. The bible is selective, biased, incomplete, and poorly translated. And arbitrary with respect to what went in and what didn’t. I never understood why the Gospel of Mary or Phillip was left out; personally I find the Gnostic stuff far more compelling than all that passion play gore and nonsense.

Jesus and Mary were married. You can trust me on this; I was there. For those of you who think if Jesus was married the bible would have said so, allow Me to make two points: (1) Actually, a Jewish rabbi at the turn of the first millennium AD who was not married would have been sufficiently unusual to have merited note, not vice versa. Quite simply: no mention of Jesus's marital status in the bible argues FOR his marriage, not against; (2) If you understood enough about the ways and customs of the time, you’d realize that the bible leaves no doubt that Jesus and Mary were married. Sure, a regular Joe reading the bible in English 2,000 years after the fact might not get it; but a Hebrew reading the original at a time roughly contemporaneous with the writing would have had no such trouble. But then, don't go by the bible. Go by Me. I danced with the bride. She was lovely.

The Holy Grail is the bloodline of Christ. Seriously, you shouldn’t need me to tell you this. You already know that the grail is the receptacle of Christ’s blood. For goodness sake, have you never heard of metaphor? Because this one couldn’t be more clear. Didn’t you ever wonder what the legend of King Arthur had to do with a grail quest, if the grail was just a golden cup? Most of Europe’s kings traced—or attempted to trace—their lineage back to Christ. The quest for the bloodline of Christ was the quest for proof of divine right to kingship. That was what made them kings, especially in medieval, Christian Europe. I mean-- duh!

Da Vinci was a prankster. Among his best religious pranks, of course, was his use of the “black art” of alchemy—in this case now known as “photography”—to make the shroud of Turin. Was that really Mary Magdalene in the Last Supper? The important thing to remember is that the painting, like Dan Brown’s book, is fiction. Da Vinci was tweaking his nose at you in that painting, daring you to make the leap. Notice too, that even though the Last Supper was a Passover Seder, there is no wine glass at all in the painting (if you've ever been to a seder, you know the un-uttered fifth question is, "Why on this night do we get so drunk before the meal, even?") The literal chalice is quite conspicuous by its absence-- leaving you to make your own mind up about the metaphoric one.

Albinos make great villains. The killer in the Da Vinci Code is an albino member of the secretive Catholic sect Opus Dei. With all the fuss over the way the Da Vinci Code depicts Opus Dei, why isn’t anyone speaking out for the plight and persecution of the albino? Every time you see a juicy part for an albino in a film, inevitably it’s as the bad guy. What’s up with that?

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By the way: a taco in Chile has womanly features, and next thing you know, pilgrims come from miles around flock to see the face of the Blessed Virgin. Yet God writes in a blog, and-- nothing. Zip. Nada. I don't get it. Maybe next time I'll appear in a bag of Doritos. Or on a podcast; those seem to be popular these days.