Jesus Christ, Superhero:
Jesus was a guy who was a model of righteousness. He possessed extraordinary powers that he used to make things okay for ordinary people, and in the 20th century he appealed to a large audience.
Superman was a guy who was a model of righteousness. He possessed extraordinary powers that he used to make things okay for ordinary people, and in the 20th century he appealed to a large audience.
Does anyone see a pattern here?
A universal constant of humanity is a desire to feel like everything is going to be alright. Or to put it another way, a universal constant of humanity is to feel like you’re preserving the survival of your DNA by the most effective means available.
This is an important manifestation of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her. Ordinarily, when people have the choice between two courses of action, they pick the one they perceive to preserve the survival of their DNA most directly. But sometimes things just aren’t that simple. So they figure out a different trick…
Suppose you live in a certain way that works pretty well. If you’re satisfied with it, it means you feel that it offers you a pretty effective means of preserving the survival of your DNA. But that doesn’t mean it offers you the most effective perceivable means of preserving the survival of your DNA. Suppose you can imagine a way that you could preserve the survival of your DNA more effectively, but doing that thing would be a risk. To get to the point of preserving the survival of your DNA better than whatever you’re doing now, you would have to take your chances on doing something that could preserve the survival of your DNA a lot worse than whatever you’re doing now. If you take the chance and lose, you’re going to threaten the survival of your DNA, not improve it. For instance, if you were… oh, I don’t know… a Jewish slave living in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, and were getting kicked around by Roman centurions all the time, you’d have your choice between sitting there and taking it and making the best of your situation, or rising up and trying to drive the Romans out of Israel once and for all. If you could drive the Romans out, you could preserve the survival of your DNA a lot better than what you’re doing now; but if you get killed in the attempt, you’re not going to preserve the survival of your DNA at all.
Or suppose that you live in a way that preserves the survival of your DNA pretty well, but as a result of your living in conditions that your emotional instincts didn’t evolve to deal with, you feel (that is, perceive) that living in some other way would offer you a more effective means of preserving the survival of your DNA, even though you can see intellectually that it probably wouldn’t. Suppose you make a comfortable living selling acoustical ceiling tile in Akron, Ohio, but you’ve always fantasized about being a pirate who sails the high seas in a three-masted ship, just because it appeals to your senses of aesthetics and adventure. Considering the life of a pirate versus the life of an acoustic ceiling tile salesman, selling that acoustic ceiling tile probably does offer you the most effective means of preserving the survival of your DNA objectively speaking, even though it doesn’t always feel that way. And not only that, even if you did want to be a pirate badly enough that you really were willing to pick up a cutlass and a flintlock pistol and sing “Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum,” with Long John Silver, you can’t, because 18th century pirates don’t exist anymore.
In either case, you have one situation that preserves the survival of your DNA pretty well, you can perceive another situation could offer you a better means of preserving the survival of your DNA, but for whatever reason you don’t dare to (or can’t) pursue that course of action. The situation you have isn’t acceptable, because even though it works pretty well overall, you still have this nagging feeling that you should be doing something differently. So go back to the statement: “All human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her.” If you can’t fix the situation by changing your behavior, what else can you change?
Your perception.
That’s exactly what those ancient proto-humans did when they invented religion. They gave themselves an escape clause to life to give them a way to overcome the inescapable threat of their physical mortality. They couldn’t escape the threat by changing their physical mortality, so instead they changed their perception of their physical mortality.
So back to that original idea that people want to feel like everything is going to be alright. If people don’t know that everything is going to be alright, the next best thing is to believe that somebody has the power to make things alright somehow. That’s a pretty all-encompassing description for what you get out of the deal if you follow Jesus, isn’t it? So forget about Jesus for the moment. Let’s talk about comic book heroes.
What’s the difference between Superman and Batman—or Spiderman, or the Incredible Hulk, or any of the other comic book heroes who’ve been turned into movies in the past few years? You can see it in the comic books, and you can especially see it in the movies.
Superman is pretty much an ordinary guy as his alter ego, who can turn into a virtually indestructible superhero. He’s immune to bullets, he doesn’t age, he has x-ray vision, he can shoot heat-rays out of his eyes, he can hold up bridges underneath trains to keep them from crashing into ravines, he can fly faster than a jet, he can fly out into space, he can even fly around the Earth so fast that he can turn back time. Any time anything goes wrong anywhere in the world, Superman can always save the day. He has a steady girlfriend, too. Oh, and he came from another world, somewhere out in space, by the way.
Batman, on the other hand, is a prince of darkness. He’s a mortal human from Earth, who sits up in his castle, all by himself, haunted by his past. He doesn’t have any superpowers; he gets his superhero abilities from a bunch of cool inventions and exceptional human abilities. Batman’s romances never work out. In every Batman movie, he gets beaten up by the badguys by direct physical force, just like any action movie hero. Then, after he wins, he returns to his castle to sit there by himself in the dark of the night, still haunted by the ghosts of his past.
Spiderman is just a kid who got bitten by a spider. Unlike Batman, his superpowers are all his own, but they’re nowhere near Superman’s powers. Spiderman is a dork as his alter ego, he’s clumsy, he’s always broke, he tries to go to school, but he doesn’t fit in very well there. When he goes out to fight crime and save the day, he finally feels like his life is working out, but when he comes home, he’s stuck right back where he was with all his ordinary problems. Like Batman, Spiderman always gets beaten up in his movies by direct physical force. Spiderman has a girlfriend, but he knows that having her for a girlfriend puts her into serious danger all the time, because unlike Superman, he can’t protect her from everything in entire world.
