Overview

When you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.[1]

Many Buddhists know this saying. Most don't take it seriously. It's like a "get out of status hell" card. Whenever someone questions your idea of the Holy Buddha, you just say, "then kill him - it's about the practice, not the person" and you look wise and humble, but you can keep on worshiping the dude, his ideas and what he stands for. Don't do that. (You don't care about Jesus? Good. Move on. You don't have the disease I'm curing here.)

I still have some Sacred Ideas in my head about Holy Men. Yes, the religions that were built around them are nonsense, but the original dudes, they had something interesting to say. This holds me back. It makes me sympathetic to shitty ideas. It's just crazy. So let's do a complete deconstruction of the worst example, Jesus. In other words, I'm now destroying the Jesus Was Way Cool trope in all its glory.

It's time to kill Jesus. For real this time.

Which Jesus?

Turns out, there isn't just one Jesus. There are quite a few. Some people try to harmonize them together, but the result of this multitude is really just that whenever one version gets attacked, a believer can just pick another and claim that this is "the real Jesus". You don't like the Son Of God? Well, pick The Social Reformer. That's a strength of the Jesus meme, but it really screws up your rationality. So to defeat it, you really need to get rid of all the versions. And the important thing is, you can't play them against each other. You must defeat them on their own terms.

Let's list them all.

(I'm going to tackle one version per post, to make the writing a bit easier on my side. Once I'm done, I'll put it all into one article and move it to the main site. I may skip a version if I think someone else already did a good job destroying it.)

Jesus the Ascetic

Jesus the Mystic

Jesus the Messiah

Jesus the Social Reformer

Jesus the Revolutionary

Jesus the Son Of God

Jesus the Redeemer

Jesus the Miracle Worker

2.8 KiB Raw Blame History

Overview

Which Jesus?

Part 1 - Overview

2.8 KiB

Raw Blame History