Chapter 162. ‘The Seditious Genius of the Spiritual Penis of Jesus’: Christianity, Kin Selection and the Christian Origins of Modern Liberalism

The second treatise of Part I of Mitchell Heisman’s Suicide Note carries the subtitle “How Christianity’s Subversion of Kin Selective Altruism Evolved into the Modern Idea of Social Progress” and runs from page 359 to page 506 of the 2010 text [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “Overview”]. Its table of contents sets out four movements: “Supernatural Rapist” (pp.360-391), “Christian Family Values” (pp.392-421), “Good News! The Trojan Horse is Here!” (pp.422-442) and “Rupture and Rapture” (pp.443-506), the last divided into “Rupture: How Christ Hijacked the Moral Compass of the West” and “Rapture: The End of the World-Rule of the Selfish Gene” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “Table of Contents”]. Heisman takes the sociobiology of W. D. Hamilton and Richard Dawkins and applies it to the historical Jesus. His thesis is that Christianity is a meme complex that turned kin-selective altruism against its own genetic basis. In his account, this reversal later became secular egalitarianism, liberalism and Marxism, and it points toward a technological “rapture”.

The sociobiological toolkit: Hamilton’s rule and the meme

In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins explains Hamilton’s insight in terms of the gene: a gene that causes its bearer to help relatives can spread, because those relatives carry copies of the same gene with a calculable probability. On this reckoning, “a gene for big sister altruistic behaviour should have just as good a chance of spreading through the population as a gene for parental altruism” [Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, #55197, ch.6]. Dawkins insists that “kin selection is emphatically not a special case of group selection. It is a special consequence of gene selection” [Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, #33979, ch.6]. The second tool is Dawkins’s “meme”, a unit of cultural replication that spreads from mind to mind. In Heisman, kin selection explains the “altruism” of Rome and of the family, and the meme explains how Christianity spread through and against them [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “Christian Altruism: The Selfish Meme”].

‘Supernatural Rapist’: the paternity thesis and Crossan’s matrix

The treatise opens with the revolts of 4 BCE. Heisman quotes Josephus on Varus’s destruction of Sepphoris, about four miles from Nazareth. He then quotes John Dominic Crossan: “In Nazareth around the time Jesus was born, men, women, and children who did not hide successfully would have been, respectively, killed, raped, and enslaved” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.360-361]. Combining Crossan’s dating of Jesus’s birth to that year with Dawkins’s remark that Jesus’s paternity is “a strictly scientific question”, he concludes: “it appears highly probable that Mary, Jesus’s Jewish mother, was raped by a Roman soldier… If so, then Jesus was not the ‘son of God’, but the son of a Roman rapist” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.361]. The virgin-birth story, for Heisman, hides this fact; faith in the “son of God” is required precisely because the evidence points the other way [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 27].

Heisman connects his thesis to the ancient tradition. He quotes Celsus’s True Doctrine, as preserved by Origen, to the effect that Mary was “pregnant by a Roman soldier named Panthera” and was “driven away by her husband”. He suggests “Panthera” may mock parthenos (“virgin”) and mentions, as “less likely, but possible”, the archer Tiberius Iulius Abdes Pantera, whose tombstone was found at Bingerbrück in 1859 [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.362-363]. On the reference shelf, Origen calls the Panthera story a fabrication; Borg and Crossan suggest it may preserve a memory of the Sepphoris operations; James Tabor argues the Bingerbrück soldier could have been the father, while Raymond E. Brown, Maurice Casey and Christopher Zeichmann reject this, Zeichmann writing that it is “beyond doubt” that Pantera’s unit was not in Judaea or Galilee at the relevant time [Wikipedia: Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera]. Heisman himself says that the “greater evidence” lies in “the nature of Jesus’s ethical innovations within Judaism” rather than in these texts [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.363].

Heisman then casts Jesus as a pharmakos, “the greatest scapegoat individual of the greatest scapegoat race”, and, citing Robert Trivers on adaptive self-deception, proposes that Jesus “had faith, pure faith, that the God of Israel was his true father”, so that “he healed himself through faith” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.363-367]. He then turns to Crossan’s formula that Jesus and Paul must be understood “within Judaism within the Roman Empire” as “the absolutely necessary matrix”. Where does a half-Jewish, half-Roman Jesus fit? Heisman answers: “there was no middle ground. In this savage historical conflict between Jew and Roman, there was no moderate ground with integrity. There was either transcendence, death, or both” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.369-370; section 31].

