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A Thought Experiment
Today, around the world, many folks commemorate the torture and execution of an alleged criminal at the hands of functionaries of the Roman empire. I wonder if, two thousand years from now, anyone will commemorate someone else's torture and death--perhaps in Gitmo some poor soul is biding his time 'til his apotheosis. Should it happen, I suppose there's a fair chance that blame could even be shifted away from the American empire, rather the way that church history exculpated their own empire. He was turned in, say, by his own people on trumped up charges and George W. Bush did everything he could to wash his hands of the matter. It's a strange exercise to think how we might figure into someone else's mythology, as I'm sure it would have been for people living two thousand years ago. It seems like it would be harder to make good mythology now though, since we have so much better documentation and a much clearer understanding of evidence and, well, how the world works. If Saddam Hussein, for instance, was rumored to have risen from the dead, I suspect we'd all be more than a little skeptical, figuring that either the now-living Hussein is an imposture or that the death itself was faked. Of course, I guess with well over six billion of us, there would be people who'd be willing to buy into it, but they'd be such a minority that it would be inconceivable to think it could rise to be the world's dominant religion. I mean it would probably take a near-total collapse of civilization as we know it to allow such a mythology to arise and come to the sort of prominence that the other great popular mythologies have managed. Hmmm.
Well, don't mind me. I'm headed off in a few hours to sing in a Good Friday service.