“Such was the crucifixion of the Son of God. His faithlessness did this to him.”

A Course In Miracles, p. 421

Imagine a world where this might be true.

In the first place, being a country-born ideologue riding into the “Big City” on a white jackass to “learn them city boys some righteousness,” would always be contraindicated regardless of their obvious need for remediation. Mocking the power structure must always result in your untimely death at the hands of that power structure.

In the second place, lying to an entire civilization as to the nature and consequences of one of its pivotal, if manufactured, moments in time could have massively deleterious consequences.

My early tutelage in Catholicism taught me to not question authority, to always regard the Church as the “one truth” I could always count on to provide me the guidance any worthy human life could possibly require. If the solutions provided by church dogma did not provide me with the solutions, or relief, that a solution should, the problem was due to my as yet unreconciled defects of character. The Church was to be the pearl of great price in my life and conducting myself as if I believed otherwise must always result in being posthumously tormented for all eternity. Simple. Like all great solutions.

So, in addition to having a number of unresolved challenges waiting for me outside the doors and walls of various churches scattered across the country of my birth, I had the problem of hiding the fact, growing more obvious with each passing decade, that I was the Antichrist spoken of by John of Patmos in his Apocalypse. My blood boiled with unresolved rage, my life became awash in failed relationships and the world around me grew darker the more worldly “truth” I let come into my mind. Much was wrong within me and the more I tried to apply the solutions provided to me as a child, the worse things seemed to become. One would expect that the wicked should suffer so.

Quite naturally, a nice refreshing box of wine became one of my favorite escapes. Smoking some of the “sacred ganja” in combination became a daily lifestyle choice that lasted some ten years. But like most love affairs that burn hot enough to produce smoke, an inability in both acumen and desire to be a responsible motorist, or both, things ended rather poorly. Alcohol and ganja continue to work for others which is fine for them; I, however, have had my dance card unceremoniously punched out of existence. Time to go home, time for salvation, time to get down to causes and conditions wherever they might take me.

I am happy to report that my inflated opinion of myself regarding my ultimate identity was not true. Not entirely. It appears everyone around me is both christ and antichrist and how we choose to deal with this most confusing set of circumstances determines whether we live happily and usefully whole, or die according to some miserable bodily or mentally vanquishing upheaval. I believe I am on the mend, certainly in much better spiritual and physical condition than a person who began life on an unstable trajectory might deserve, but I am by no means completely free and clear of a formerly incessant desire to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Particularly in those circumstances where, like Jesus of Nazareth, I return to the Big City to mock the rich and well-heeled for the crime of maiming a large portion of my family tree, mostly before I was ever born. The Great Depression hit my mother’s side of the family tree especially hard.

The Catholics and Protestants of my youth, in many cases, would like to make the story of Jesus of Nazareth a tale about those who loved the spoken word of God made flesh, and those, “dirty Jews,” of the Sanhedrin, the Scribes and Pharisees. No doubt Jesus may have felt that way and may have “cleared the temple” for this very reason, but, according to A Course in Miracles, the problem that resulted in the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth was his own inability to believe that every human being is equipped with a divine spark that makes salvation and “seeing the Light” possible in the first place. Jesus lost faith in the ultimate humanity of his fellows and took to insulting and mocking them at just the wrong moment in history. The story of the end of Jesus of Nazareth had nothing to do with “Jews v. Christians” at all, but rather rich versus poor. When one considers that for the majority of Christian history the only humans wealthy enough to own and operate a printing press might have had a vested interest in distorting the story of Jesus’ life and death, the scapegoating of more modern Jewry begins to take on a completely different hue. Especially if those Jews were also quite wealthy themselves as often becomes the case when slaves overthrow their masters and learn how to hold their former masters at bey.

And you thought being black, African, Egyptian or possessing more than a slight amount of melanin in your skin was cause for horror or concern. Yet genetically, it is not possible for two white humans to produce a dark-skinned child, yet it is quite possible for two dark-skinned humans to produce one that is very Caucasian in appearance. Click, click and click. Obviously a huge amount of human history has been lost to us over the centuries, which is sad, but one side benefit of getting one’s own story straight becomes an uncanny ability to sniff out bullshit from the collections of stories other humans tell about themselves and to start identifying and resolving similar patterns of denial, delusion and dishonesty.

My problem with the phenomenally wealthy is not so much that they are not human but that, like any human ceded that much authority over other humans, the slightest character flaw in them produces an enormous amount of suffering in those occupying the lower rungs of the social strata beneath them. The problem is not that human beings possess flaws so much as we are utilizing a system of social organization that magnifies the impact of human flaws on the lives of others. In time this condition will need to be adjusted so that compassion and mercy can be more evenly distributed throughout the human family. Merit may well strike in one person for a particular of time, but that good fortune seldom passes on to one’s progeny. Certainly the times where one is called to demonstrate their merit change such that what is required at one time may be more or less than what is required in another. A genetically oriented social hierarchy is not fluid enough to allow solutions to flow to the problems where they exist.

I continue to distrust, as do many, the religion that water-boarded a fear of drowning into my consciousness at the age of six months – the only memory I possess from that period in time. I continue to distrust any collection of humans hierarchically organized to manage the thinking, beliefs, money, property and/or prestige of any social collective – I do not believe that such trust is merited given both history and the known unknowns we can deduce from the lack of it in key areas of import. But most importantly, I am coming to realize that not every phenomenally wealthy human is a psychopath, nor is it entirely ill-conceived that merit be considered when deciding who deserves their station in society and who does not. My great sin in life has been that I did not possess the merit required, at the proper time, to bring down the psychopathic conspiracies of wealth under whose heel we all now suffer. I only hope that I can be of some service to those who hope to make our present conditions survivable, tenable and known to others for all time. We dare not repeat these same mistakes ever again.