Hillel, Hamilton and the inversion of the command structure

Heisman traces the split between Christianity and Judaism to the dispute between Shammai, “a more ‘right-of-center’ or conservative scholar-leader who emphasized strict adherence to Jewish law”, and Hillel, the “left-of-center” interpreter of the law’s spirit [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 32]. In his reading, Bar Kokhba radicalised the Shammaite line and fought Rome by becoming Rome, while Jesus carried the Hillelite line to its limit and defeated Rome by becoming universal [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 32].

Hamilton supplies the next step. Roman virtue, Heisman argues, was kin-selective self-interest: soldiers die for an empire that enriches their families. Jesus “exposed” this [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 33]. Heisman claims that “Jesus’s radicalization of altruism lays bare the selfish motivations of empire, and refutes its claims to own the ‘common good'” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.424]. He reads the Sermon on the Mount as a reversal of political logic. “‘Love your neighbor’ referred primarily to the love of internal peace necessary to wage external war”. “Love your enemy”, by contrast, means internal war for external peace, which is to say war against the family [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 34]. In short, “Jesus’s anti-kin selective behaviors are those that subordinate kinship to altruism” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.426].

‘Christian Family Values’: hatred of the father, service to the child

The section titled “Have you hated your mother today?” (p.392) builds on Matthew 10:34-39 and Mark 3:31-35 (“Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother”). [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “Have you hated your mother today?”] According to the study guide, he reads Jesus’s hatred of family as hatred of his Roman rapist father, with Mary’s violation standing for Rome’s violation of Judea [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 37]. In “Some Are More Equal than Others in God’s Kingdom” he locates the root of Judeo-Christian ethics in the relation between parent and child, in which the powerful serve the powerless. He argues that even the Nazis could not apply “only the strong survive” consistently without killing their own infants. Christianity universalises this compassion for children to all poor, widow, and sickly as God’s children, and so Jesus becomes the “child-king” whom fathers and kings serve [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 38].

The Trojan horse: Christian memes, Paul and the fall of Rome

In “Christian Altruism: The Selfish Meme” (p.422) Heisman reverses the usual moral value of altruism. “The most universalistic altruism would be the genetic suicide of all humanity. Christian altruism can be looked upon as the survival strategy of Christian memes that are waging an evolutionary war against the genes of the believing Christian” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.425]. Then comes the image that gives the section its title: “Jesus effectually hacked the sociobiological system by propagating memes that, like a Trojan horse, infiltrate and change the rules of the system from the inside out” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.427]. Rome is a carnivore, Christianity a virus that “penetrated the minds of its hosts and injected its laws or codes of behavior” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.427-428].

Paul is the agent of that spread. “The ‘mustard seeds’ of Christian memes helped bring down the greatest power of its time. Paul, the most eminent Jesus freak of his generation, seems to have appointed himself Minister of Propaganda within the Kingdom of God”. Heisman lists Paul’s measures: baptism in place of circumcision, the abolition of dietary laws and “the bestowing of elect status onto gentiles” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.429-430]. He follows Crossan in noting that leaven, made from moldy bread, symbolised corruption in the Bible. The parable of the leaven therefore becomes “to actively plant seeds of corruption” in the patriarchal order [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.430]. The section “How Rome was Raped by Jesus’s Penis of the Spirit, Contracting a Deadly Virus” (p.431) completes the metaphor. Just as Roman conquerors penetrated Israel, “the Jewish-based God memes of Christianity penetrated the ancient Roman world” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.431ff].

Nietzsche’s prior indictment

In The AntiChrist Paul is “the Chandala hatred of Rome, of ‘the world,’ in the flesh and inspired by genius”. Nietzsche writes that Paul saw how “with the symbol of ‘God on the cross,’ all secret seditions, all the fruits of anarchistic intrigues in the empire, might be amalgamated into one immense power” [Nietzsche, The AntiChrist, #6519]. For Nietzsche, Christianity “preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned by life”. He says the early Christian “lives and makes war for ever for ‘equal rights'” [Nietzsche, The AntiChrist, #6519]. In the Romanian Genealogia moralei, the slave revolt in morality “începe atunci cînd însuşi resentimentul devine creator şi naşte valori” (“begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values”). Nietzsche’s symbol of the whole struggle is “Roma împotriva Iudeei, Iudeea împotriva Romei” (“Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome”) [Nietzsche, Genealogia moralei, #13637, I.10, I.16].

Heisman takes over Nietzsche’s genealogy but changes the verdict. Elsewhere in the book he announces “Overcoming Nietzsche in the Creation of God” (p.1543) [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “Table of Contents”].

