Would the universe and the path humans are on be better or worse without accounts of Jesus? How so?

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I just gave one highly-personalized answer, what’s another one to me?

The genesis of this answer is me trying to make sense of the need for denial in social interaction. Just because you are limitless, other people are not, and so you must work around their limitations. I already see a psychologist for therapy, part of walking that path is conveying to her that the limits that other people face do not apply to me.

I am going to have to do that again for another psychologist, one therapist is apparently not enough for me, and I’m strategizing ways in which to do that for her so that I can get real insights into my issues. If I don’t then we just get hung up on problem solving. The reason I have problems is not because I can’t solve them, but because I’m interested in the deeper, profounder aspects of those problems. I could make them go away, but why in the world would I want to do that?

What does this have to do with Jesus and his gift to mankind? Very little. But because I have no limits, I can analogize anyway. I am going to give you insight, and give myself insight at the same time. I’m just hardcore like that.

So let’s take a journey. Today we’re venturing not into pop culture, we’re going to somewhere where stakes actually matter. Musicians and culture makers bake their bread out of things that matter intensely to them, but the bread is intended to be as fluffy and easily-consumed as humanly possible. They encode the profound into the mundane.

No, we’re entering a different realm. Where the bread is meaty and the genesis silly. We’re going to discuss politics. Politicians aren’t allowed to have excessively-detailed inner lives. They have to be responsive to ordinary peoples’ wants and needs. And one thing that ordinary people need is to be able to understand their leaders. You can find no surer exposition of this fact than in the last US presidential election. Nobody understood Clinton, whereas Trump was eminently understandable.

Politicians sacrifice their individuality so that they can have greater impact.

One of the things you learn as a former atheist studying Jesus is that the Christians are hiding as hard as they can from his utterly mythical status. He absolutely, positively, could not have actually existed the way Christians paint him in the Bible. It’s perhaps one of the greatest spiritual lessons you can learn to study this.

Reality is trumped by imagination. Effortlessly and thoroughly. The imaginary Jesus that the Romans dreamed up is in every way you can think of superior to the real, historical Jesus, who was bound by the legends and culture of his time. Roman Jesus was not so bound, he could be free to be this apolitical bastion of incorruptible good that the Romans needed of him, that the Jews of the day would have found cloyingly idiotic.

Christians do not understand this, they’ll fight you to their dying death over their conception of Jesus, but if you ask the people that actually study Jesus, the Catholics, they’re intimately familiar with this fact. Real Catholics don’t hide from it, they embrace it. They see the real Jesus, they see the Roman re-creation of him, they see all of it as just different takes on the same, larger-than-life, divine, story.

So, to answer your question, the human race is absolutely, immeasurably, enriched by the various Jesus legends. But of course you knew that. I didn’t have to tell you that. This is an answer with a real audience of one, but I still have to speak like I’m lecturing a bunch of college kids.

So now that I’ve answered your question, let’s answer mine. How does this relate to my difficulties with my upcoming appointment? We made a distinction earlier between artists and politicians. The commonality between the two is that they both serve a large audience.

I serve, most frequently, an audience of one. My new psychologist will be another audience of one. I am neither artist nor politician, I am teacher. In order to truly learn we must teach. And it’s way easier to teach one person than to teach many. And it’s best when the stakes do not matter. So I can get the most from her by teaching her.

I hope I do a good job. The thread of this answer is hard to follow and recombine, how does politics relate to Jesus? But not impossible. There is only so much time. Jesus only had so much, and so do we.