Meditation for December 14th
Jesus Q. Christ: Schizophrenic
After Christianity began to spread in the Middle East, Asia, and even into the barbaric wilderness that was Europe, the very nature of Christ became the debate. The Council of Chalcedon was convened in 451 to address the very essence of Jesus’ time here on earth. Was he a man or God? Did he have a soul?
To be fair to those early theologians, they were as smart as the time in history and technological advances allowed, so they were pretty dumb, but they came up with the Hypostatic Union, where two distinct natures: one divine and one a person in one man.
Others lost their argument that day. The Apollinarianists were sure Jesus was born a normal man, but absent a human soul, where a divine soul sat. Others were sure that Jesus walked along, a God like his Father did in the Garden of Eden. Some described Jesus as being from a totally new third nature, but religious people come up with the damnedest things.
Jesus traveled Judea with one mind and two wills. This is a fractured, tortured person, and it plays out in his refusal of temptations while fasting and tripping in the desert. Jesus was mad. Not angry, but absolutely bonkers crazy.
He was all the right kinds of mad, though, so it didn’t go down as just another man gone crazy from the syphilis, nor did the insanity turn into world domination. He had a sense of humility. There was some point he was trying to make, but insanity made him talk in riddles and parables, so what he really wanted was, and is, being deciphered by the biggest assholes on earth.
He walked around a man, but a divine will was overwriting his primal instincts. Usually, a homeless man who claims to communicate with a deity is placated with a quarter or cruel laughter, but Jesus had the Apostles and other followers instead. One was even a tax collector! So, unless the water-to-wine miracle was the center of this storyline, and it was just a group of hobos walking around getting drunk, there was some charisma in this Jesus guy.
People deal with conflicting thoughts all the time. On one hand, we want to do the right thing, but on the other hand, we really want to be on top, and we have to fuck other people over to do that. Jesus wanted to do the right thing, AND God is telling him to be even better than human.
The fact is, Jesus didn’t have a chance. He was born in a lower working-class family where the father was much older than the mother, who claimed an angel had impregnated her for God. Then, a weird post-birth abortion law was passed by a king who was listening to prophecies and had to kill all the newborn boys. Hence, the family has to immigrate to Egypt until shit cools down legally, and then come back, more interested in religious philosophies than Dad’s (the human one) job.
He saw a corrupt system, and his mind reacted to it the same way a person who becomes a paranoid schizophrenic might grab on to conspiracy theories. There is an occupying military and government run by the Romans, who use the corrupt religious institution to keep the people placated. Jesus might want to have the Romans out. A better moral group in charge of the temple, but that wouldn’t have been a religion; that would have read like a homeless person with a sign in Portland, Oregon, denouncing the cruelty of the government and the rich instead.
So, to make sure we take care of the returning Christ, we oughta fund mental illness programs, take care of our immigrants, illegal or otherwise, pay attention to all paranoid conspiracy theorists, and we’ll have to take the word of every person who claims God is a parent or maybe just a confidant.
So to add on top of the Blaise Pascal’s Wager, “I would rather live as if God exists to find out He doesn’t than live as if He doesn’t to find out He does”, I would also say, “I rather live as if every person who says they are the Son of God is the Son of God and find out he isn’t than not to believe a person who says they are the Son of God and find out they are the Son of God”.
Prayer
Jesus Q. Christ,
My question to you, good sir,
Are you the predominant religion because the world’s most enormous armies back you,
Or are the countries that have your back the world’s most enormous army because you let them be?
And is the theology of your nature right?
Or was the right one snuffed out a long time ago by a competing philosophy?
Are the right books in the bible?
Or did the right ones get torn out?
How much are you leaving up to man to spread your gospels?
Or are you being very much misunderstood and misinterpreted?
Amen
Goal
It just isn’t clear who or what Jesus was, and it feels like he wouldn’t have appreciated what he has become, judging by the works of his older brother James. Maybe he is just an example, and not to be worshipped.