messianic_complexes andru235 this site seems to attract such types...sure, i'll assail myself with the phrase... but i've noticed it's mainly males. has anyone else noticed this? men in particular have a tendency (for better or worse) towards the messianic complex. i doubt this is inherently a male thing... maybe it's yet another sign of imbalance in male culture? why aren't we simply content to know what we know? why do we feel the need to proffer our philosophies and beliefs? why do we turn to forcefulness? at any rate, i sure don't plan on stopping any time soon. 051026 ... oldephebe Please list those blatherers you feel stand upon the highest hill, climb it in thier sacerdotal robe and and wrought humbly made sandles and raise the ram horn to thier full flesh lips animated by the Unreason of Heavenly inspired will, and like the springs of chaos let pour forth the holy wind of the "mystery" and the "divine". I'm sure I might be on that list. Or at least the list of self-righteous types who faciley construct thier own moral universes and then add liberal amounts of blah blah poetic..blah and just let the blathe end ... HERE! ... 051026 ... oldephebe that should have been, "hand wrought and humbly made sandles..." you know the ones we use to climb the hill outside of the city walls and such. ... 051026 ... vernon love i don't think the messiah would be caught dead in a place like this! and it's sandals. :-) 051026 ... birdmad contrary to what's been said of me... if such a thing exists i have a satan complex instead. i haven't aspired top be anything resembling christ-like since i was 15 051026 ... andru235 oe, i think that was the first time i ever read one of your blathes and didn't learn at least three new words. frankly, i'm disappointed. i think you are single-handedly responsible for my having learned a good 100+ new words since coming to blather...far more than i've learned from any single source since school (an accidental, albeit auspicious alliteration). turn me into an addict and then cut me off, is it? harumph. vernon, while you are probably correct, i really doubt that "the" messiah is going to be caught alive anywhere either. but i've been wrong before. i have had a few self-righteous blathing binges, and i don't feel too bad about having done so. nor i don't think less of people for not agreeing. granted, my self-righteous binges tend to go like this: "we are all divine and infinite! embrace the infinity that is YOU!" i'm all about people following their dreams, after they excavate their dreams out from the avalanche of pop-cultural expectations ("but i couldn't be an actress 'cuz i don't look as good as *her*") in other words, my self-righteousness isn't based in my being better than anyone - it's based in everyone else being much better than they tend to esteem themselves. and that includes they who already have high self-esteems. it's like, every person is a beautiful melody. but most of those melodies aren't going to sound good with the rhythm and harmony set up for us by society. instead of changing their melody, people could uncover their own harmonious rhythms. we can all be a harmonious blacksmith! hooray! i'm not sure i feel like i stand on a hill, though. is it a valley i am in? i can't tell. however, it is not a plane either. something tells me i am standing on a dimensional rift zone, and i like it. sort of. not really. i want to go home now, actually. as to the extended list, i'm not one to name names. it doesn't really matter anyway, as i'm not reproaching anyone. mainly i'm just observing that thus far, all the messianic types i've come across here on blather have turned out to be men. this includes both religious and "sciency" (plus others too) types of messianic complexes. also, i should've used another word than "complexes". i always feel like that word is used to trivialize and pidgeon hole the significance of the "complex" itself. aren't those who refuse to preach, preaching all the same? they merely play a different instrument. basically, i don't see the messianic complex as a bad thing, as long as blood is not shed, nor bruises incurred. i certainly have found myriad instances where something i comprehend cannot readily be expressed in words. so i sometimes wonder if those persons whose preaching is antipodal (courtesy of OE) to that which i have espoused are simply trying to express the same concept with the opposite words. or a concept for which vocabulary isn't suited. i think some self-messianism is based out of an attempt to see in another something one beholds within oneself. for the most part i don't think it to be solely a product of megalomania, it's just another way of reaching out. i think a lot of the fanaticism comes out of a refusal in either party (preacher or preachee) to grant that there is legitimacy to the feelings/beliefs of the other party, even if not shared. simply shooting down the other party is childish and indicates a deficience in understanding of some sort. we have all been there, and will probably be there again. it's ok. in those whose "preaching" consists of a reckless disregard for the belief systems of others, especially when coupled with a desire to rip apart the other party's belief system, i suspect that the preacher is expressing an unfulfilled need to be in some way dominant in regards to something or other. i especially notice this in certain hard core religious / science types... 