기독교의 창립자들은 예수가 실제 삶을 체험하도록 설정했다. 예수는 진짜로 고통받았고 자신을 희생했다. 하나님이라면 실제로 체험할 수가 없고, 정말로 고난을 겪을 수 없다.

"The founders wanted the Christ to really have skin in the game; he did actually suffer and sacrifice himself. A god cannot have such a skin in the game, cannot really suffer"

 

CHAPTER FROM SKIN IN THE GAME:
LIFE IN THE SIMULATION MACHINE--WHY TRUMP WON --WHAT'S THE POINT, ALL THIS BICKERING ABOUT THE TRINITY

I once sat in a dinner party on a large round table across from a courteous fellow called David. The host was a physicist, X who was honoring an author, a former secretary of the great Borges, so, except for the fellow David, everyone was dressed like people who read Borges. As to David, he was dressed like someone who lives in the Park Slope side of Brooklyn. At some point during the dinner he unexpectedly pulled an ice pick and made it go through his hand. I had no clue what the fellow did for a living –nor was I aware that X was into magic. It turned out that David was a magician (his name is David Blaine), and that he was very famous.

I knew very little about magicians, assumed it was all about optical illusions –the central inverse problem that makes it easier to engineer than reverse-engineer. But something struck me at the end of the party. David was standing by the coat check using a handkerchief to sop us drops of blood coming out of his hand.

So the fellow was really making an icepick go through his hand –with all the risks it entailed. He suddenly became another person in my eyes. He was now real. He took risks. He had skin in the game.
I met him again a few months later and, as I tried to shake hands with him, noticed a scar where the icepick came out of his hand.

HOW TO BICKER LIKE A BYZANTINE BISHOP
This allowed me to finally understand the entire business of the Trinity. The Christian religion, throughout Chalcedon, Nicea, and other ecumenical councils and various synods of argumentative bishops, kept insisting on the dual nature of Jesus Christ. It would be theologically simpler if God were god and Jesus were man, just like another prophet, the way Islam views him, or the way Judaism views Abraham. But no, he was both man and god; the duality is so central it kept coming back though all manner of refinement: whether the duality allowed sharing the same substance (Orthodoxy), the same will (monothelites), the same nature (monophysites).
The founders wanted the Christ to really have skin in the game; he did actually suffer and sacrifice himself. A god cannot have such a skin in the game, cannot really suffer (or, if he does, such a definition of a god with a human nature would back up our argument). It would be like a magician who performed an illusion, not someone who actually bled after putting his icepick.

THE MATRIX
Philosophers, unlike the equally argumentative but more sophisticated bishops, don’t get the point with the so-called experience machine. Simply, you sit in a machine and someone plugs a few cables into your brain, and you undergo an experience. This experience will never be real –only a modernistic academic philosopher who never took risk can believe that nonsense. Why?
Because life is sacrifice and risk taking. If you do not undertake a risk of real, reversible or potentially irreversible harm from an adventure, it is not an adventure. The argument can lead to niceties about the mind-body problem, but don’t tell your local philosopher.

TRUMP
I have a tendency to watch television with the sound off. When I saw Donald Trump in the Republican primary standing next to other candidates, I became certain he was going to win that stage of the process, no matter what he said or did. Why? Because he was real and the public –composed of people who take risks, not the lifeless nonrisktaking analysts we will discuss in the next chapter –would vote anytime for someone who actually bled after putting an icepick in his hand than someone who did not.