I own the first three X-Men movies (the last one was a bit too violent for me), and probably watch one of them quarterly or so. I watched X-Men 3 Sunday night.
Anyway, I got to thinking about it, and what if you had a mutant whose power was supreme and unconditional love? I experienced it in a dream once, from a man I knew from books, and who I believe had just passed on. He was just there, and there was this amazing radiance coming from him of unconditional acceptance. No matter who I was or had been, the energy would have found a way to connect with me, and comfort me. There were no strings. He had no need to do anything but shine. You cannot help but be strengthened by such an experience.
Given a strong enough radiance, I think you could heal any emotional wound. You could erase the needs for hate. Hate has survival value. It is tactically useful, given deficient strategy. However, if the need for it is erased, then it, too, ought to fall away.
So our hero shows up, and suddenly everyone just wants to celebrate. Nobody wants to fight. This would make for an awful comic book, but it’s an interesting idea.
An interesting addendum to the basic idea is to ask why, if Jesus was the nuclear bomb equivalent of love, he was hated by so many. You can hate people who talk about love, but you cannot hate someone who gives it out in reality, freely, and completely. Love is home. That is where we all want to live. It is the answer to that clinging doubt about who we are and where we really ought to be. It is peace, and we all want peace, whether we admit it or not.
In my view this is perhaps the most compelling argument against the unique divinity of Christ. I have no reason to doubt he taught roughly what has come down to us (with a few strategic imbellishments along the way that helped the Church), or any reason to doubt he rose from the dead. People have been “resurrected” on many accounts even in the modern day. There is a medium out there, David Thompson, who many claim can do it even in our own day and time. I am a skeptic, which means I simply don’t know, but admit it is both possible, and may not be true.
I will add too a rant that I have approached at times, but I don’t think ever actually typed publicly. In my view it is sheer lunacy to believe that God–who created the universe–would have the need to get people to sacrifice his “son” so he could forgive them. Yes, you can call it a mystery. I call it bullshit, though. Please forgive me, but I find this idea deeply offensive both to the spirit of God in which I believe, and in the man Jesus Christ, who died and was reborn two millenia ago, and whose main teaching was Love.
Since all other sacrifices took place on the altars of the Temple, why would Jesus not have had his throat slit there? God could have told people to do that. Jesus could have told people that was what was supposed to be done.
What happened in my view was that the being and teachings of Jesus were so astonishingly original that when he was gone, his followers simply did not know how to classify them. So they fit them into a mold with which they were familiar, that of the sacrificial order. He was already dead (gone), so they didn’t actually have to kill him to make it work.
It is a source of consistent amazement to me, too, in the rare cases when I go to church that the priest holds up the wafer and says “This is the Body of Christ”. He holds up the cup and says “This is the blood of Christ”. Then everybody goes up there and eats the wafer and drinks the wine. Wars have been fought over whether or not Christ’s actual body enters into the wafer–if it is literal cannibalism–or if it is merely there in spirit.
In my view, and I’m just a wandering spirit with ideas I don’t try to tame, this is stupid, stupid, stupid. It misses the damn point. My two cents.