Consider the greatest “success story” of Western Civilization – Jesus Christ.
My opinion of Jesus of Nazareth’s essential message was that it was an anti-materialist offering of a life of freedom, kindness, and generosity. He was a peripatetic philosopher with no home or possessions, offering an invitation to “The Kingdom of Heaven,” which was alive within us all. As an Unbearable Being of Lightness, his offering was unpalatable to Society at large. So he was killed.
Even his message of love for our enemies and his invitation to a life of wonderful lightness, liberated from the reflex to strike for every material object of “value” in our sight was considered too threatening. These messages stimulated the fundamental survival drives of Greed and Fear encoded deep into our brains through the reptile ancestry of our mammalian heritage. And those basic drives easily overpowered the more recent and shallowly-rooted mammalian survival tool of Love.
Through a strange alchemy unique to humans, we have somehow combined together Greed and Fear to form Ego. And so Greed and Fear, operating both independently AND in it’s new manifestation of Ego, did what it will always do. It co opted the simple message unto an institutional system. That system will promote a morality of poverty for some, but not others, when it is expedient (like when a zero-sum paradigm is ascendant). At other times it blesses maximum consumption for all whenever that is considered an economic boon under a non-zero-sum regime (such as now).
And at all times, Fear violently prohibits ‘turning the other cheek.’
From this perspective Jesus’ phenomenal success represents a catastrophic failure. And though we venerate his image as a meek and willing sacrifice offered for the salvation of all through a the communal activities of ‘worship’ and our loud proclamations of ‘belief,’ an astute observer will notice that, in practice, he has developed some decidedly reptilian features…
Reptile Jesus crawled down from the cross
He picked up his handguns and said I’m the boss
He turned to his people, said cling to this earth
Gather your treasures here by right of your birth
Then all the reptiles tore out their scales
Rose to their feet and pulled off their tails
Then all the reptiles put on their clothes
Reached out their claws and grabbed the controls
Reptile Jesus said wash your own damn feet
He raised up the prideful and trod on the meek
Said hate those who wrong you and live by the sword
Go check out Ann Coulter if you ever get bored
Meanwhile the reptiles tore out their scales
Rose to their feet and pulled off their tails
Meanwhile the reptiles put on their clothes
Reached out their claws and grabbed the controls
You brood of vipers. Such a cold-blooded Christ
You’ve fashioned in your image
Eager to strike, with a venomous bite
Defender of the privileged
Reptile Jesus baptized in blood
Envied his neighbors, but chilled with his buds
Bowed down to idols moved to the ‘burbs
Wrote the constitution and gave us The Word