BRIAN READE'S COLUMN: Zealots do more psalm than good.

Byline: BRIAN READE

I'VE always thought that people who take religion too seriously are more to be pitied than praised.

It goes back to a Christian Brother leathering me senseless when I was 13 for asking if the Nativity was the first case of a teenage mum gaining shelter and generous gifts after claiming she'd had an immaculate conception.

What the psycho in the frock was trying to hammer into me was the message that religion is joyless and beyond reproach. Have an original take on it and you'll feel a terrible wrath. And that's almost as ludicrous as it is counter-productive.

Look at the Archbishop of Canterbury's claim that TV's Footballers' Wives is a parable for all that is evil today. Surely his Easter message would have been more powerful if he'd said football management, as epitomised by Sven Goran Eriksson, is a parable for all that Christ suffered.

How the people initially treated this outsider as a messiah after he made the blind see and the lame use their left feet. How his humanity shone through when he was tempted by Mary Magdalene (Ulrika Jonsson) and the money men (Chelsea), then sent into the wilderness with only his 12 loyal followers led by St Peter (St Beckham). Until one of them betrayed him for 40 pieces of silver to the Press and he was crucified.

That would have been a far more instructive message than alerting his flock to check out dirty Tanya on the job, sending viewing figures higher than her hubby's heart-rate.

The same goes for Mel Gibson's film The Passion Of The Christ.

How did a movie, full of unknown actors telling a story - in Latin - which we all know the ending of, take pounds 2 million in its first UK weekend? Simple. Rabbis denounced it as anti-Jewish pornography containing more gut-wrenching violence than Tarantino in an abbatoir. Goodbye box office records.

Mel Gibson does take the view that Jewish leaders wanted Jesus dead. He does depict the Jewish mob as bloodthirsty and barbaric (although the worst violence towards Christ is perpetrated by Roman soldiers). But that's his reading of the Gospels and his prerogative as a director. History is nearly always filmed through a subjective eye.

For rabbis to decry it as a vile anti-Semitic work which will incite racial hatred against today's Jews is, like my old Catholic teachers, ludicrous and counter-productive.

No one will leave a cinema wanting to punch a Jew unless they were that way inclined before they went in, because they won't see a baying mob of Jews, just a baying mob. (Unlike some misguided Scots who hit the first Englishman they saw after leaving Gibson's Braveheart.)

The Passion Of The Christ probably wouldn't have attracted half its audience if America's paranoid Jewish lobby hadn't yelled about it being an obscenity the world should boycott.

But these religious zealots are so wrapped up in their own world they can't see the effect their outrage has on the real one.

It's like that Father Ted episode where Ted and Dougal are made to picket a cinema because the bishop believes it is showing a blasphemous film.

As they stand there with the placards saying "Careful Now" and "Down with this sort of thing" two tutting old ladies approach and ask, "Does he get his lad out, father?" And when Ted answers yes with disgust, they leg it into the cinema with wide-eyed anticipation.

Tell us sons of Adam not to eat a single apple, your holinesses, and we'll devour your orchards.