Seeing as you were so kind as to mention this "wise philosopher" twice ... a note for the record, I may well be a philosopher, but that doesn't bestow me with any particular wisdom, just a more verbose vocabularygreek18 said:
... I shall offer three brief responses.1) the internet allows people to be much more direct and confrontational than they would probably be in real life. Therefore it's often necessary to read things online in a less-emotional way than if it were someone saying the same thing to your face. Even though people get genuinely upset; one of those contradictions of our uncertainty as to where the emotional divide exists between the "virtual" and the "real"... this strange new realm that is still a novel experience for humans.
2) do not forget that there is a mood of extreme dissatisfaction among many in the US and elsewhere right now that their freedoms are being eroded during the Bushite-Blairist era. Thus you should perhaps be unsurprised if they respond with venom when they see one member of their "community" online seeking to instigate censorship of free speech as well.
3) as I have indicated through postings on this thread already, I believe that there is a long history of seeking to eroticize the figure of Jesus through representation, whether in terms of rendering him an epitome of contemporary ideals of beauty, or by masking his genitals on near-naked representations in such a way that their over-present absence makes them appear conversely overly present and an object of fetish beneath the thin material that (only just) conceals them. Thus, as "immoral" as this thread might seem, I think it is merely a more explicit way of alluding to something that has been an unspoken - yet clearly-referenced - attribute of Jesus in representation for hundreds of years; rendering him as a barely-clad sex symbol rather than in a realist fashion, with his omnipotence made tangible in terms of human sexuality also.
