Of Christ and the Guardians

Jesus is the same as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Except that He isn’t. To say that Christ is the same as Santa is to say that He is the same type of thing as Santa. What type of thing is the Easter Bunny? The Easter Bunny and company are myths and stories that fulfill, at least in the expression of their popular portrayals, specific sociological and psychological niches within the context of the culture in which they are found. Presumably, one could explain “why” the bunny and “why” the jolly fat man. It is outside of the scope of this article but the movie, Rise of the Guardians, comes to mind as an excellent example of this. The characters serve as representatives and defenders of certain things (hope, wonder, etc.).

If one makes the claim that Christ is no more than a myth, one must explain the myth. If Christianity is a made up religion, we must be able to explain the context of the fiction. Under what circumstance was it necessary to create Christ? I would posit(from my own experience in the faith) that if Christianity was invented, it was invented behind a brothel as a man lay in his own vomit and other men passed him by paying no heed. It was founded when every desire was met, every thirst quenched, and every hunger was sated. The moment it was birthed into the world was the precise moment the inventor looked inside and saw a twisted soul and was filled with nothing but self-loathing. If Christianity was not revealed to us by the God-Man, it was hatched in the mind of the most wretched of humanity come face to face with itself. In our lowest state, we conceived it’s opposite.

I’ve heard many theories from the modern atheist concerning the mysterious origins of my faith. Some are as simplistic as asserting that we are afraid of death and others are as absurd as asserting that it was invented to control the populace. The first fails in its scope and the second contradicts any serious study of the faith. But neither of these is as surprising as the assertion by New Atheism that a godless universe is an inherently good thing. Now, free from our archaic superstitions, we can finally reach our full potential. One of the several arguments that come to mind against this is that a godless universe is a universe that is inherently meaningless.

Vast ages of human beings have lived their lives with no meaning. That’s not just numbers. Billions upon billions of individual souls have looked upon the stars, looked upon their hands and could not contemplate that neither had any inherent value or meaning. Each of them had blessings in their lives and knew instinctively that SOMETHING had to be thanked for it. Each of them knew hardship, despair and suffering and cast their eyes to the sky in agony. In a godless universe, they were all mere chemical reactions. No amount of posturing and appeals to emotion can soften that. In fact, there is nothing to soften. It is not that one day we will die and be nothing. It’s that we already are nothing. Or, in a logical formula:

1.       Value is an assigned attribute

2.       Assigned attributes cease when there is no longer anyone to maintain them

3.       Value ceases when there is no longer anyone to maintain it

All of this is to illustrate the difference between Christ and the Guardians. The most striking difference is that Hope exists outside of the Easter Bunny and Wonder exists outside of Father Christmas. They are merely avatars of an already existing reality. Christ, if He is an avatar at all, must be an avatar of that which cannot be without Him; Eternal Life, intrinsic purpose and value, redemption, etc. Christianity has Christ Crucified at the center of the Universe because that is the only place He can logically exist.