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The two influences that have always been strongest with me are, first and foremost, scientific philosophy, a search for a picture of the universe that is consistent with known data and regularly shaved by Occam’s Razor. The other influence was more traditionally "religious". As an artist, I believe I serve power(s) that transcends me. On stage, for example, an actor becomes part of a greater being through subordination to a transpersonal spirit, making what might be called, by a valid analogy with catholic theology, "the Body of Dionysios".
I also had the unusual experience of being married for ten years to a fundamentalist Christian. Moreover, my wife said she had been told, by other people, that they had in turn been told by Angels, quote, “that she was Jesus Christ returned.” For the time I was with her, I “believed” these things were true, but I didn’t think I “believed” them, I thought I “knew them to be certain beyond reasonable doubt.” As a right-brained artist with a scientific world-view living in my left-brain, “suspension of disbelief” is the closest I can come to faith.
My experiences with Xianity, or Paulinity, or Catholicism or Suburban Churchianity, or whatever you want to call the unaesthetic mish-mash that passes for religion among this warmongering racist people, were negative before my marriage. “Christian” superstition has been the chief enemy of Scientific Philosophy from the trials of Galileo to Scopes and the monkeys. As a pacifist poet faggot, I received my share of persecution of the common sort, and I admit that I knowingly got my own back on people I could push lower in the pecking order, but I didn’t enjoy it much, and I was glad when I got out of High School, and the need and even the temptation to indulge in status games was over. Status games are no fun when you are in the out-group.
By the way, in High School, several times I would publicly deny the existence of God and the divinity of Jesus and challenged the Guy in the Sky to strike me with lightening then and there to prove me wrong. Incidentally, I have been told by “Christians”, including my ex wife, that all the persecution I received in High School came from God because of my flagrant agnosticism (they call it atheism) or else because I am a faggot (a notion that still sometimes surprises me), and may have been a cause for crowns in Heaven for my persecutors.
A big problem with the story of Jesus Christ, the god who went slumming, is that it had official “versions”, nearly all of which are best exemplified by Gibson’s movie, The Passion of the Christ.
. These versions stuck me, then and now, as being hideously unaesthetic due to the complete dichotomy between the descriptions of the behavior of the mysterious radical rabbi and the behavior of “Christians”. As the peace movement has been asking, “Who would Jesus bomb?” To which I answer,“ I don’t know about Yeshua ben Yosuf. He could have been either a Gandhi or a David Koresh as far as I can tell, but I know some of the disciples would have nuked Rome if given a bomber.”
I had more residual respect for the Myth of Christ in High School than I have now, when I have seen the evil gentiles have done with the god of my ancestors (I have learned, since my wife left me, that my great grandparents “converted” or “passed” as “white Christians” when they moved to Mississippi and got the chance to make someone else the nigger. Even so I am Jew enough to claim aliyat, and considering what George Bush has done to “Christianity” I am glad to be able to say I am not a Christian in any sense, I am a Jew). I also then, not yet having lived through the Jonestown, etc., had more respect for Yeshua ben Yosuf (or ben Miryam, if you are one of those who says he was a bastard) than I have managed to retain.
I first came to respect Yeshua when I read The Murder of Christ by the anti-Nazi psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. This book describes Yeshua as what might have later been described as a hippie guru, but took him seriously and described him as what we might now days describe as an Avatar of the Tao. Reich described his murder as the result of his being a sexual being in a world of ego-dominated patriarchally perverted Westerners. As a result, instead of living out his life like Lao-Tse, he was forced into playing the role of a dying God in the manner of Osirus and Dionysios, a process completed by the sexually crippled police spy Saul of Tarsus.
While I now suspect Reich’s Christ is as mythical as Gibson’s, I do respect his insight that what is truly important about Yeshua, if anything truly is important about him at all, is how he lived, and maybe what he taught. How he died is less important, except as a caution, and what happened after his death is not important at all. Except that I am sure that no Jew would ever want to be considered a god unless he was a “bad Jew”. By Yeshua’s standards, he would have known that would be considered grounds to believe him damned by the Guy in the Sky.
Since most of the militaristic and racist people in the United States believe that the Bible by God says Jesus rose from the dead, I will tell how I estimate the probabilities of what happened, and what I think the facts of each outcome would mean for Scientific Philosophy. I leaves the aesthetics to you own judgment, and to my evaluation of The Passion of the Christ.
