Saving Jesus

Is there anything left to save? Historically there seems to be less and less. It’s hard to support claims of some sort of divine being in the Mediterranean world at the peak of the early Roman Empire with no independent historical record. This shortcoming blew a hole in the Christianity boat decades ago. In fact the effort to create a modern patch for this hole set up the whole nineteenth century fundamentalist recreation that grew out of the long twisted history of fringe Christianity that was a big part of the colonial America foundation. The only patch that worked was to claim that the mashup of texts that grew out of early populist cults built on Greek, Egyptian, and Judaic mythologies nearly two millennia ago was, itself, divine and not subject to question. But that actually played hell with the original populist, Graeco-Roman cults that were totally spiritual and had no actual anthropomorphized divinities. All of this was totally dependent on a fairly ignorant and barely literate population. This is the main version of American religion that has finally run aground and is breaking up in early 21st century America. That reality is well picked over with the remaining lightly involved folks trying to get some distance from the mess and the hard core barricading themselves in small town America and trying to turn Donald Trump into a really, really ugly Jesus. That is not working out well at all. I think that anyone with a sense of mindfulness and compassion, the basic principles of the new spiritual reality, has got to feel bad about Jesus ending up like this. It’s time to quit complaining and do something about it.

We know the end of religion as a general problem of human society is in sight. Yet the forces of fear and ignorance are most dangerous in their desperation. As is often the case this is happening as a normal generational change tied to both basic education but, more importantly, to enhanced communication and information availability. Social media is the most direct instrument of change that we have ever produced. It is already recreating us for the new virtual paradigm. Luckily for the more open societies this has happened before the forces of denial i.e. the percentage of the population scared shitless of change, figured out what was happening. While the attacks on the evolving social media civilization are nearly…

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