ial-an-Atheist® is proud to be the first to announce the exiting news: The Second Coming has occurred! Jesus has returned to earth after a long absence. Although the Bible says that he will come riding on clouds of glory and that everyone on the (necessarily flat) earth will see him at once, we are rather smug to tell you that the Bible was wrong about that. Actually, he has returned the way he arrived the first time: emerging from the womb of a surrogate mother.

It so happens that the Vatican Institute of Molecular Genetics, which usually is opposed to genetic engineering and in vitro embryo techniques, decided it had waited long enough for the Second Coming and decided to do something about it. After prolonged and delicate, secret negotiations with the Archbishop of Turin, the Vatican geneticists were allowed to extract some DNA from blood spots in the Shroud of Turin. Supplementing that DNA with more extracted from various foreskins of Jesus preserved as holy relics in half-a-dozen Catholic churches and nunneries in Europe, the Vatican “techies” were able to clone Christ. (You can imagine the trouble they had trying to persuade a bunch of nuns, who consider themselves “brides of Christ,” to let go of their husband’s foreskin.)

There is a problem, however. Not only has Jesus thus returned, he has returned in multiplicate. For you see, the Vatican engineers used the polymerase chain reaction to produce many copies of the surviving DNA sequences and reconstructed them in numerous enucleate human ova subsequently implanted in the wombs of surrogate mothers – as it turns out, thirteen nuns who secured the honor as part of the terms for their releasing one of the foreskins. To everyone’s surprise, all thirteen ova implanted and developed. Two years ago, all thirteen brides of Christ gave birth to identical baby Jesuses. (I guess that means they gave birth to their husbands.)

Christianity has a further problem in all this. Since Jesus is a god, and there are thirteen Jesuses, it follows that there are thirteen gods, not just one, as the popes have always claimed. But the theological implications of the Vatican engineering have become even more complicated recently. Although the babies are only two years old, they have already reached physical maturity – proof positive that they are indeed gods, even if they are provably fabrications of the Vatican.

Unfortunately, as in the case of Jurassic Park, the genetic engineers had to use African frog DNA to fill out the missing parts of the Jesus genome. Would you believe it? The Vatican now has the same damn problem that developed in Jurassic Park. The thirteen Jesuses maturing all together created some sort of sexual transformation pressure, just as sometimes happens in certain fishes and frogs. Seven of the thirteen Jesuses have matured into Jesinas – absolutely divine figures. Goddesses, in fact.

As you know, the First Coming occurred two thousand years ago, and Jesus has been “building up pressure” for a long time. So it comes as no surprise to learn that he – I mean they, six of them – couldn’t hold it in any longer. They impregnated their seven sisters – I mean they impregnated themselves, since genetically they are all identical. Now a second divine generation is about to begin, and it’s anybody’s guess if Jesus will give birth to himself, or perhaps themselves, or whether we are in for some unimaginable surprise. “With God,” the Ohio state motto tells us, “all things are possible.” Meanwhile, all thirteen Jesoids are finishing their catechism studies and shortly will be confirmed by Pope John-Paul II as Roman Catholics, Eastern Rite. Unless, of course, he excommunicates them for the sin of incest – or would it be “self-abuse”?