I am in constant pain.  If I think about it, I’ve probably been in constant pain since late February.  It isn’t bad.  It just interferes with my sleep right now.  One of the things I’ve been doing to deal with the pain, is to get into pointless arguments on Fearbook.  They’re pointless, because they’re part of an echo chamber, and nobody is going to learn anything at all from them anyway, except maybe me.

Yesterday’s pointless argument started off well enough.  One of the more pointless arguments out there is to argue the historicity of Jesus to a bunch of atheists.  I don’t really understand why atheists don’t think there was a non-magical son of a carpenter (or was it a Roman Legionnaire?) going around spouting anti-Roman rebellious sedition, who got crucified and died because of that, and stayed dead.  Why is it so abhorrent to their worldview, or at least the ones I was arguing with, to even think that most of the myths of the world have a kernel of real world material truth to them?  I’m not even claiming that non-material reality is true for that one.

No, they said.  The myths around the world have no real world component to them.  They sprang up out of, I don’t know, the ether? The vacuum? The void? And then afterwards, people started imitating the parts they could.  Meanwhile, I’m arguing for the existence of archetypes.  Take Disney’s jealous step-mother, for example.  Based on a true story, right?  A village savior who sacrificed himself so that the village could continue to exist.  Based on a true story, right?  Little Red Riding Hood is based upon the true story of a girl who goes to visit grandmother, meets a bad guy on the way, and, depending on where you are in the world, because the story really is global, either gets saved or gets gobbled up by the bad guy.  No, they said.  Never happens.  These myths have absolutely no basis in reality, they say.

Do they not realize what their position leads to, down the primrose path all the way to the end?  If the myths of the world are not based upon a material reality kernel of truth of some kind, no matter how small, then spirits must exist.  If big ideas, a couple thousand years old, of Little Red Riding Hood’s admonitions about the privacy of location information online, do not arise out of material reality, then there must be a non-material reality from which those big ideas arose.  If scientific discoveries frequently occur simultaneously on two or three separate locations around the globe, before the internet and before telephones and before the telegraph, then there must be a non-material reality from which these ideas arise.

The muses are spirits.  They can be propitiated.  They can be welcomed.  They can be shut out.  They can leave you and find somebody else.  They can hang around and cause feverish spurts of unbelievably prodigious amounts of writing in a small amount of time.  If the simplest explanation for widespread mythological uniformity is a war in the spirit world, then why not go with that?

Myths change the meaning of actions.  If you believe that humans arose from trees, are you going to log them and burn them all?  If you believe that humans arose from dirt and a blood clot, then are you going to not make the dirt bare and spill blood?  If you believe that humans arose through random chance, are you willing to make the selfless sacrifices required by your community for its health and continued existence?

If Jesus was a channeled spirit instead of a body that actually walked around, then that would explain why so very many atheists refuse to believe he actually existed.  Yet, even the rocks cry out for the existence of animism.  They’re alive too.  So, what if Jesus was a channeled spirit who still exists?  What then?  The question is: is Jesus worth listening too, given all of the other channeled spirits out there?  Does Jesus work for your particular community, or for you as an individual?  Or do other spirits, like your ancestors perhaps, have more skin in the game and work better?  Is he too high up on the spiritual food chain now to actually affect material reality for you personally?  Don’t you want a saint instead?  Especially a forgotten one stricken from the calendar whose attention is not spread among quite so many people, so it is easier to get their attention?

I need more sleep.