If you pay much attention to the comic book industry, Superman has been declining in popularity a lot lately. Superman became a household hero back during the Great Depression, when a lot of people had a lot of problems and didn’t know what to do about them. A lot of people wished that someone could just come along and make them all go away. The Superman movies were made in the ‘80s, during the climactic years of the Cold War, when lots of people had lots of problems they couldn’t solve, and wished that someone could just make them go away.
Batman and Spiderman came along a lot later. The Batman movies were made in the ‘90s, after the Cold War was over. The Spiderman movies were made in the ‘00s (or whatever the f*ck they’re calling this decade). During the Batman years, the most tangible threat to America was crack, street gangs, and organized crime. During the Spiderman years, the most tangible threat to America is powerful villains who can inflict lots and lots of destruction on cities. And lo and behold, here come new superheroes to fight those kinds of problems.
Remember what I’ve said about successful movies being made about people the audience can relate to who face meaningful conflicts? During the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, Superman’s audience faced a sh*tload of conflict. Batman and Spiderman’s audiences didn’t face nearly as much conflict. Superman’s audience faced so much conflict that they couldn’t really afford to concern themselves with personal problems terribly much. Batman and Spiderman’s audiences didn’t face nearly as much conflict as Superman’s audience, so they could afford to concern themselves with personal problems. So what kind of superheroes did they get? During the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, they got an average Joe who could solve any problem in the world, including outrunning nuclear missiles and pushing them off course so they shot harmlessly out into space. Then after the Cold War was over, the audiences got superheroes who had lot of personal problems, just like they did, and who could do some cool stuff to solve problems in the world, but were nowhere near invincible.
You remember what I said in the last book about the most successful professional artists figuring out how to turn other people’s feelings into art? Superman’s audiences faced problems nobody knew how to solve. Batman and Spiderman’s audiences faced problems they could imagine being able to solve, even though it would be extremely hard.
To put all of this together, the trend you can see is: As the real-life conflict facing the world decreased, the superpowers superheroes got to meet the conflicts in their movies decreased, and the conflicts they faced as their alter egos increased. The superheroes’ proportion of conflicts versus abilities to use to overcome the conflicts has remained fairly constant, but as the problems facing the real-life world decreased, the levels of superabilities and movie conflicts have decreased. As people’s belief in their own abilities to solve the problems they faced increased, their sense of dependence on superheroes who could come save the day for them decreased.
As a result, it would not be difficult to put Batman and Spiderman into a movie together and create conflict that would be equally meaningful to both of them. If you tried putting Superman into the movie with them, it would suck. Conflict that is meaningful to Batman and Spiderman wouldn’t bother Superman a bit; and conflict that was meaningful to Superman would slaughter Batman and Spiderman.
Recently, in order to try to revive his superhero career, the creators of the Superman comics have been reducing his abilities and saddling him with more personal problems, so now he suddenly has more in common with Batman and Spiderman than he traditionally has.
Anyway, back to Jesus Christ, Superhero. Once upon a time, there were some people who faced a lot of threats that they couldn’t see any way to protect themselves from, so to make themselves feel better, they came up with a legend of an ordinary-seeming guy who had an infinite supply of powers that he could use to protect the righteous and virtuous people of the world and make all their problems go away. What? Oh, no, sorry, I’m still talking about Superman here. But, ah, do you notice any similarities yet?
My point is, even if the Bible is the official word of the Christians’ god, the words of the Bible were still written down by humans to be read by humans, who, for all intents and purposes (meaning their genetic evolution) were just like the humans who wrote and read the Superman comic books. A lot of people of today insist that the existence of the Bible proves that Jesus must’ve been everything the Bible says he was. But the existence of the Bible doesn’t prove anything, except that people of 2,000 years ago told stories about heroes who could solve the problems the people faced, just like people in the 20th century did. If 1/3 of the world’s population today fell in love with Superman comic books and told their children stories about Superman for the next 2,008 years, by the year 4016, would it really matter that Superman was never a real person?
There’s just one drawback to that argument, which is that Jesus had powers that Superman didn’t. The Cro-Magnons of 60,000 years ago began burying their dead ritualistically. When people start burying their dead with offerings of things that were valuable to the person in life, it suggests that for some reason the people burying their dead companion think he still needs these things. That suggests that the people believe that biological death isn’t the end to life. Biological death has been the single biggest tangible problem people have faced for at least as long as modern humans have existed. Superman didn’t have any powers to help solve that problem, but Jesus did. So is it any wonder that a hero who had powers to solve that single biggest problem of humanity should remain so popular for so long? Just like superheroes of the modern world, Jesus had the powers he needed to overcome the conflict his audience faced.
My other point is, as the problems people face have changed, their legendary heroes and their heroes’ abilities have changed. The problems facing humanity during the Great Depression, the ‘80s, the ‘90s, and today, were not the same problems that faced Jesus’s followers. As people’s problems have changed and their perception on the world has changed, their heroes have changed. If Jesus returned right now to solve all the world’s problems, would he be as invincible as Superman? Or would he be more human and have fewer powers, like Batman and Spiderman? Would his ability to solve problems consist of instantly wiping them away like Superman could, or would it consist of helping people to solve their own problems?
Think about it…