Let us imagine for the moment that we live in the Everett-Wheeler Multiverse, in which everything that can occur does occur1. The question of course is, what may or may not occur, what cannot occur, and what must occur. On the question of what cannot occur, I am ultimately agnostic, but I won’t go as far as David Hume who, between believing fifteen people saw Yeshua returned from the dead and believing he was dealing with fifteen lunatics, fools, or liars, would be inclined to believe all fifteen were liars.
To consider all of the data, maybe, charitably, six billion people out of the sixty who have lived could be described by “Jesus” as saved, if he was feeling merciful and wasn’t still pissed about the way he was treated the last time he was here. Let us assume for the moment, therefore, that 10% of the human race could therefore be called Christians (a leap, I admit, but I am being more charitable than the maker of tsunamis). Let us assume further that an Everett-Wheeler Multiverse operates on the basis of observer participation2, as this allows us to calculate odds “democratically”.
We could assume therefore, that in betting on Pascal’s wager, one should take in to considerations that the odds are only about 1 in 10 you will spend eternity singing some sort of Church Music, and are equally good that you could spend it in a Bordello by treating women as property in this world, if your taste go that way, by being a Wahibi Muslim. To dismiss Pascal’s Wager, I think with even those odds I would bet with the sizable percentage who believed in personal extinction, especially since Wheeler, at least, believes your consciousness determines which universe you live in3. Actually, I believe the probability that a Jew was God is about 30%, considering the Hindus believe we all are God.
Dumping all that, I will go now with Hume, and assume there is a statistically significant probability of zero that Jesus Christ is both the son of a Semitic desert deity and himself one/third of God, along with that Semitic desert deity and the communal consciousness of those who have undergone either the experience of speaking in tongues, Baptism, Communion, or been members of the Catholic church with their confessions said (the “orthodox” views). The probability is therefore even less that he is the Platonic God incarnate (the Monophysite and Christian Science views, as well as the view of non-evangelical Christians) but slightly higher that he is a Bodhisattva (the Nestorian, Manichean, and New Age View, as well as that of Buddhists).
With that last glance at Pascal’s wager, let’s assume that Christ being God in any real sense is not something that can occur even in the Everett Wheeler multiverse.
There is a non-zero probability (I will not attempt to estimate it more precisely) that D. H. Lawrence got it right, that Yeshua physically survived. This renders Christianity even more abhorrent to me as representing the greatest fraud in history, and makes Yeshua himself a con man on par with Hitler. There is a historical precedent for religious leaders faking their deaths and resurrections. Having expressed these sentiments, which were sharpened by seeing Gibson’s masterpiece, why did I watch The Passion of the Christ?
I went with a Jewish friend who wanted to see if it was anti-Semitic. I wanted to see if we would agree on that point. Also, as you can tell, I am familiar with the story. As Alex in The Clockwork Orange pointed out, it gets you through the dull times, if you ignore the preachy stuff. As an artist, I can almost forgive Yeshua his Hitlerian delusions of Palestinian liberation, and Gibson meant this as his masterpiece. The story has not been handled with such love and genius by anyone except Zaferelli, the makers of Jesus Christ Superstar, and maybe Godspell.
My friend found it less anti-Semitic than the book it was based on, but he is forgiving of Catholics since the Pope apologized for his historical guilt for the murders of millions of Jews, and told Catholics not to do it anymore. He was more disturbed by having fantasized about giving oral sex to the devil, after he found out the actor is female. Since my fantasies tend to run to being crucified when I am using the Bible as porn, that was not a problem, and I appreciated her use as a character. All my disbelief was suspended, even to the point of accepting the meteorological anomalies, until the last minute. If it had ended a minute sooner, it would have been the greatest movie ever made. As it is, it left him as a Holy Ghost, and I don’t believe in Holy Ghosts, aside from maybe Dionysios, when I am crossing the boards myself, so that leaves Yeshua functionally nailed to a tree. We can’t get beyond his death to his life, because our intention is focused on the smoke, and mirrors of pie in the sky with the Guy.
Great job, Mel, now that I have a DVD player, I am sure I will use it to masturbate yet.
Notes:
1The Everett-Wheeler Multiverse is a (mathematical) description of the consequences of quantum theory’s implications about the nature of reality. Until the advent of quantum theory, physics dealt with certainties, but quantum physics deals with sub-molecular phenomena so far from our normal perceptions that we have an innate amount of “uncertainty” in our observations. Processes are described in terms of probable outcomes, for example, there is a fifty percent chance an atom will emit a particle, or not emit a particle, within a certain amount of time.