Rupture: the economised political, Marx and the quarrel with Dawkins

In “Rupture: How Christ Hijacked the Moral Compass of the West” (pp.443-472, with the subsections “The Hypocrisy Industry”, “The Christian Collapse into Capitalism” and “Jesus and Marx: Prophets of the Left”) Heisman argues that “Christianity economized the ethics of the West in the sense that Christian values turned the political arena from the arena of highest human virtue to the arena of the lowest human virtue”. Jesus and Marx appear as parallel revolutionaries, each taking a leftward logic to its extreme [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 39]. In his reading, Christian ethics opened a rupture between biological fact and moral ought. That separation of fact from value made possible both objective science and mass individualism [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 40]. Against Dawkins, who wrote that modern moral values “certainly have not come from religion” and that “the onus is not on me to answer”, Heisman replies: “That is an explanation? How can religion be ruled out if he has no substantial alternative explanation?” He holds that secular egalitarianism evolved out of Christianity, not in spite of it [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 41].

Rapture: salvation on ‘God’s Hard Drive’

The final movement, “Rapture: The End of the World-Rule of the Selfish Gene” (pp.473-506: “Jesus Saves (Your Soul [on God’s Hard Drive])”, “Judaism for the Gentiles?”, “The End”), reads eschatology as an account of technological change. Following Crossan, “the end of the world” means the end of an age. He proposes that “‘The end’ would then correspond… to the end of the supremacy of biological humans and the beginning of the supremacy of postbiological life”. He likens Christianity’s exponential spread to open-source software, citing Kurzweil [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.473-474]. “The birth of Christ — the transition from ‘BC’ to ‘AD’ — could be considered the pivotal moment of transition” from biological to postbiological evolution. “If and when biological humans upload their souls or consciousness into computers, pure spirituality will not cease to exist only a physical, material basis” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.472-475]. He concludes that “a time will come when Judaism, Christianity, and Islam will all be superseded by the reality of God-AI” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.473].

The scholarly literature on transhumanism makes a similar genealogical claim from the side of religious studies. In Calvin Mercer’s collection, Heup Young Kim’s East Asian theological chapter states that “‘transhumanism has emerged from a culture shaped by Christianity.’ Transhumanism looks like a techno-secularization of the Judeo-Christian vision”. [Mercer, Religion and Transhumanism, #74801, ch.7]. A chapter in the collection’s first section draws on Ted Peters’s distinction between futurum, “the future as growth, as an actualization of potentials”, and adventus, “a coming new reality”. It notes that in the Christian adventus “the functional agent of transcendence is God” [Mercer, Religion and Transhumanism, #74801, section 1]. Michael Burdett argues that transhumanism depends on and extends the myth of progress (ch.9), and Amy Michelle DeBaets’s “Rapture of the Geeks” (ch.12) offers a feminist critique of Kurzweil’s Singularity [Mercer, Religion and Transhumanism, #74801, “Introduction”]. Robert Geraci makes the same structural claim: “Apocalyptic AI, like its predecessor movements in Jewish and Christian history, starts with a dualistic view of the world”. He adds that “the Jews and Christians looked forward to the resolution of their political dilemmas through the establishment of a new kingdom that they would inhabit in new bodies”, while Apocalyptic AI substitutes evolution for God as guarantor [Geraci, Apocalyptic AI, #75891, ch.1]. The direction differs: these scholars treat the transhumanist vision as a secularised descendant of Christian hope. Heisman treats Christian hope as an unknowing anticipation of the coming technology.

Key points

• Heisman’s second treatise (pp.359-506) argues that Christianity subverted kin-selective altruism and that this subversion became the modern idea of social progress [#38252].
• He claims it is “highly probable” that Mary was raped by a Roman soldier. He cites Crossan on Sepphoris and the Celsus/Panthera tradition. The reference shelf records that mainstream scholarship (Brown, Casey, Zeichmann) rejects the Pantera paternity hypothesis, which James Tabor supports [#38252; Wikipedia: Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera].
• Within Crossan’s “matrix” (Jesus within Judaism within Rome), Heisman’s Jesus had “no middle ground” and therefore universalised the Hillelite line of interpretation.
• Using Hamilton’s kin selection as Dawkins explains it, Heisman reads “love your enemy” as internal war for external peace, and Jesus’s hatred of family as hatred of the Roman father.
• Paul is the “Minister of Propaganda”, and Christian memes are a Trojan horse or virus that weakened Rome. Nietzsche’s AntiChrist and Genealogy had already framed Christianity as a revolt of ressentiment against Rome.
• Against Dawkins, Heisman holds that secular egalitarianism, liberalism and Marxism evolved from Christianity.
• He reinterprets the rapture as the upload of souls and the end of the “world-rule of the selfish gene”. Kim, DeBaets and Geraci, writing from religious studies, see transhumanism as a techno-secularisation of Judeo-Christian eschatology.