To borrow a phrase from someone on this site, Dick seemed to be “googling God”, but in his own pre-Internet way. Maybe that’s the trick: learning how to tap into that intersection between what is real and what is not, an artistic or creative Twilight Zone. It certainly helped Dick’s works to become so visionary in today’s post-post-modern world.

Cheer up! You are a modest Gnostic, but not bad at all as a story teller.

i stand debunked!

mario: with skills like yours, you ought not to waste them here on small fish like me. please, the world needs you. no, the GALAXY needs you! i think i hear jesus coming to lift you up into heaven and to punish me for all my evil sins of using the internet to make a metaphor about searching for meaning!

i’m so worthless i could cry!

1. …OI: beliefs are for those who have no experience of something… …DD: that is why an experienced Internet surfer like Occult Investigator can do away with them
2. OI: Religions, [] are nets which we cast in the hopes of catching god. .. …DD: that is it, religions were only hopeful precogs of The Net. Now we have the Real Thing
3. … OI: Religions are better used as search engines… DD: that is the crowning statement! Now we can Google to God™®!

I know it seems a sick joke, but believe me; Occult Investigator is really convinced the Net is God; he is the High Priest and Oracle™® who can help the faithful Google to God™®

maybe another really good example of the lines being blurred is philip k dicks whole mystical experience and subsequent novels. its like he managed to sort of enter into the fictional world of his novels, or it managed to enter into our world. and his writing before that is brilliant, but once it starts to really blur together it takes on this whole other intense level.

also reminds me of something we talked about a while ago, how james joyce (or somebody after him?) claimed that if civilization ended and all that was left was a copy of ulysses (or was it FW?) then, all of human history and knowledge could be recreated from it…

i think this whole discussion is probably one of the wildest mysteries there is, the line between fact, fiction and “truth”…

In the story, I had Jesus ready to be executed for a crime he didn’t commit, only to be spared at the last minute because he was discovered to be a resident alien from Mexico. He was deported for three days, then returned to Pacoima, where he was greeted as a prophet and a hero. This was my humorous re-imagining of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection.

Reading this exchange on this site reminded me of one reaction I received for my story: a woman from a Latino-based blog found the last entry of my story (focusing on Jesus’ execution pardon) and thought it was a factual news item. She linked it on her blog and sincerely thought it was a true item. I never proposed, at any point, that my story was anything other than fiction.

Eventually, I had to e-mail the woman and respectfully explain that it was made-up. She took the link down, but it struck me as oddly apt that she would consider my satire factual and true.

The question is: would this woman have continued to believe my story to be true, had I not informed her of her mistake? Was she looking for the sacred in my writings, or was she just looking to reinforce what she already believed, which was that the death penalty was wrong and that Latinos get the shaft by the legal system? If I were a con man, I would’ve let her believe my story until it was discovered to be a hoax. Certainly, I didn’t mean to consciously perpetuate the myth– my story was meant to debunk the act of elevating the mundane to the status of the holy.

Jesus Lopez is appalled when he is deemed holy by his peers, for the simple fact that he found extra beer in the back room of a ditching party (a dig at the story of Christ turning water into wine). He has contempt for his followers, along the lines of Brian in “Monty Python’s Life of Brian”.

Unfortunately, I accidentally deleted all of my old Archives, so the Jesus story is gone. But I bring it up because my anecdote is a true-life scenario that addresses the topic of your debate.

My two cents: it doesn’t matter how you word the John Doe sentence, because people have their own agendas and will interpret it any way they want to. Both of your arguments, and the comments of others, only serve to reinforce your respective viewpoints. Meanwhile, no meaningful communication has been made, and thus no light has been shed on the topic because both of you are working with theoretical examples.

I suggest that, in order to test both of your respective arguments, both of you should try writing a sacred text, and see who out there takes it seriously and who out there thinks it’s crap. My forecast: it all depends on how convincing it is.

as you want to share with your blogging community part of our private exchange, it is fair to everybody to make them privy to the rest of the story.

In his return e-mail to the one where Occult Investigator so deftly analyses the John Doe line (with focus on Saint Quentin, Electrocution, Innocence, plus Spending and Death Wing for good measure), Debunker’s Debunker wrote:

As for literalism and John Doe’s little example, one should consider that DD’s English, though fluent, is not “mother tongue”. So John Doe line was translated … literally (!) from Italian. How would it lend itself to “Freudian analysis” if rephrased thus:
• John Doe, who has been on death row for over 10 years in Saint Quentin’s prison, is due to be executed by electric chair tomorrow morning. The prisoner has always proclaimed his innocence
By the way, John Doe was meant to “spend” his time at Alcatraz, but as DD remembered that it must have been closed down quite some time ago, DD had to move him to Saint Quentin.

Somehow, without realizing it consciously, Occult Investigator has given the key to the right understanding of his “three points” [Look at Tim Boucher’s site “FAQ: What are your religious beliefs?]. This is really a marvellous example of how mind works; you think you are dodging tricky questions, and instead you are giving yourself away.
1. … that is why an experienced Internet surfer like Occult Investigator can do away with them
2. … that is it, religions were only hopeful precogs of The Net. Now we have the Real Thing
3. … that is the crowning statement! Now we can Google to God™®!
It is all clear now, that is what John’s Gospel was pointing to!

“You search the Scriptures because you believe they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me!” John 5:39.

As Bill Clinton would say: ”it is the Internet, stupid!”

Mario (a real mame!)
Debunking the debunkers

I certainly found your analysis of the John Doe story quite plausible. Yes, indeed, it is a sacred text. Funny that Mario should have chosen such a rich example.

Well done, both Tim and Mario.