Cinemorphosis

Tag: bible

  • The Aspiring Writer Strives to Overcome His Inferiority Complex

    The Aspiring Writer Strives to Overcome His Inferiority Complex

    The aspiring writer, Manuscriptus Rex, writes not out of pure inspiration but from the unholy fusion of a chip on his shoulder and a raging inferiority complex. His desperation for a cure has somehow led him to the worst possible conclusion: that literary dominance is the only path to salvation. Anything short of conquering the literary world? Utter failure.

    Why such extremes? Because Manuscriptus Rex is an eternal adolescent, emotionally stunted and incapable of nuance. Life is a brutal, binary equation—winners or losers, triumph or oblivion. There is no middle ground. And for those with just enough talent to know they’ll never be the best? The humiliation is unbearable. They sink into a spiral of self-loathing so profound, they start questioning why they were born in the first place.

    This despair is captured well in the 1984 movie Amadeus, in which Salieri, the patron saint of mediocrity, spends his life gnashing his teeth over the fact that, for all his ambition, he’ll always be the guy in the cheap seats while Mozart, the true genius, takes center stage. Some might be tempted to draw the same parallel between Paul and Jesus, as if Paul were some whiny Salieri, shaking his fist at the heavens over his lack of messianic charisma. Dead wrong. Paul didn’t sulk in anyone’s shadow. He sharpened his writing tools, rearranged the spotlight, and made damn sure it was aimed squarely at himself.

    How successful was Paul at making his writing stick? Let’s put it this way—his entire written output amounts to about eighty pages. Eighty pages. That’s not even the length of a middling beach read you’d abandon in an airport terminal. And yet, those pages have been scrutinized, weaponized, and dissected with more fervor than any artistic or literary masterpiece in human history.

    I sit here, surveying the wreckage of five decades of my own writing, knowing full well that it will likely fade into the void, while Paul’s scant eighty pages have dictated the course of Western thought, politics, and religion for two thousand years. The word “influence” doesn’t even begin to cover it. This is literary world domination.

    And was this tidal wave of influence accidental? Hardly. Paul wasn’t just writing to save souls—he was writing for his own immortality.

    Pauline scholars love to point out that Paul wasn’t exactly thrilled with what the original apostles were peddling. Their Jesus still had training wheels—tied to Torah, saddled with Jewish law, bogged down by the pesky weight of tradition. Paul, on the other hand, had a better idea. His Jesus was purer, punchier, and more potent—a spiritual superfood untainted by Torah preservatives. And Paul wasn’t shy about it. He called it “my gospel”—not once, but over and over again, like a divine trademark. Forget the Jewish-flavored Jesus movement—Paul’s was gluten-free, carb-free, and straight to the Gentile bloodstream.

    This wasn’t just a theological shift—it was a hostile takeover. Paul didn’t seem particularly interested in Jesus’ actual words. Sermons? Parables? “Love thy neighbor”? Small-time. Paul’s focus was on his own visions, his personal revelations, the ones that conveniently made himself the authority on Jesus. While Peter and James clung to their quaint Jewish traditions, Paul rebranded Christianity in his own image, rolling out a one-man revolution that sidelined the original apostles like outdated board members in a corporate coup.

    And rabbi scholar Hyam Maccoby—never one to understate a theological conspiracy—takes it even further. According to The Mythmaker, Paul didn’t just step out from Jesus’ shadow—he steamrolled over it and rebranded Christianity as a Paul Production, with himself as lead architect of one of history’s largest religious empires. Salieri could only dream of that level of self-promotion.

    But Paul didn’t just change the messaging—he altered the entire emotional foundation of Christianity. Maccoby doesn’t just accuse Paul of hijacking Christianity—he accuses him of rewriting the entire Old Testament like a hack screenwriter with a savior complex. The Jewish tradition of free will, strength, and human agency is replaced with Paul’s bleak vision of humanity—where people are helpless worms, groveling in the dirt, utterly incapable of doing anything good without divine intervention.

