Our affinity for the "Jesus-character": Finally some actual philosophy.

That's right, I had a thought today, an actual intellectual thought, which I can actually write about. YES!

So, let's get to it. In the course of undertaking a degree, you unfortunately have to do some work somewhere along the line and some of mine was to analyse the significance of film for religion (I took the pessimistic view that religion and film don't mix well, for various reasons). Anyway, in our lecture on the subject, it was pointed out that the Western storyteller has a big affinity for using "Jesus figures" - alternatively called the "redeemer" or the "saviour" character. It's true that there sure are a lot of self-sacrificial heroes out there, Sydney Carton (A Tale of Two Cities - if you haven't already, make sure you read it) is one of my all-time favourites, and almost every story has a saviour character, from Batman to Harry Potter to Darth Vader to Neo from the Matrix.

But is it right to call them Jesus figures? In making this claim do we not lift Jesus above such other characters? Had we might as well call Jesus a Darth Vader figure? Is the popularity of Christianity in the West a result of our adoration of the Batman-type character, rather than the cause of it? I'm not making any statement about the factuality of the Bible or the existence of God or whatever, but is it not philosophically worrying that we use our critical thinking to challenge a lot of what religion is about, but then allow it dominion over the whole of literature and film?

The Hero with a Thousand Faces theory tells us that most stories use the same archetypal characters, indeed they have the same basic plot, called the "monomyth", in which:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

The use of the term "Jesus figures" replaces the monomyth with Jesus, giving undue legitimacy to what is possibly a fictional or mythical character or to fictional stories about a great spiritual leader. This in turn legitimises the parasitical organisations which have formed and grown strong off the back of the story of Jesus, and taken those stories for their own ends. I believe you would call them Churches.