Memetic Christianity: Jesus Dying For All Mankind

People, both Christians and non-Christians, often take the New Testament stories literally. I would argue that this is misguided, and that originally Christianity was conceptual, not literal. Here we will look at the idea that Jesus died for all mankind through this lens.

Jesus is a type of everyman figure. An everyman is a character in a story that symbolises man in general. In the story of Jesus this man in general is taken to an idealised extreme. That is, he is man in perfected form. Perfectly good.

When people hear that "Jesus died for all our sins," it sounds utterly bizarre when taken literally.

"How can he have died for my sins when I wasn't even born back then !" ..and so forth.

However, when viewed as a conceptualised ideal it makes much more sense.

Self-sacrifice is a noble act. A minor act of self-sacrifice is good, a greater act of self-sacrifice even better. Generally, the ultimate act of self-sacrifice is laying down one's own life. For another human being, or for your country, or for an ideal (say 'freedom,' or some set of religious values).

So, as Jesus represents the ultimate expression of this self-sacrifice concept he doesn't just die for a single country, or an ideal, or for a specific person or persons, but he dies for all people - in all times. For everything. It's self-sacrifice taken to its furthest possible extremity. The ultimate idealised version of suffering on behalf of others.

Gigachad

To give a modern example we could compare it to the gigachad meme. To anyone unfamiliar with internet meme culture a chad is basically someone who's very masculine. Therefore, the gigachad is a version of this meme that takes this masculinity to its furthest limit. The perfect embodiment of absolute manhood.

Of course, we all understand that this is a meme, and not a real, actual person.* It's a symbolic version of man, taken to an extreme - meant to be understood as such, and not to be taken literally.

It would be dumb to take it literally, and it would also be dumb if people in a thousand years' time looked back and thought that the people living today literally "believed in" gigachad. Like he was some kind of actual, living god.

So, in essence, Jesus Christ is giga-martyr. Symbolic of a high ideal we can hold aloft, conceptualising the ultimate good.

[*People may point out that the gigachad image is a digitally-altered image of a real person. There's lots of debate online about this - is the image entirely artificial, was there an actual original person to begin with. Personally, I have no idea. However, this too is similar with the Jesus story. It could well be that there was an original 'real' Jesus - who was some kind of rebel figure during the Roman Empire. That story then being enhanced and memed into the idealised version.]