Me-ssiah

Making my religions

In my last post, I said Nakayama Miki, the founder of the Japanese religion Tenrikyo, had chutzpah.

Lots of people (okay, not billions or even millions) have enough chutzpah to declare that God (or whoever) speaks through them.

But as far as I know, among them only Nakayama had the chutzpah to also claim that a spot in her yard was where God created mankind. That spot - the Jiba (in the drawing below - no photos allowed) - is the most important place in the world … at least according to her.

I regarded her belief as geocentric … omphalic … and egocentric.

I grok her … to a point. I may be the most narcissistic person I know.

I don’t know anyone else who wanted to found a religion centered around himself.¹

I tried many times to write a ‘Bible’ equivalent about the adventures of … me.

Guess where those adventures took place.

The Holy Land? Tibet? India? Atlantis? Lemuria? South Carolina? The hollow Earth? The psych ward?²

I left a hint at the end of my last post:

If I declared Hawaii - which just so happens to be where I live - to be the center of the universe, who would take me seriously?

I wouldn’t. Because I don’t believe Hawaii is the center of the universe. Not literally. Not gonna overturn astronomy, even though I have a lot of doubts about it.

But I do believe my island should be the capital of this planet, which is just the first of many worlds to conquer. I’ll spare you my cosmology and just point out how Hawaii is distant from all continents and between the Old and New Worlds.

Now you know why I don’t like the mayor or the governor.

Because I am the emperor.³

BECAUSE I SAID SO.

But who would believe me? I lack charisma, which Max Weber described as a

certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader. . . . How the quality in question would be ultimately judged from an ethical, aesthetic, or other such point of view is naturally indifferent for the purpose of definition.

Eileen Barker

discusses the tendency for new religious movements to have founders or leaders who wield considerable charismatic authority and are believed to have special powers or knowledge. Charismatic leaders are unpredictable, Barker says, for they are not bound by tradition or rules and they may be accorded by their followers the right to pronounce on all aspects of their lives. Barker warns that in these cases the leader may lack any accountability, require unquestioning obedience, and encourage a dependency upon the movement for material, spiritual and social resources.

Len Oakes

argues that charismatic leaders exhibit traits of narcissism and also argues that they display an extraordinary amount of energy, accompanied by an inner clarity unhindered by the anxieties and guilt that afflict more ordinary people.

I have narcissism but lack energy. I want to go to sleep.

I also lack “inner clarity”. I have anxieties and guilt. The weaknesses of a slave.

Energy plus clarity equals chutzpah. The power of a superman. A sociopath. A master. A true me-ssiah!

A fake me-ssiah like me can’t keep saying crazy things with a straight face. Maybe I’d learn how if people beLIEved me. If their affirmation gave me fuel for my lie machine. But not one person has ever fallen for my act. So I can’t take myself seriously. I can’t help but think of the “Meatsiah” from Bob’s Burgers.⁴

I’ve seen the Meatsiah episode of Bob’s Burgers several times, but until now I didn’t notice how the oval around “Meatsiah” doesn’t curve like the pages of the book it’s supposedly written in.

I don’t have what it takes to be a Nakayama. An L. Ron Hubbard.⁵

In A Piece of Blue Sky, former Scientologist Jon Atack wrote,

L. Ron Hubbard was an opportunist who lied consistently about his past, as part of a process of self-glorification – and probably self-deception. He was an arrogant, amoral egomaniac.

[...]

Hubbard was a paranoid, power hungry, petty sadist, who paraded his inadequacies through ever more frequent tantrums.⁶ Reveling in his disciples’ adulation, he spent his last years in seclusion, surrounded by sycophants.

[...]

To Hubbard, anyone who opposed or even criticized him was evil, their opposition to him inevitably slowing the progress of mankind.

[…]

Ron Hubbard would have liked to rule the world. He believed, and said, that benevolent dictatorship is the best political system, and saw himself as the only natural candidate.

