Why?

"Poor Joseph, God was a hard act to follow"
The Billboard features an unsatisfied Mary looking up to the heavens
while poor Joseph looks deflated

Why: What I can never understand is why people on this planet always want to make personal decisions for others. I can understand it if it would harm them in some way - somebody wants to drink poison, so you stop them. But why some people want to say you can't wear that, or you can't do that, or can't say that, or I've decided without asking you what you can or can't have or do. All because they personally don't want or like what the other person has or wants. It is quite beyond me.

I believe as long as it doesn't harm others and theyty are paying for it themselves they can do as they damn well like. Sometimes of course the definition of it harming others is the sticking point. Usually, if it is only my sensibilities that are upset, then I don't give a continental.

Billboard: The recent flurry (an unholy row!!) about the billboard above is just another manifestation of these people. Put up by Auckland's Christian church St Matthew in the City the vicar says he wanted to lampoon the literal Christian conception story and get people discussing miracles and God.

But a few hours after the billboard went up, an angry man with a pot of brown paint covered over Mary and Joseph's faces and later it was attacked with a knife. Real Christian of them.

I thought the Vicar was one of the most sensible people we have heard from lately.

"We're trying to lampoon the idea of a literal male God who somehow, it's assumed, impregnated Mary. Most Christians don't believe that, but the message that the general society hears from the church is this message; they think that they're meant to take it literally.

We think God is about the power of love as shown in Jesus, which is something quite different than a literal man up in the sky."

The usual suspects are upset, in particular lobby group Family First.

As he said most thinking Christians understand that the Bible is not to be taken literally and was something written for that time. Ranke- Heinemann a Catholic theologian and the first woman to hold a chair in Theology at Essen University was fired in 1987 for suggesting the virgin birth was faith not fact.

And I read that after over 60 years membership ex President Jimmy Carter has resigned from the Baptist Church because they have reiterated that woman are inferior to men. Sounds like the Taliban.

Sadly, as those who have tried to destroy the billboard show, in this world there are people everywhere wanting to make decisions for others about even the most minor things.