    Fast-forward two millennia, and we’re still drowning in the wreckage of Paul’s inferiority complex—scrolling ourselves into oblivion, slaves to algorithms, locked in a spiritual malaise that might as well have been engineered by Paul himself. Maccoby paints Paul not as a mystical visionary, but as a man crippled by his own self-loathing, a former Pharisee who couldn’t hack it in Jewish law, so he torched the whole thing and built his own damn religion. And it worked.

    Paul’s biggest marketing coup was turning Jesus into something unrecognizable. Gone was the Torah-loving Jewish teacher—in his place, a Hellenized God-man with cosmic grandeur. But Paul didn’t work alone. He had Luke, his personal spin doctor, crafting The Acts of the Apostles—a biblical infomercial designed to make Paul look like a tireless hero, smoothing out his awkward edges, burying any embarrassing missteps, and giving the real apostles about as much airtime as unpaid extras in Paul’s vanity project. The result? A Christianity that barely resembled anything Jesus actually taught, but one tailor-made for mass adoption.

    It’s a corporate rebrand so slick that Paul might as well be the Steve Jobs of Western religion.

    Paul didn’t just invent a religion—he invented religious dominance. His theology was designed for maximum influence, structured like a brilliantly engineered algorithm—one that self-replicates, adapts, and burrows into the psyche like a spiritual virus. You don’t just believe in Paul’s Christianity; you’re owned by it.

    And this is where the connection to my own writing demon becomes uncomfortably clear.

    Paul did what I’ve always wanted to do—he wrote something so potent, so inescapable, so monolithic, that it hijacked human consciousness for centuries. His letters didn’t just survive—they became the foundation for an entire civilization. And what is that if not the ultimate literary ambition?

    The writing demon inside me has always whispered the same temptation—that if I just write the right book, if I craft my message well enough, if I design the perfect narrative, I can transcend obscurity, reshape reality, and carve my name into history.

    Paul did it. He wrote himself into religious permanence, his eighty pages outlasting every empire, every cultural movement, every literary masterpiece.

    And maybe that’s why I can’t stop thinking about him.

    Because deep down, I know: Paul is the ghostwriter of my own ambition.

  • Writing Is World-Building

    Writing Is World-Building

    The writer who seeks literary dominance can be called Manuscriptus Rex. He is a beast acutely aware of his own brokenness, a self-awareness that drags him into the depths of morbidity and despair. But mere recognition of his anguish isn’t enough—he must transcend it. Not through quiet introspection or self-acceptance, but through literary dominance. Writing isn’t just therapy; it’s conquest. His words are not gentle offerings but acts of aggression against the world, though he convinces himself otherwise. He’s not a tyrant—he’s a savior. He doesn’t crave attention—he has something urgent to say, something the world must hear.

    One of the most exalted members of the Manuscriptus Rex species? The Apostle Paul. His life reads like a high-stakes thriller—a battle-worn intellectual waging ideological war through the written word. If Hollywood ever needed a poster child for a writer with a messianic mission, Paul would be it. Ink-stained fingers, unshakable conviction, and a belief that his words would outlast empires—because, of course, they did.

    Thinking of Paul as a character in a movie reminds me of a similarly absurd but far less consequential scene from my own past: the time my high school bodybuilding buddy, Martino, and I were ensnared by the oldest bait-and-switch in history—free food and salvation. We had been lured to a Wednesday night church youth group by the promise of unlimited lasagna and Kool-Aid, a trap set by the twin seductions of carbs and sugar. The youth pastor, a bearded, bespectacled man with the unshakable enthusiasm of someone who truly believed he could sell eternal life like a used car, paced the room as he spun his gospel pitch. He wanted to know if we were ready to accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, as though an extra serving of garlic bread might tip us into theological certainty.

    Martino, a squat, blocky fellow with a neck so thick it could’ve moonlighted as a battering ram, sat politely through the sermon, nodding with the blank expression of a man deep in a carb coma. His eyebrows, heavy and brooding, looked as if they were preparing to stage a labor strike right there on his face. By the time we left, his stomach was full, but his soul remained stubbornly unmoved. Driving home, he grunted through a yawn, “Nice lasagna, but I don’t think I found Jesus in there.”

    Paul would’ve had a field day with Martino, hammering him with letters, debates, and fiery rebukes until he saw the light—or at least surrendered out of sheer exhaustion.