I am not candidate material. And that’s why I can write about this here and now. My religions are never gonna happen.

“Religions” in the plural because I’ve toyed with the idea of anomphalic Zoroastrianism. But that’s a story for another day …

1. I did, however, have dinner with someone who had considered founding their own religion. Despite arguably being more qualified than me, they hadn’t taken the plunge. But maybe they did after we parted. Maybe they’re in a mansion right now. Where’s MY mansion?

From Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill’s Marshal Law #5 (1988). If you think American superheroes are ridiculous, this comic is for you. The “he” in these panels is Superman the Public Spirit.

Seriously, I could just use curtains that work and new jalousie windows.

2. Never been to any of those places except India. Where I did not have a spiritual experience. Just a work experience.

3. How’s that declaration for a way to make my two hundredth post special? (I’m not counting Substack’s “Coming soon” placeholder as a post.)

4. This book is said to have a recipe for the Meatsiah.

If I, the Me-ssiah, ordered my chef to cook me the Meat-siah, would they be amused? Would they accept a copy of The Bob's Burgers Burger Book: Real Recipes for Joke Burgers with both hands? My Burmese reader has a passage titled ပစ္စည်းဟူသမျှ ရိုသေကြ (Treat All Property with Respect - it’s for second graders). Imagine the respect given to a cartoon cookbook from the Me-ssiah. It might approach the respect given to The Book of Wally:

That is the entire Book of Wally The text has just two words and one punctuation mark: “To: Wally”. Not to the Moon. To Dilbert’s coworker! Source.

Now I want to see “The Shroud of Wally” again.

5. Whom I parodied in an early version of my ‘Bible’. Which I wrote while reading used copies of his Battlefield Earth and The Invaders Plan (I never read the other nine books of Mission Earth - or gave Hubbard any money).

Why those books? Just as Hubbard, um, emulated other people, I emulated Hubbard.

Jon Atack on Hubbard’s emulation:

He was an outright plagiarist, who eventually could not bear to acknowledge anyone else’s originality.

[...]

Hubbard pieced together modified versions of pre-existing ideas.

[…]

Hubbard created a curious amalgam. Dianetics came from Freud (with echoes of Fodor and Rank), Korzybski and possibly from certain psychiatric, wartime work in abreactive therapy. The origins of Scientology are in Aleister Crowley’s Magick, a smattering of schoolboy science, demon exorcism and science-fiction. The Sea Org derives directly from Hubbard’s naval experience; not only do they have uniforms, ranks and campaign ribbons, but also Fitness Boards, Committees of Evidence, Compliance Reports and Commendations. These diverse elements were rounded out with touches of behavioral therapy, Chinese brainwashing techniques, references to Machiavelli (Hubbard said The Prince was one of his favorite books, and even claimed to have written it), and possibly some acquaintance with Gustave le Bon’s crowd psychology. All of this disparate material was synthesized through the personality of L. Ron Hubbard.

Similarly, Shinto and Buddhism were synthesized through the personality of Nakayama Miki to produce Tenrikyo.

My first religion was a synthesis of Objectivism and Indian religions (despite how India was anathema to Ayn Rand, founder of Objectivism) with bits of Christianity (and at one point even a fantasy of Jewish ancestry). As for my second, see the penultimate sentence of this post.

Is there a new religion that does not draw upon the old?

And even old religions draw upon older religions: e.g., Christianity and Islam are built on a Jewish foundation while Buddhism and Jainism are built on a Hindu foundation, which itself is a synthesis of elements from Proto-Indo-European religion and long-lost faiths that don’t even have names.

6. I laugh as I wonder what sincere euphemisms Hubbard’s servants had for his tantrums. Power means never having to say you’re sorry. “Sorry” is for slaves; masters are always right. And the me-ssiah is the greatest of all masters, having ‘come down from heaven’ to ‘save’ all mankind from some threat that doesn’t actually exist.