In the Everett-Wheeler Multiverse, each outcome occurs, but in a separate universe. On our scale, it would be as if every time a coin was tossed, the universe split in two. Actually the situation would be more complex. If the odds were 1 in a billion that the atom would emit a particle in this particular microsecond, the original universe would split into a multiverse containing a billion universes, in only one of which would that particle be emitted. Consider that this would occur in interaction with every other quantum event that could occur in that microsecond, and every microsecond. In the Everett-Wheeler Multiverse, more universes arise each microsecond than there are electrons in our universe. This is patently absurd when stated in English or any known language, aside from possibly Mathematics.
2If I haven’t offended Seer Wheeler already by my attempt to explain in English the multiverse he and Seer Everett described in Mathematics, I shall probably do so in explaining his reasons for not believing it is an accurate picture of the workings of reality, and in only one in billion possible universes will my interpretation of Wheeler’s universe agree with his own.
First, as I said in the last endnote, the Everett-Wheeler Multiverse is patently absurd when described in English or any known language, aside from possibly Mathematics, although Cosmologists might prefer the term “inelegant”. As Einstein said in explaining why he did not accept quantum theory, “God does not play dice with the Universe”. (Without going too far off the track, I disagree with Einstein [and Abraham’s] assumption. As a Hindu-Taoist-Mahayana Buddhist with a Scientific philosophy, I think the Universe may well play dice with itself. As a literary specialist, let me also note that the characters of Y--H and Satan certainly gambled over Job.)
The Everett-Wheeler Multiverse describes what occurs when “the state vector does not collapse”. “The state vector” is the set of probabilities of the various possible outcomes. When a real outcome occurs, the state vector is described as collapsing into that one outcome that is observed to occur. The problem is, we do not know what “collapses the state vector”, or even if it does truly “collapse.” If it doesn’t, our universe is one ever-branching twig of a possibly infinite multiverse. Wheeler decided that the vector does collapse, and that what makes it collapse is the very act of observation (thus avoiding postulating an unknown factor beyond the mechanism by which observation collapses the vector). My combining these two aspects of Wheeler’s thought for this thought experiment is in no way intended to be representative of Wheeler himself. In the context of Pascal’s wager, this combination actually implies that we chose our after-lives individually as much as it implies that we “take a vote on it”. As I said above, I give odds of about a billion to one that Wheeler thinks the universe works as I am describing it working in this calculation of the odds on Pascal’s Wager.
3 Here it is, with the caveat that it is a billion to one Wheeler would agree with this description of the “Multiverse”.
The planet Earth is inhibited by at least six billion distinct universes in the form of individual consciousnesses inhibiting specific human bodies. It has also, as I said, been apparently inhabited by ten times that number of individual human universes. In traditional Buddhist psychology and/or metaphysics, as I have understood them, the collective agreed upon consciousness of these humans, dead and living, forms “samsara” the collective delusions of day to day life. Beyond this is “moksha”, true being, which is beyond any human language’s description, including Mathematics.
In the case of how our universes intersect to make the multiverse we live in, lets take my own example. I live in a universe where all the evidence indicates humans must help each other to survive the Malthusian ecological crises that looms within something on the order of a hundred years, much less the economic collapse that is looming within something on the order of ten years. I also, as an artist and especially as an actor, participate in a rite of communal creation of samsara, collective universes.
However, the largest fraction of human beings alive today are underfeed illiterate Asian females with inadequate shelter whose consciousness is largely devoid of any concrete understanding of what keeps them hungry, ignorant and largely helpless. The consciousness of the majority of the species is scarcely more advanced, as with the Christian fundamentalists, who are largely devoid of any sense of keeping them hungry, ignorant and largely helpless. Sometimes, as in the case of Neocons, it is demonstrably a worse consciousness, as these are the people who believe it is right to keep them hungry, ignorant and largely helpless, and do so.
My vision of Global samsara is inevitably biased, but it seems to me that I live in a Multiverse that may be destroyed by a Cabal of universes which are imposing their collective samsara, their collective delusions which focus with Hitlerian certainty in the person of George Bush, who combines, with the limits of his stupidity, the morals, manners, and ideology of Caligula.
I won’t say that it is impossible for the collective consciousness of human beings to change so that humans be human, but I would like to make a suggestion to Mel Gibson’s God as to how he might help. I’ll try not to get too statistical, Christ, but the Rapture would certainly help the odds. If you are possibly also the God of Plato or something, and really don’t like Christians, I would be satisfied if you could remove the 144,000 worst ones, as long as you bagged Cheney and Wolfowitz along with Bush and Ashcroft. Amen.
T. S. Ross is a staff reviewer for Unlikely 2.0. check out his full bio page.