    “Eternal paradise? Eternal hell? If you want to win me over, show me the movie.” Without a flicker of humor, he added, “Jacques Cousteau and his film crew need to do a deep dive into heaven and hell and report back. Then maybe the pastor will have something worth talking about.”

    I couldn’t help but think of Jacques Cousteau and his team of underwater explorers filming their way through the afterlife when I was reading French novelist Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom. In typical Carrère fashion, he takes the early church and flips it into a bizarre TV production, with Saint Paul as the leading man, flexing his theological muscles for the cameras, while Luke, ever the dutiful biographer and behind-the-scenes producer, works overtime to keep Paul in the best possible light. It’s like watching Keeping Up with the Apostles, with Luke spinning Paul’s antics while fending off rival apostles who think ditching the Torah is a little too avant-garde. You can almost picture Luke yelling “Cut!” every time Paul’s dramatic speeches veer a little too close to heresy, scrambling to keep the script on track as the whole Jesus movement teeters on the edge of a theological reality show gone wrong.

    Carrère kicks off his novel with a nod to a TV show he worked on about people who had the inconvenient habit of dying and then popping back into life in a small town. He muses,  “I stopped writing fiction long ago, but I can recognize a powerful fictional device when I see it. And this was by far the most powerful one I’ed been offered in my career as a screenwriter.” In a world that’s often nasty, brutish, and short (thanks, Hobbes), the idea of reuniting with our dearly departed is practically irresistible. The implication? Any religion that dangles this tantalizing offer in front of us is going to beat out the competition—especially those dull creeds that don’t have a resurrection hook.

    As Carrère (who writes as the narrator and a version of himself) dives into production for Les Revenants (The Returned), he lets slip to the show’s directors that he’s also knee-deep in another project—a book about the early days of Christianity, circa 50 A.D. in Corinth. Just like the TV show’s fascination with life after death, his book is centered on a ragtag hero, Paul, a weak and afflicted guy who has the audacity to proclaim the resurrection of a prophet. But Paul doesn’t stop there. He’s selling resurrection like it’s the next big thing, a kind of spiritual VIP access, where believers in this prophet get to share in the resurrection perks. And guess what? This faith spreads like wildfire, catching on faster than the latest TikTok trend, and brings with it a personal transformation that Carrère dubs a “mutation.”

    Soon, this belief system grows so big it becomes mainstream. While Greek mythology gets relegated to the kiddie pool of fairy tales, Paul’s gospel of resurrection, virgin birth, sacrifice, and atonement becomes the intellectual equivalent of filet mignon—served up and taken seriously by the world’s smartest, most educated minds, who swallow it whole. It’s no longer quaint mythology—it’s doctrine. And everyone’s buying in.

    But Carrère doesn’t treat this religion as some ironic punchline. Nope, he’s serious, bordering on obsessive. His novel isn’t a parody of early Christianity; it’s a deep dive into how these early religious pioneers, especially Paul, wrestled to bring their story to life. In Carrère’s view, this whole endeavor is a lot like producing a TV show—grappling with messy production details, contending with rival storylines, and trying to make the narrative stick. His novel becomes a meditation on storytelling itself, especially the stories that linger in our minds, take root, and possess us—even as our faith wobbles on shaky ground. It’s about the narratives that survive the centuries, not because they’re quaint, but because they hit us where it counts.

    By the time Carrère loses his faith and slides into agnosticism, he’s still obsessed with the steadfast faith of others. Religion, he realizes, isn’t going anywhere—it’s hardwired into our brains like some sort of default app we can’t delete. We’re suckers for stories that explain the human condition, and like William James says in The Varieties of Religious Experience, we’ve all got our internal wiring that divides the “healthy-minded soul” from the “sick-minded soul.” Shame, guilt, penance—it’s all built into our psyche. And in moments of catharsis, we somehow manage to feel connected to our Maker, like a spiritual Wi-Fi signal we can only tap into when we’re having an existential meltdown.

