Response: Geek Gods

This week in class we covered a concept, well mainly the comparison of, the mythic and romantic hero.  We established an idea that the Mythic hero was better by better in form, and the romantic hero was better in degree.  Our definition of the idea was that we are told the Mythic hero is better, where as we must establish that the romantic hero is better through perception.  Another idea was that the Mythic hero is better than us physically, while the Romantic hero is better than us emotionally.

I had brought up the the fact that we are living in a time of the "nerd god", and that the greeks believed that the Gods were an embodiment of our vices. Like how Zeus was an adulator, Iron Man's an alcoholic, and Batman is a self righteous violent vigilante.  Yet they are physically better than us and all the stories tell us so.

Then the idea sprang to mind; God is the mythic hero, and Jesus is the romantic.  For this i am talking strictly in a sense of "myth" and not in a sense of "religion".  In the old testament God constantly shows man he is his superior, and demands they worship him.  He even goes so far as to smite cities and flood the world out of rage.  On the opposite side of that coin, Jesus is the compassionate embodiment of God. It is never stated that he is better than man, but we perceive that he is better than man because he does not sin.  He becomes a compassionate God and the paradigm shifts. It goes from the concept of the psuedo-greek gods (the Jewish God) to a "human" and compassionate Jesus (the Christian God).  Its a shift from the Mythic to the Romantic, from the wrathful to the compassionate. A "real life" embodiment of the concept.