@kara_dreamer oh gosh i have a fun buddhist story for you later

@amphetamine eee, this should be good :)

@kara_dreamer so toward the end of the Kevatta Sutta, there is a story called "Conversations with the Gods"

it's pretty wry ;)

scroll up a little bit from where this link goes:

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.11.0.than.html#bigbrahma

But then JHWH picked up a bit of Greek philosophy and decided to have another go at being The Almighty; this time it kinda worked, but still...can you honestly say it _really_ worked? It's striking how SMALL a figure Jesus really seems to be, despite the creditable attempt to claim that this street preacher was in fact _Logos_ himself. Great intellectuals and theologians have struggled mightily to stretch the Jesus story to make it big enough to hold the whole Universe but it's always seemed like mere talk. Jesus has shrunk with time, not grown, and in the decadence of his cult, he's merely a seven-foot-tall blonde nonentity.

hell, J. Random Videogame Character has probably inspired more variety of artistic expression than Jesus is capable of mustering up these days--unless there's some vast vein of awesome Jesus fanart I don't know about. Everything I've ever seen is greeting-card quality.

Similarly, JWHW has never managed to come across as anything but a fusty old beardy guy. Oh, he tries REAL hard to seem ineffable and mysterious, manifesting as burning bushes and the like, but it's not worked. The Bible's God is a meshugganah grandpa and that's that.

@kara_dreamer
SO I GOOGLED JESUS FANART BECAUSE HOW COULD I NOT
http://www.topito.com/top-fan-art-jesus-christ
Also the google image results are humorously filled with sonic fanart.

@Irick see, Jesus is so bloodless and insubstantial a figure that he's easily replaceable by SONIC THE FRICKIN' HEDGEHOG

@kara_dreamer
I don't think I agree with the foundational assumption there. There is a level of historical context that such a claim ignores including pretty much the entire history of western art. As much as I like some good pop culture jesus mash ups ignoring the institutional pressures of both iconography as a formalized style and iconoclasm is patently misrepresentative of the depth of experience within the personage.

@Irick "There is a level of historical context that such a claim ignores including pretty much the entire history of western art." Oh, believe me, I know something of this history, but honestly...it _is_ history. Of course religious artwork featuring Jesus still abounds but notice how it's all simply retreading the old work? Jesus _may_ have been a figure once to inspire creativity but those days are fading into distant memory.

@kara_dreamer
Again, that's the influence of iconoclasm. Depictions of jesus and the godhead increasingly became obscure if they wanted to be novel because of the threat of ostracization for great works that do not follow the formal iconography of the church. Hence the raise of Sacred Geometry within the artistic styles of later christendom.

@Irick I don't think that really cuts against what I'm saying though. In fact it seems to explain it: Jesus has become a stale and uninspiring figure because churches kept him trapped in outdated standards of depiction.

@kara_dreamer I don't really agree though. The cool stuff may be apocryphal, but it's around. It won't be promoted by the church, but i'd charge that no church promotes the secularised/fictionalized versions of their holy figures with maybe the exception of Discordianism/Church of the Subgenius and the embrace of the Illuminatus! trilogy.
Exoteric faith seems incompatible with expression through the sacred world when we distinguish it from the profane.

@Irick Hrm...I'd say that churches don't explicitly _promote_ such milk-and-water depictions of their holy figures, but they implicitly promote them by complaining about anything that's less inoffensive.

@kara_dreamer
*shrugs*?
The mythic Jesus is a living figure of a personal religion. American Gods (TV show) nails it pretty well visually with the myriad depictions of Jesus that have been mapped through the views of the various cultures and even just the internal cults of catholicism. Siddhārtha Gautama and Jesus just don't translate to our hero myths, so their depictions tend to break the popular mold. Personal salvation isn't killing Ice Giants.

@Irick I'm not seeing it, honestly. Mind you, I've been exposed chiefly to American Christianity, which I suspect is probably one of the most rotten and degraded corners of Christendom, so maybe I'm not getting a fair picture. But that "living figure" to me is a complete cypher. Invoked incessantly, but in a completely empty manner. Jesus freaks utter "Jesus" the same way that a wizard in a cartoon shouts "Abracadabra!" as a one-size-fits-all invocation, formulaic, empty. I'm not seeing the "living figure".

@kara_dreamer
I mean, to be even more crass about it, the argument in Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby as to if they should pray to "8lb 6oz Baby Jesus" is a good microcosm of the living status of the mythic Jesus. :3

@Irick Yes, exactly. Infantilized. Meaningless.

@kara_dreamer
You're missing the metaphor.
People internalize different aspects of the myth, some mean more than others. That's the same with any faith. The culture someone is brought up with colors their vision and their depiction of these things, as well as their internal resonances. A god who is loving god will resonate to someone who is loving. A god who is a vengeful god will resonate to someone who is vengeful. Every myth contains multitudes.

@kara_dreamer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman:_Worlds'_End#.28.2354.29_.22The_Golden_Boy.22
http://marvel.wikia.com/wiki/Jesus_of_Nazareth_(Earth-616)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punk_Rock_Jesus
For some examples that maybe are less nuanced, if a bit less funny to me :P

@kara_dreamer @Irick hi this was fun to read as a christian-ish universalist weirdo. Just sayin.

@TaxDan @Irick *chuckles wryly* my relationship with Christianity is an ongoing and fractious one indeed!

@kara_dreamer As someone who mostly looks at gods through historical lenses, I find the idea of Yahweh as singular creator more understandable when I think of it first being seriously posited during the Babylonian exile, as a people who'd been _really_ successful by nomadic-to-settled tribal standards struggled to conceive of their place now that, in their part of the world, empires had become a thing that they couldn't ignore.

@listelian Ah, yeah, that makes sense. I'm not _au fait_ with scholarship on the Old Testament although I'm vaguely aware of its highly composite nature.

@kara_dreamer Well, if you feel like going down a wiki rabbit hole on this stuff, a decent place to start would probably be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_hypothesis

@listelian that's more @mona's game, she's the classical scholar *giggles* indeed if there's a reason that we gave Christianity as much time as we did, it's because we were able to make analogies of its tangled and contentious textual history to the long-running arguments over who "Homer" actually was.

@silent Yeah, and JHWH definitely makes more sense as just one of a crowd of gods jostling for attention...