    I couldn’t read The Kingdom without recognizing my own affliction: the belief that writing a novel isn’t just storytelling—it’s world-building, doctrine-crafting, the construction of a system so compelling that it hijacks minds and rewires belief. Carrère brilliantly lays out the blueprint for how a book mutates into a religion, how a narrative, if potent enough, doesn’t just entertain—it converts, indoctrinates, and dominates. And that’s when it hit me: my writing demon wasn’t interested in just producing a book. It wanted a Bible, something so monumental it would command devotion, establish authority, and secure my literary immortality. It wasn’t enough to write—I had to found a faith, recruit disciples, and stake my claim in the intellectual marketplace of salvation. Whether it was Paul pitching resurrection or me hammering away at my so-called masterpiece, the impulse was the same: create something too big to ignore, too transformative to discard, and too undeniable to fade into obscurity. And just like Paul, I was willing to burn through years, health, and sanity for the cause.

  • The day I showed up to work in a see-through pirate shirt

    The day I showed up to work in a see-through pirate shirt

    The breeding ground for my unreadable novels was the California desert, where my catastrophic literary judgment was rivaled only by my crimes against fashion. Allow me to paint you a picture of excess so garish that even Liberace would have staged an intervention.

    There I was—a freshly minted full-time professor in a sun-scorched town, drunk on a heady cocktail of naïveté, unresolved teenage angst, and the disastrous influence of International Male and Urban Gear catalogs. To my 27-year-old mind, these catalogs weren’t mere collections of overpriced polyester; they were sacred texts, blueprints for the modern alpha male—or at least a man who looked like he managed a European nightclub and occasionally fled the country under mysterious circumstances.

    But even my delusions had their breaking point. The pinnacle of my sartorial madness arrived in one final, glorious misstep—an outfit so egregious that it shattered the patience of my English Department Chair, a man whose tolerance, until that moment, had been almost biblical.

    At first, my colleagues generously excused my increasingly bizarre wardrobe as “youthful exuberance” from a Bay Area transplant trying to assert some “big city” flair in a desert outpost where fashion trends arrive three decades late. But one fateful day, I pushed the boundaries beyond reason. I strutted into the campus like a peacock ready for a ballroom dance-off, dressed in tight Girbaud slacks that practically screamed, “I’m here to give a lecture, but I might also break into interpretive dance.” My feet were clad in Italian loafers, complete with tassels and tiny bells—yes, bells. Who needs socks when you’ve got bells? 

    But the crown jewel of this sartorial disaster—was the sage-whisper green pirate shirt. And when I say “pirate shirt,” I’m not talking about a whimsical Halloween costume. I’m talking about a translucent, billowing monstrosity that looked like it was plucked from the wardrobe of Captain Jack Sparrow after a particularly wild night of plundering. My bulging pecs were practically hosting their own TED Talk through the sheer fabric, and the effect was more Moulin Rouge than Macbeth.

    Word of my fashion blunder made it to Moses Okoro, our distinguished Chair, a no-nonsense scholar in his fifties who had traded the vibrant streets of Lagos for the dull sands of this backwater town. Moses prided himself on being a man of deep thought, the kind who savored life’s complexities and relished philosophical debates like a connoisseur of fine wine. In the rarefied circles he once frequented, he had been celebrated for his intellectual rigor, a reputation largely sustained by an essay he penned two decades earlier on a celebrated Nigerian novelist. The essay, which dissected themes of post-colonial identity with surgical precision, had been lauded as groundbreaking in its time, securing Moses’s place as a respected voice in academic and literary discussions. But the years had passed, and that once-prominent essay had become a relic—he still leaned on it like a crutch, bringing it up whenever the opportunity presented itself, hoping to rekindle the admiration it had once inspired. 

    By the time I got the midday summons to his office, I knew I was about to get the fashion red card. I walked in, and there was Moses—feet ensconced in some sort of luxurious foot-warmer device, a necessary accessory for his gout. He flashed me a grin that was half-amused, half-pitying like a man witnessing someone try to cook a steak with a hairdryer.

    “Jeff,” he began, in a tone that suggested he was both fond of me and horrified by me. “You’re a striking figure, I’ll give you that. But this—” he gestured vaguely at the shimmering monstrosity draped over my torso—“is taking things too far. I can see more than I care to.” 

