Identity Reveal: I’m Jesus Christ

After being afraid of dying during an earthquake, I figured it was time for me to say this.

It was two hours after the 11:11 p.m. Marrakesh earthquake. An older man in blue-striped boxers asked for a phone to call his family. To my left, a deadpan Arabic man with an open head wound passed by. Families ran from the smoky open square towards my friend group, screaming in Arabic, looking up. I thought a B-52 had bombarded us. 

A Catholic friend prayed for the ten of us. Somewhere in Heaven, in an address I'm unaware of, Jesus chose to save us over the 3,000 Muslims who died. The friend who prayed was Arabic but wore a cross, so Jesus spared her. I will call her Mary.  

Throughout the next five days, Mary brought up Jesus most times she talked. I would call a toast for life, and she would say how lucky we were that Jesus saved us from dying. And how there was a heavenly reason she was alive. And how we would have died if we hadn't been inside the bar.

Mary didn't talk about Jesus after my friend Angela read a Celtic Cross tarot spread and a past, present, and future one. The spread alluded to the loss of my mom and encouraged me to focus on my writing. I don't believe in the predictive ability of divination, but the spread cheered me up. My Catholic friend sat at a table across from ours to avoid a spiritual attack.

Contrast is one of the easiest ways to know who you are. You look at the seemingly opposite of who you are or who you don't want to be to identify who you are. We were lucky to live because 3,000 people died.

Some Catholics highlight behaviors often labeled undesirable in others to raise their moral status. They ask why you hook up on Tinder, get drunk, and have a septum piercing to contrast their life to yours. People from other religions also do this, but I’m focusing on Catholics because I grew up in a Catholic country, attended a Catholic school, and attended a Pontifical university.

Some judged people intensify their "wrong" behavior to discomfort the Catholics. For example, if the Catholic says only uneducated bikers have tattoos, the judged person would act uneducated. The paradoxical outcome is the judged acts in a way they disagree with, and the judge reinforces their moral superiority.

If many Catholics didn't unconsciously believe that someone ought to lose for them to win, many would not preach. Games are thrilling when you can win or lose. Beyond some laughs, playing a basketball match against LeBron or a 50-inch baby is unexciting because you know the outcomes. The more challenging it is to enter Heaven, the more appealing it becomes.

That's why you don't see Catholics parading against sinners—heroes need villains. If most Catholics believed the devil lived next door as a cannibal, rapist, or any embodiment of evil, they would make more fuss about it. I’d even ignore the tenosynovitis from my wrists and throw in a few jabs. But instead of actual fuss, Catholics often let sinners be because they remind them how good they are. 

"The blessed in heaven walk to the battlements and look down and delight in the justice of God being properly carried out in hell." St. Thomas Aquinas.

I blame misinterpretations of who Jesus was and what he preached for the moral superiority some Catholics have. I took a class on Christology supervised by the Vatican at college. Jesus preached every person was worthy of salvation, regardless of their sins. This clashed with the Pharisees, strict followers of The Torah, who rejected these sinners: tax collectors, prostitutes, the ill, etc. Jesus's followers found his rebel stance intriguing. But, Catholics pedestalized him as the only one capable of loving everyone instead of realizing they could also love everyone.

Catholics see Jesus as God, posing the impossible challenge to its followers of living up to Godly standards.

In the book of John, Jesus tries to explain to the Jews that we are all God,

“Many good works have I shewed you from my Father; for which of those works do ye stone me? The Jews answered him, “It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy because you, being a man, make yourself God.” “Is it not written in your Law, you are gods’?”If he called them gods to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be broken—do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?”

Jesus is saying we have the potential to perform every miracle he executed, not that he alone can.

Most Catholics who haven’t studied the New Testament and verses like the above don’t know this. Thus, they shit on others to remind themselves that, even though they are worse than Jesus, an unattainable ideal, they are better than people who smoke hash at a Riad's rooftop to calm themselves down after a fucking earthquake.

You see less misinterpretation around what one is capable of doing in Buddhism. I am aware that Mahayana, Theravada, and Vajrayana Buddhism have different beliefs and that these and other branches have distorted the original intent of The Buddha. Still, Buddha is accepted as a title, not a person. "Buddha" comes from the Sanskrit root budh, which means “to be awake.” Gautama Siddhartha, The Buddha, was the man who woke up from the dream of life we are all in and saw it for what it was. Buddhism says we can all wake up. Because Buddhists know they can become the Buddha, they are less likely to compete with each other. It's easier to love everyone when you don't have to keep up with the feats of a man with superpowers born out of a virgin.

There are obvious reasons why these Catholics frustrate people. A lot of them criticize you, aren't open to new ideas, and virtue signal often. 

I don't mind these traits. 

What's repelling is how disingenuous these people are without knowing. You would like to believe some people love, forgive, and share without constraints like Jesus did. People who see life as a game in which everyone wins. But then you meet Mary. She resembles the idea of Jesus until you discover she has been telling everyone that you are flirting with her, likely to say she didn't succumb to temptation.

It doesn't make sense. If Jesus wanted to kiss someone, he would tell them right away. Plus, I only date women up to eight years older than me, and Mary is 37. It doesn’t add up. 

I have met many atheists and agnostics, and they would all be happy to meet someone who embodies Jesus' way of living. Many want a reason to believe. But they don't have one because the average Catholic they meet doesn’t want Jesus to save them or others. Heaven can only be alluring if Hell is not.