The Christian Idol

The popular Myth of Jesus is an Idol of mass religion. It was created by the exoteric Christian Church, when it moved to legitimize itself in the eyes of the secular State of Rome. That Idol is worshipped by popular belief, and many have been and continue to be deluded and oppressed by the Cult of that Idol.

Like every Idol, the Myth of Jesus contains a secret about Man himself. But that secret is locked away in the features of the Image men worship. Men worship Jesus as an exclusive human embodiment of God because they are unwilling or unable to accept the kind of responsibility for themselves that Jesus accepted for himself.

Jesus did not teach the worship of himself as an Idol of God or a Substitute for the responsibility of each man for his own religious and spiritual sacrifice. And even if he did, it would be our responsibility to liberate ourselves from that Doctrine.

The popular Myth of Jesus is founded on archaic cosmological archetypes. Jesus is believed to have come down from Heaven (or the sky of stars above the Earth) and become a blood sacrifice (in the ancient style of cults that ritually killed animals and men), and then he is supposed to have risen up into the sky again — back to Heaven. The man Jesus is popularly believed to be God, the Creator of the Universe, and his death is glorified as a necessary Cosmic Event that somehow makes it unnecessary for any believer to suffer permanent mortal death.

All of this, and more, may have made some kind of imaginative, street-level sense in the days of the Roman Empire, but it is nothing more than benighted silliness in the last quarter of the twentieth century. And, in any case, none of this Idolatry was the teaching or the intention of Jesus or any of the other great spiritual Adepts of the world. All of the mythological idolization of Jesus was the creation of the exoteric and popular cultism of the early Christian Church. And the time has come for the world to renounce this nonsense — even if the Christian Church itself is yet unwilling to renounce its obnoxious absolutist claim on all of humanity.

The Myth and the Idol of Jesus have nothing to do with true religion or the spiritual responsibility of Man — as I have tried to explain in these essays and in many other writings. And it is time we stopped glorifying the martyrdom of Jesus. Even though it seems possible that he personally survived the crucifixion and went on to continue his work outside Israel, the popular belief is that he died on the cross. And the persecution and attempted assassination of Jesus by the hypocritical religious cultists of his time was not in any sense good for mankind. It was a grave misfortune, and a prime example of the stupid, unillumined, and aggressive mentality that still characterizes the popular or mass level of subhuman existence. The world would have profited much more if Jesus had been able to work openly and live to a remarkable old age as a great prophetic Teacher of Israel. In that case, the true esoteric foundation of religion might have begun to become the basis of human culture two thousand years ago. And, at the very least, mankind could have avoided the long tour of domination by yet another impenetrable Idol of the mind

The idea that the martyrdom of Jesus was the literal and final Sacrifice of God is a perversion of the Truth. The true sacrifice of Jesus occurred while he was still alive. That sacrifice was of an esoteric spiritual nature, and it is of no inherent value to any other human being, unless that individual will duplicate that same sacrifice in the processes of his own body-mind.

Why do we persist in a retarded and negatively cultic understanding of religion? The Truth is plain — and it has been plainly preached and demonstrated, not only by Jesus, but by many Adepts in every epoch of human history. But the Idol of Jesus persists — because it is one of the great archetypal alternatives to authentic personal religious or spiritual responsibility. It is time for mankind to awaken to Wisdom and to the understanding of Jesus in Truth. Then perhaps some benefit will have come to us at last from that ancient outrage performed in Jerusalem.