Playing Lucifer to My Father's God

Okay. I'll just come out and say it: I think that Jesus Christ was mentally ill. I liken him to Charles Manson, albeit with a much more benign and friendly agenda, because he had the same ability to manipulate people into believing in his grandiose delusions, and the strong desire to do so. Of course, I don’t really remember much from the bible, so I don't have a lot of proof to back this up, but I do remember one story, where Jesus was hungry, and he wanted figs from a fig tree. When he saw that the fig tree was barren, he smited it, burned it to the ground with his godly powers, presumeably to show it who’s boss. This does not seem like the actions of a sane man, nor of a loving man.

I don't know...I don't know much about what Jesus has been purported to have said, but I do know that every time I hear his words being spoken, like during a sermon or what-have-you, I'm often struck by how similar it sounds to things that crazy street-people have said to me. When I was in Arizona, being young, confused, and homeless, I was often approached by older homeless men who would try to act like they were really mystical gurus, instead of just people with mental problems. They'd speak in "parables", and talk alot about god, and would basically construct this atmosphere of being on a higher spiritual plane. They’d answer your questions with further questions, as though they were trying to lead to some sort of revelation, and if you disagreed with them, they would just shower you with a heavy stream of their dogma, until argument really just didn’t seem to make sense anymore. Although I didn't draw the connection at the time, when I think about Jesus now I see him in much the same way: an arrogant, pseudo-spiritual lunatic wandering around after having become too crazy to hold down his carpentry job anymore, preaching at people, promising them eternal life if they listened to him and did what he told them to do, and basically just spouting off nonsense in an enraptured yet commanding tone of voice.

What’s worse, is that the depictions of Jesus on the cross look sooo much like he's a crazy homeless person: long matted hair, emaciatedly skinny body, broken down with the weariness of being, say, manic-depressive, look of dazed abstraction on his face, often coupled with an obviously fake smile. He is not so different looking from the man shaking his cup of change at you as you walk around downtown. This in-and-of-itself might not be so bad. The real problem is that Jesus reminds me especially of one crazy person in particular: my Dad, the bi-polar, shizo-affective jerk who ruined my life. He looks just like Jesus, only with a greatly protruding beer-belly (pictures of him from his pre-alcoholic youth are even more convincing). And my Dad makes a lot of weird “spiritual” comments, and acts like other people are supposed to all supposed to sit cross-legged in a circle in front of him, listening carefully to his every word. He gave me the middle-name of a guru from India that he admired (“Kirpal”), because he was under the impression that under his guidance I would become a great spiritual leader. He often talked (especially when drinking—so pretty much all the time) as though everything he said was of the greatest sprititual importance, that it all had hidden meanings, and if us lowly, dumb-as mortals who did not happen to be sent on a divine mission from god would simply take the time to write down everything he said and study it for centuries then we would all be saved. So when people talk about Jesus doing this, that, or the other, it's very easy for me to imagine my Dad roaming around the desert, spouting off weird bullshit at people, playing like he was divinely appointed messenger sent to free us all. Now, I don't think that many people would follow my Dad like they did Jesus: he's pretty obviously mentally ill, very chaotic, and usually quite insulting. Then again, that would be a good description of Charles Manson as well, and he got a lot more than 12 disciples to follow him, plus he got them to do much worse things than just leave their jobs and work to promote his public image.

So Jesus is my Dad, and my Dad is God. I wouldn't steal from my Dad, because he has enough problems. But if I was in a position where I felt that he was trying to manipulate me into doing something, or trying to get me to think about morality in his terms, I would pretty much just reject everything he said out-of-hand, regardless of what I really thought was right or wrong. And so I think this was where I was coming from with the whole money stealing thing from my last entry: I knew it was wrong, that I should put it back. But every time I started to think of why it was wrong, or tried to tune into and understand my feelings of dismay, I got very bitter and defensive, as though I was being forced by someone that I didn't respect, and in fact hated, to do something or believe in something, because he had a vision that God told him I should do it; and not because it was right or wrong, beneficial or detrimental, but because he was having a religious ego-trip and wanted to exert his power and make me believe in his distorted dream-world; not because it was a good idea to do what he was saying, but because if I didn't do it I would get strangled, or hit repeatedly over the head. God will send me to hell if I don't do what he says and worship his teachings; my Dad will kick my ass.

Basically, the way I see it is that on a conscious level I was like "what is the right thing to do in this situation?", but in reality the issue for me didn't have anything to do with ethics: it had to do with whether someone had the right to control me, whether or not I would let the threat of violence dictate my actions. And I won: the christian church has no effect on me. I do not have to listen to the babblings of a mentally ill psuedo-guru with dreams of fascism, spouting-off about a God whose main pre-occupation seems to be with hurting and punishing people for not doing what he says. I was proving to myself that I don't do what I do out of guilt or fear: I do it because I've thought about it, and have decided what is actually the most beneficial for everyone involved. Or at least that's what I told myself at the time. In reality I based my actions on petty, destructive, rebellion. I looked god in the face and said "fuck you, Dad. I'm sick of kow-towing to your insane bullshit, and you can't tell me what to do." And yes, of course, I'm not doing what he says, but my actions are still just as controlled by what I imagine he thinks and wants from me, only in an inverse rather than direct fashion. It’s still fear that controls me, only I focus on the anger that I’ve created in reaction to that fear to tell me what to do, instead of the fear itself.

I think the most obvious moral of this story is that I should just stay away from Christianity. When I look at the cross, I'm never gonna be able to see anything but a mentally ill white guy who looks just like my Dad. I'm never gonna see God as anything but a big bully on an ego-trip. And because there is still a part of me that believes that God and Jesus are real, and have real power, I'm not going to be able to view anything I do in the context of christianity with any rationality. It's always going to be me playing Lucifer to my father's God, pointlessly rebelling against everything he stands for, not matter what that might be. I don't want to live like that, so I'm going to stay as far away from the Christian God as possible.
Krsna, on the other hand, is a spiritual figure that I'm still quite interested in. I mean, he's frickin' BLUE fer christ's sake