    I glanced down at my exposed chest and, for the first time, realized that my pecs were starring in their own soap opera under that filmy fabric. Moses continued, “I get it—a man with your bodybuilding prowess wants to flaunt it. But, Jeff, this is an academic setting, not Studio Fifty-Four. Be more of a professor and less of a Desert Peacock.”

    He then instructed me to march straight home, ditch the pirate couture, and return dressed in something befitting a person who isn’t auditioning for a Vegas show. Before I could slink away in shame, Moses added with a smile, “Jeff, I like you. You’ve got potential. But let me remind you, this town is a fishbowl. Whatever you do in the morning, the whole town knows by lunchtime.”

    That was the small-town way—a place where the smallest fashion faux pas became a full-blown scandal before the sun hit noon. As I left his office, I knew that my pirate shirt days were over, along with my delusions of dressing like the love child of Captain Morgan and Don Juan.

    With a sigh, I trudged home to swap my dreams of high fashion for something a bit more… professorial.

  • EVIL: WHERE SCIENCE AND THE SUPERNATURAL BLEND TOGETHER

    EVIL: WHERE SCIENCE AND THE SUPERNATURAL BLEND TOGETHER

    Evil follows the adventures of a tall, chiseled, impossibly handsome priest, David Acosta, who looks like he bench-presses church pews for fun. He’s got two sidekicks: Kristen Bouchard, a psychologist with the looks of a supermodel and the brains to match, and Ben Shakiv, a tech-savvy assistant who’s there to remind us that even in the battle against Satan, someone needs to handle the Wi-Fi. Together, they travel to the darkest corners of the earth—by which I mean upscale suburban homes—where they confront demonic activity with a cocktail of theology, piety, and science. It’s like Scooby-Doo for adults, only instead of unmasking Old Man Jenkins, they’re reporting back to the Diocese after wrestling with the forces of hell itself.

    Adding a spicy dash of drama to the mix is the forbidden love between our hunky priest and Kristen, who, let’s be honest, is only human, and no one can resist a priest with a jawline that sharp. Their missions are a delightful blend of exorcisms and scientific investigations, all while offering sly, not-so-subtle satire on social media, technology, and the big, bad world of power. It’s like watching The X-Files meet The Exorcist, with a dash of Project Runway thrown in for good measure.

    No battle between good and evil is complete without a proper villain, and Evil delivers one wrapped in a crisp suit and the smarmy charm of a man who’s never met a moral boundary he couldn’t slither past. Enter Leland Townsend, a pencil-necked agent of Satan who oozes the kind of slick, synthetic charm that makes used car salesmen look like monks. If you looked up unctuous in the dictionary, you’d find his face grinning back at you, practically dripping with synthetic sincerity. He’s less a mustache-twirling villain and more a corporate devil—HR-approved, disturbingly polite, and disturbingly effective.

    But the true stars of Evil? The fashion. The main characters strut through supernatural horrors in coats so exquisite they could be on loan from the Louvre, each one worth more than my first car. And let’s talk about the priest’s wrist game—a white-dial Patek Philippe that retails for the cost of a small house. Nothing says “vow of poverty” quite like a $50,000 timepiece. This isn’t just aesthetic indulgence; it’s a quiet, winking commentary from the writers: if you’re going to go toe-to-toe with the devil, you might as well do it in couture. After all, nothing repels demonic forces quite like the confidence of someone dressed like they just stepped out of a Milan runway show.

    Beyond the sartorial spectacle, what is Evil actually about? The show thrives on one central tension: the ambiguity of evil itself. Is it supernatural? Psychological? A fusion of both? The show refuses to let us settle comfortably on any single answer. Take the episode where Kristen Bouchard’s daughters are up at 3 a.m., faces glowing in the eerie blue light of an iPad running some unholy ghost-hunting software. They swear the house is haunted. Their mother, an atheist clinging to the comfort of logic, insists there’s a rational explanation. Evil dangles both possibilities in front of us and then, just when we think we’ve landed on an answer, it yanks the rug out. It never gives us the luxury of certainty, instead keeping us suspended in a deliciously maddening limbo where science and the supernatural blur together. And that’s its brilliance—an exquisite, unnerving dance on the knife’s edge of belief.