Somehow I’m getting that conflated with Elvis impersonators, which logically leads to…
Jesus impersonators! Crooning at a Las Vegas banquet hall near you!
I think most of us were using the second definition. Admittedly, the pictures aren’t frightening, but their unnatural weirdness makes them distinctly unpleasant. They are glurge made visual.
Ken Jacobs… Male prostitu…
(oops, wait)
I e-mailed the link to my husband and told him I’d found his Christmas gift. He’s very excited and wants to get one for everyone we know.
I have no particular stake in persuading you to consider these images creepy and respect your right not to be creeped out by them. For me the creepiness doesn’t come from them being images of Jesus with living children. The creepiness is more about the oddly blank eyes, the 2 dimensionality of “Jesus” in the images, and the places where things like chins and skulls intersect in ways that defy physics. Adding to the creepiness is the Stepford-ness of everyone in these images. If I commissioned a portrait of my deceased grandfather and my son and they ended up looking like The Sunshine Family I’d find it creepy.
Upon previewing I see WhyNot has posted what I meant a little more clearly. And yes, when someone says “She’s with Jesus now” I take that to mean that the person in question has died so pictures of my kid “with Jesus” do seem like a picture of my kid “only imagine he died”.
I think you hit the marketing nail on the head. It’s just that the end user of these particular products hasn’t really thought it all the way through. I love Jesus and I love raquetball (in varying degrees). I don’t want to play raquetball with Jesus.
I’d love to hire them for an afternoon and make a collage for my office cubicle with pictures like:
“Me and Jesus riding a Harley”
“Me and Jesus having a beer together at the bar”
“Me and Jesus at the strip club”
“Me and Jesus at the craps tables”
Something tells me though they wouldn’t be up for it.
“I know you can walk on the water but can you walk on that much beer?”
I was thinking it would make a neat group picture at the next DopeFest. Jesus and a bunch of Dopers – many of them probably inebriated – having a floating picnic in that Thomas-Kinkade-looking forest…
You’re right, though, they probably wouldn’t take our money.
NO! Cuz, he’s like, eternal and stuff. Give him a new outfit? You may as well go ahead and age him 2000 years!
Well there was that time Jesus drank out of the wrong cup…
The creepy part is that there are people who live among us who see this and think it would be a nice thing to have.
“Me and Jesus, rockin’ the glory hole”
Maybe if I could stand next to Jesus ala Stephen Colbert and his black friend, but Jesus needs to make that face.
It took me a minute to figure out the ‘feel my hands’ thing, that they meant ‘hold to a cross’ nails and not fingernails nails. Why no, I wasn’t raised Christian.
Bam! Got it in one. Well that and the hovering stepford thing.
Telephone conversation I had with the GF:
She: “Hi honey. What you doing?”
Me:* “Working really hard on my Joey”*
78.5% of Americans are Christians. In America, the average person is a Christian; three out of four of the people you see are, on average, Christians.
http://www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/research_briefs/aris/key_findings.htm
Well I’ll be darned. Jesus is one of the Oakridge Boys.
My first impression was “You! Kenny Loggins! Lower your hands slowly and step Away from the baby…!”
But are they *true *Chistians?
Hey, quick straw poll, would a ‘true’ Christian find these pics appealing or offensive?
I find them as sickening as the photoshopped babies as cherubs which local photographers advertise, for the same “what if my baby were dead, how pretty” reasons mentioned above.
That’s what does it for me. And the way they are plasticized makes them look lifeless like wax dummies. So that dead artifiicial look juxtaposed with such hamfisted reverence crosses the line into “creepy” for me.
If they’d just staged the very same photos with a guy dressed as Jesus in a nice, real-life outdoorsy place, I’d think it was a little cheesy, but not creepy. It would be more like sitting on Santa’s lap for Christmas card pictures, only it woukd be strolling with Jesus through a garden. Kitchy. But the ultra-airbrushing makes everyone look quite alien. Creepy.