Jesus is a figment of my imagination

Here is what the duck means:

While he was still speaking, a bright cloud suddenly overshadowed them, and a voice called from the cloud: 'This is my Son, my Beloved, on whom my favour rests; listen to him.' At the sound of the voice the disciples fell on their faces in terror.

Occasionally reality bowls us over. Experience overwhelms us. Life fries our circuits. And then we want to bottle it up and sell it, but language is a lossy compression scheme. Only a fraction of the information present in the experience gets encoded in our words. But the trade-off is that now we have something portable. The experience may not be full-strength, but it is at least communicable at all. Imagination is the process of uncompressing experience. It means filling in lost detail. The original experience may be in the past or the future, or it may not have happened at all.

Religion is a guess at what we can't see. It requires imagination, working from the very little we can see. Science and philosophy increase what we can see, but there will always be room for religion. The alternative to religion is to be content only with what we can see, and I'm not.

Jesus (I am supposing) is history's truest compression of ultimate reality (wow does that sound stupid). But history Jesus had to be compressed a ton in order for me even to find out about him at all. I've never seen Jesus and I've never heard a voice. I've felt strong positive emotion when I've read my own experience against beautiful Christian abstractions (for example, while watching Little House on the Prairie last night, the episode where Laura accidentally shoots Pa). I take that to be the important information lost in compression, and that's pretty much what I'm going on.

It is really hard to maintain commitment to the abstractions without the experience. Heck, it was hard even with the experience!

So Jesus is a duck, and the duck is God:



And the Bible is a compression of this duck/God history Jesus:



And Christianity is an uncompression:



And other religions are looking at ultimate-reality Jesus cock-eyed:





Feed back to Chad Whitacre.