This web page was written on 23-03-2002 at 3:50am whilst wondering why I haven't updated the site in six months.

WHY I AM NOT JESUS CHRIST.

There we go. A nice inflammatory title. Something to get the visitor numbers up. Only problem, now, is to justify it. So… Why am I not Jesus Christ?

I have a need. I’ve felt an urge, deep within me, for a number of years now. A deep, potent driving force that … scratch that. I’m off down Hollywood territory there. I have a desire, a longing or fetish if you will, about dying so that others may live.

Yeah, me weird; I know, but it’s true. Maybe it’s my dark gothic sensibilities or a sense of the dramatic, dynamic power that I feel is missing from the world. Maybe I’ve watched too much noble war filmage or possibly my love of life is playing off my sense of personal worthlessness. Maybe it is easier to achieve glory in death than live normalcy in life.

I don’t know. I’ve devoted maybe two days solid thinking to this… I’ve got the bases covered but I’ll be debollocked if I actually know what it means about me as a person.

Considering current news fair, I’ve had to ask myself some serious questions. Given the right background, would I be a suicide bomber or one of the terrorists of September 11?

Possibly not, but I can see their point from here. The British Legion had a set of posters out for Remembrance Sunday upon which one quoted “...there is no greater love than this, that a man lay down his life for that of his brother...”. People may not like the link between the two, but those Palestinian suicide bombers feel the same devotion to their people as those pilots who flew into ‘certain’ doom at the Battle of Britain. The righteousness of their cause aside for the moment, the sentiment is the same; and it is one that I sympathise with.

It’s not that I am suicidal, far from it, but I think I want my life to mean something. To be remembered. The easiest way to do that is to fall on a grenade in a schoolyard or, in a more fantastical metaphor, to charge the Dragon, screaming, so that the others may escape in the few final moments.

I doubt many people cried at the end of Independence Day. I did. I felt a kinship for Russell Case, making his death mean so much, because his life was meaningless.

But there is the problem, and this is why I am not Jesus Christ. There are no 15 mile-wide space ships coming to wipe us out (that I know of). There are, thankfully, no grenade throwing maniacs stalking the local schools or grand battles between good or evil that will decide the fate of the universe requiring the sacrifice of my immortal soul.

I am not going to save the world by washing down forty cocodamol with a bottle of vodka and putting my head in an airtight plastic sack. Nor could I select an evil person and go be a bomb. Evil spawns itself. The taking of a life is never anything other than an evil act. It is never anything other than a failure of moral truth. Self-sacrifice is another matter, but evil would just sit back and laugh at my chilling corpse if I tried to sort out the world’s problems like that, and I would be deserving of the scorn for my self-delusion and naivety. If Jesus really did die for our sins, then I envy his sacrifice.

And still, it doesn’t work. There is something else to this feeling, and I don’t know what it is, yet.