The symbols that wake us up: triangles, circles, paintings and sculptures of heroes, martial, intellectual, or spiritual.

Circles and triangles, zero and infinity. Is man not a religious animal? Does man not respond to certain combinations of pitch, arrangements of colors, facial expression, the gesture of his fellow human? Does art function religiously?

Does man not respond to certain images, certain stories? Is true religion merely a feeling? Is there a structure to the human religious response?

God is a schizophrenic who wakes up outside of himself. He thinks he's a little slave. He or she is even born early, helpless, incapable of lifting his head. (Note that Jesus gets a case of weak neck at the end, having come full circle.) He thinks someone else is God, and that this God character see everything, is everywhere. (A false truth..)

The individual wakes up to the fact he himself is the creator of all the gods he has previously worshiped. His individual brain is the generator of his religious experience. his imagination that creates kings is the king of kings. Self am lord. Is this an alpha chimpanzee sort of charisma?

The eye does not readily infer itself from that which is sees. Nor does man that worshiper easily infer that he is the projector of the images he worships.

As the eye infers its primary significance, so does man the religious being infer that he is the source of all gods. He introjects his images of the gods, swallows them, takes them back, reclaims them as himself. Christianity is an absolute religion because it is a story of a mortal man as god, a publicly executed criminal as god. What could be more subversive? If the scapegoat is god, the world is upside down. The Cross spins and inverts the world. The last arrive first, the first don't arrive at all.

And this is Satanic as well. Satan too is a criminal. As Christ is crucified, Satan is cast into hell. The crucifixion and hell are one. Heaven and the Holy Ghost are 1.

The feeling and the image are one. The god-image is adopted by the individual as persona.

A man ceases to be alienated from his god. He is his god. A man no longer is outside the truth. He is the truth. A man is no longer alienated from his desires. They are his horses, his women, his thrill.

Jesus, "real" or not, is the man in the story who told folks that the kingdom of God was within them. Of course they would nail him up. Jesus is a revolution of pure inwardness, a realization of self-ownership. If we stay with the radical core of Christianity, we have absolute religion, absolute ethics, a transcendent ethics loosely based on telos (which is spirit) not on the letter of the law. (The letter kills. The spirits gives life.) ("God is love," "God is a spirit".)

I'm afraid that most Christians have made a Golden Calf of Christ. To be outside him is to misunderstand him. He's only understood from the inside. ("He has a name that no man knows but himself"). This name is ineffable but not beyond human experience. God is not a sentence but a feeling. Therefore his tautology: I am what I am. He is self-identity and being. Pure being is nothingness. The wind must be inferred from the rustle of leaves and the scattering of birds. Naturalistic Epistemology is the wrong net for spirit/mind/emotion. The Bible is to Plato as whiskey is to beer.

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Jesus is the Other that need not be feared. Ever welcoming Other. The Other who dies for you. Outside, an individual. To understand him from the inside is to become someone you are not, to confuse oneself with the other. Distance again, I am back to distance and recognizing the other from the outside as "that is not me".

This not exactly the biblical Jesus. Perhaps I prefer an Other messiah.

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Thus spoke Deckard.

I think the Bible offers us fragments. I admit, an entirely different Jesus could be constructed from those pieces. My Jesus is a Romantic Satanic myth, very influenced by Blake.

The Other is an important notion. Does Mary/Isis fit in anywhere? Freud said the penis was a baby. Lacan studied what he called the symbolic phallus. I think of all those paintings of a virgin and her son. I'm still trying to untangle it all, but I think the whole thing is naked before our eyes. It just demands the connecting of dots. Perhaps this is an idiosyncratic indulgence, but it's not a bad way to pass free time.
The name "Jesus" isn't important, in my view. I think it's all about the activation of what Plato would call an Idea and Jung an Archetype. I think we have this built -in- response to certain images and stories.

Anyway, thanks for reading and giving some feedback.

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Mary/Isis is the mother of the Other...
...and she does not have a penis at least in my version of the story.

Can animals be archetypes. I do a little amateur artwork and I've been drawing a lot of animals lately whereas I used to draw more people even Jesus once or twice. Is it significant that Jesus qua archetype is a human? Maybe humans are always a bit subversive and individualistic.

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Thus spoke Deckard.

Hegel thought that primitive man first drew animals and finally drew that the draftsman. If man creates his concepts(drawings are abstract, not of one bison but bisons in general), then to draw man is to draw god. Is this what incarnation myths are all about? But then he can distinguish between the godlike and ungodlike parts of himself. He can whittle it down like Blake did, to the imagination.