051026 ... andru235 birdmad i guess i didn't realize messianic_complexes refered only to christ? maybe i'm wrong. i thought it was just basically just the mindset of deciding to tell others about the causes and schemas one believes in; the belief that one has a message to convey unto others... 051026 ... bird i tend to be a bit of a literalist and having once aspired to priesthood (though i am no longer religious, per se) those latent bits of christian dogma still tend to color my remarks hence my equation of christ and messiah whether i believe that anymore or not, it's a matter of association 051026 ... andru235 i think its admirable that you took your spiritual beliefs seriously enough to pursue a life devoted to them. i'm not specifically a theistic type (my credo is it_all_exists) but we humans are deeply spiritual animals. look at the zeal with which some nihilists assault religion and/or mysticism! anyway, (not that it matters what i think) i'm way more impressed with people who take their spiritual beliefs seriously enough to consider pursuing than with investment bankers, super models, or nuclear physicists. maybe you are really bird-not-so-mad-after-all. 051026 ... grendel some would say i'm nuttier than Chinese chicken salad and Christmas fruitcake put together and i make no pretense otherwise heh 051026 ... satan satan satan that's also just it, though... i stopped short of truly pursuing that end. the combination of watching the onset of my father's terminal illness and falling in love for the first time kind of monkey-wrenched both my willingness and desire to take that plunge 051026 ... oldephebe Andrew - I haven't read ALL of the subsequent postings since i hurled my souls' spatter across this blathe page. Or in the words of the semiotician--this slowly evolving self-contained discrusive and or system slowly etching, or even violently pounding as at Other who sits in ice, at his desk entombed in his own solisism--lost in his own symbols of meaning--Okay i got carried away--back to the characterization of this blathe in the carraige of semiotics, or as a semiotic a kind of semiotics that emerges from the untussled ground half-wrought... I'm tired. Okay so I should hope one sees my writing as more than just an opp to expand ones vocab. How 'bout this? Let's really rigorously ponder the phenomenon of the messianic complex and the monster binary thing or what some call bifurcated thinking. Or even how 'bout the desecration of a holy vision and calling that may have been authentically altruistic and the charismatic like Nebbachednezzar envisions his head of gold as a gaint divine corpus of gold and descends into a delusion of diety and infallibility. bleh I think that lonley folk can get so desperate for someone to hear thier voice that it's easy to fathom how in the barreness and isolation of ones own citadel to solipsism, it's easy to see how the sub-conscious brought so closely to the surface through sleep-deprivation and careening emotions and altered states can influence one to construct this kind of a complex that starts out as a coping mechanism and then once touched by a naive and or uncritical mind the messianic malevolent to be immerses himself in constructing a mythos a personal theology and then like a self-love that has become a fatigued love lays himself down in it, and into every pore it dreams and seeps into all the horrid locked rooms in that little bit of Hell that we have in all of us and merges as a kind of chimera in scarlet and pious robes. He hath benevolence in one hand and a deaths angels scyth/claw for the other hand. ... 051029 ... oE emerges not merges 051029 ... z once again. 060927 ... somebody there will always be more, z 060927 ... Christ without the cross you guys are cool! 060927 ... daf Not surprisingly, I'm all FOR the folks that would save the world. Not the ones thjat want to surround themselves with other people to control. We call those psychos where I'm from. The folks that inspire me are those that notice something's wrong, and speak, or do something about it. Apathy doesn't need anymore allies. What would the world be like if we hadn't had the desire to care sucked out of us so early on? It boggles the mind. isn't all that difficult to boggle. 060927 ... grendel oE, if you are still out there, i absolutely love tat last bit of imagery you expressed there. 061012 ... - - 080929 what's it to you? who go blather from