What’s wrong with religion in a nutshell:

Woke up this morning, went to cnn.com like I always do, and at first glance I honestly thought they were running a close-up photo of a victim of the latest middle-east suicide bombing at the top of their home page.

But of course, they wouldn’t do that. That would be in poor taste, running a photo like that on their home page, where anybody could see it.

Unless, of course, it’s a photo of guy only pretending to have been beaten to a bloody pulp and dying. Now that’s tasteful.

Especially if the guy’s pretending to be the deity you worship and reckon runs the world.

That, apparently, is the spoonful of sugar required to make such a hideous representation palatable to God-fearing Christians and their young children. I was raised Catholic in the 60s and everywhere I went, there were effigies of that same mutilated dude nailed to a tree. Then like now, it was just part of the landscape.

I could be wrong, but I think Christianity is the only major religion in the world that iconizes the murdered body of their god over his body of good works. Quick, can anybody out there tell me how Buddha died? Or Mohammed? L. Ron Hubbard?

Probably not, because no matter what other flaws they share with most every other religion (a whole different post), they choose to celebrate the life and teachings of their holy men and women, not their bloody carcasses.

I’ve said it before and it bears repeating: In the time of Jesus, the Romans handed out crucifixions to Jews like the Gideons hand out Bibles at Holiday Inns. It was no great feat for a trouble-making Jew to get savagely tortured then hung on a tree till he or she bled to death or suffocated.

The trick was surviving it. Which they say Jesus did, which seems to me to be the whole point. Not the torture and murder preceding the resurrection.

No wonder Christianity has been responsible for so many horrible things since they delivered their savior to be hung on a cross, from the Crusades to the Inquisition to the current pedophilia scandal threatening to bankrupt the Catholic church.

For 2,000 years, they’ve focused on the wrong part of the legend. And no surprise, that’s the part of their founding story they’ve exported to the world for the same period of time.

I’ve read the gospels and am of the opinion that if Christians were more focused on the life and teachings of Jesus, instead of his gruesome and grisly death, it might be a whole different world today.