THe penis that Mary and Isis have is the baby. Didn't Isis also have a brother she was friendly with? Jesus is Mary's penis/baby. This is a strange application of Freud, I admit. But I feel like gender and religion are connected, The circle and the point.

I think animals do serve as transmitters of the archetype. The Egyptians had that dog-faced god. Christians have serpents and dragons, lions and lambs.

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Yes I do believe the connection between sex/gender and religion is strong if not essential. Without sex, reason would be enough.

Was it the Arians whose heresy it was to overemphasize the humanity of Christ. Well the muslims anyway. I think I probably have a very Muslim idea of Christ. Does Jesus have to be God to be all these things you describe?

Could something similar be said of Moses rebelling against the Pharoah and all that Pharoah stood for? Should we understand Moses from the inside as well? How about Adam? How about Noah? How about your next door neighbor? I would yes. At least as much as Jesus. Is this "understanding from the inside" really that specific or different in the case of Jesus?

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Thus spoke Deckard.

I would say that Jesus as myth is one of the more potent expressions of the self-archetype. I suppose this subversive Christianity I speak of is the association of this myth with one's own persona. The theory is that we automatically project archetypes. For instance, the anima archetype is projected on females in general and the young man mistakes his fantasy for the real girl.

I think its the same with the God archetype. Feuerbach influenced Marx on this. Man is alienated from his Gods because he doesn't remember he created them. Just as a young man learns to differentiate between the anima projection and the real girl, so does the individual realize that his idols are just that...idols.. and not the god he took them for. I feel like we cannot help but respond to religious symbols. It seems that most intellectual/spiritual telos is connected to a more or less unconscious myth. The idea I present is that man can associate this god-myth with his own persona. The Satanic-Byronic hero seems to be a lot like this. So does existentialism. Man is condemned to be free only if he has negated all exterior claims. To smash idols is to destroy god-projections. I think this is why the Caesars declared themselves god. Caligula is the dark side of self-deification. So is Charles Manson. People will look at you askance if you seem to forget your place. Is the taboo on suicide related to this? Does the suicide not imply an ownership of his life, since he dares to destroy it?

I think we should look thru as many eyes as possible. For me, Christ symbolizes the totality incarnate. The totality includes us all. Killers and saints and the girl next door. Christ is the blob that assimilates all. Forgive all sinners. The sun shines on the just and the unjust. All that jazz. Christ is just a purple robe. A drug. Concentrated Bullsh*t. People who feel good are often open-minded. Courage is good for the vision. Of course the sustaining myth of self-as-god is the prop for it all. This must be protected.

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Christ's humanity can be contrasted with his symbolism. How much was he human? How much is he symbol? This reminds me of the various doctrinal arguments of the early church. I am advocating a sort of Socianism. Just a human not a symbol at all. This is heresy I know. Not a god. Not even a symbol. And yet still the Christ. Is this even possible?

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Thus spoke Deckard.

The human/symbol dichotomy lived as a human experience would run like a spectrum, maybe. For me, Jesus is strictly a literary character, like Hamlet or the Grinch. He just happens to be one of my favorites. Whatever the real man was doesn't matter much for me. Even the Jesus myth doesn't matter much. It's the layer behind that that matters to me. Let's call it the meta-ideal.
Are humans wired to incarnate a conceptual/narrative ideal ? The meta-ideal shines through concepts(philosophy/narrative), painting, and music. One selects Einstein, Socrates, Jordan, Mr. T, Bukowski, Krishnamurti, Colonel Sanders, Keith Richards, Van Gogh, or....best of all? One's Future Self.

The skeleton of the Jesus myth is One's Future Self. I associate Self as God with many sorts of mysticism/wizardry/weird science. One's brain is the projector of the movie. So for me, the mystical is just a dream, just a flash of brain chemistry, however grand and terrible. I don't rule out other possibilities but they are never on my mind. What are stories of the gods then but drugs? (Umo the purple dwarf is scribbling these things to me...)

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I'm high on life dude. I don't need God to have fun.
D.A.R.E. to keep kids off God.


As for equating Jesus story with fiction-

We have the concept of "The Greatest Story Ever Told"
Such a story must necessarily be true.
Why? If it was not true , it would not be the greatest
Q.E.D.

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Thus spoke Deckard.