Dueling Delusions

Most of us enjoy fantasizing. Some take it to extremes. A few are completely overtaken by their rich fantasy lives, and their imaginations begin to elbow aside the mundane, monotonous, harsh, and endless petty realities of daily life, rendering the obsessive daydreamer delusional.

On rare occasions, such a deluded soul, if competent enough to have mastered the rudiments of written language, lays out his or her hallucination in a book. The delusion by this time is evolved into a grand system which solves all philosophical questions and is the balm for all the troubled world's problems. And once in a great while such a book takes the world by storm.

Such was the case with Ignatius Donnelly, a progressive politician who nonetheless reflected the racism and cultural chauvinism of his day when he concocted his grand theory of the caucasian origin of all civilization in Atlantis: the Antediluvian World. Based on an optimistic interpretation of a vague passage by Plato and supported by no tangible evidence, Donnelly's tissue of overheated fantasies is still seriously debated even today (see the Amazon reviews), showing the degree to which rubes and naifs are willing to believe anything they wish was true.

Donnelly's hallucination appeared three decades after the perpetration of the greatest fantasy/hoax in American history, when an impoverished teen-ager, Joseph Smith, discovered a stack of cryptic golden plates in a secret cave in Cumorah Hill in upstate New York. The discovery, of course, was only in his mind, but a visit to that fertile ground by an angel named (suitably) Moroni enabled Smith to "translate" the plates, and resulted in the Book of Mormon, the state of Utah, and the Amana appliances line.

But I don't have the time or space to talk about the ridiculous Mormon religion, because the fantasy du jour, is "The Da Vinci Code," a silly book by one Dan Brown which has now undergone that most crucial transformation and become a "Hollywood blockbuster." From the looks of the early reviews, however, the only blocks this turkey is going to bust are the heads of gullible readers and cinema enthusiasts ignorant enough to have credited Brown's ludicrous fantasy, which is made even more preposterous by its projection of present-day social and political styles, fads, and concerns onto the ancient landscape of first-century Palestine and Judea, medieval Europe, and Renaissance Italy.

What makes "Da Vinci" interesting is not the fact that it's an attack on Christianity generally, for there have been many of those, or on the Catholic Church specifically, since there is an American tradition of anti-Catholicism as well. The essential and highly ironic feature of "Da Vinci" I find most interesting is that it's a fantasy attacking a fantasy. Apparently we're so stressed and emotionally incapacitated by the wretched state of the world we live in, by the horrors of modern-day American civic life, and by our frightening prospects for the future, that we have to distract ourselves with dueling hallucinations.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee decided to have a battle;
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee had spoiled his nice new rattle.

That Christianity is based on fantasy and fabrication has been known for some time to anyone who has researched the history of the Christ cult and has any capacity for moral and intellectual honesty. The Jesus of Christianity is a product hallucinated by a hellenized Jew, Saul of Tarsus, whom we know as St. Paul, and first preached at Antioch in Syria, some twenty years after the death of the the itinerant and unorthodox rabbi Saul took as his "savior," Yeshu bin Yusuf.

Saul apparently was incapacitated by an ecstatic vision in which he saw a god who combined the person of Yeshu with the traits of the Greek resurrection god, Dionysius. (Nobody has yet written the monograph, "Jesus and Dionysius," but someone should.) He also had the chutzpah to refer to himself as one of Jesus's disciples, despite the fact that he never met the man except in his hallucinations.

As we all know, it was Saul of Tarsus's version of Jesus that won out over all the other competing philosophies that the charismatic rabbi left in his wake.

Yeshu and his original followers would have been horrified by the blasphemous notion that the rabbi, unorthodox as he was, might be proclaimed a divinity, even the divinity. For a Jew, such megalomanical pretense -- claiming to be God -- was the kind of stupid and deluded thing their enemies, the Roman emperors did.

Paul, though perhaps more sincere and certainly more justified (due to his very real epiphany) in his belief than Dan Brown is in his, was guilty of the same sort of mischief. I'll have more to say on this topic tomorrow.