Kurt Cobain: The Aborted Christ
It’s common to leave Christianity as a teenager and live in a worldview of atheist materialism. Probably this has to do with the dilemma of sexuality more than any other theological contention. When you die and that’s it, sex is communion. Then when one has combined having sex with being good at keeping a relationship alive, loving, and stable, you might have kids and become more conservative, which is a great time to return to religion. Now that your cooming lifestyle fits the bill, poof, it’s 80% easier.
But sometimes, people go off the deep end and are lost. Are they lost to Christ?
What can Kurt Cobain teach us about living a Christ-like life?
Here’s a more churchey christian talking about it, clearly one of the good ones. I found that while googling for a clip from Montage of Heck, a documentary about Kurt’s life, where a Christian angrily derides Kurt’s negative example for the young people.
When I was a christian lad in public school going through puberty, I had what you might call a goth phase, though it was more centered on Kurt’s aesthetic than say Rob Zombie’s or Marilyn Mansons. I had long hair that covered my face, like a perpetual hoodie, and by the end of the year when my videogame rental business got log-jammed by the State and embezzled by my ernstwhile business partner-turned bully, the first girl I ever kissed came up to me at lunch, my nails black, my t-shirt black — my soul still presumably reasonably light, I hadn’t even seen porn or smoked any pot — and she asked me if I was a satanist. And I explained, that there aren’t really any satanic churches in Woodstock Virginia, so it’s really just me doing my own thing.
Which is hilarious.
This was 1997. Anti-Christ Superstar had toured the previous year and my friend’s older brothers had gone to one of the shows. “Manson in concert, it’s fucking sick.” In my Christian psuedo-bubble, the overt satanism was still oppressive to me. I liked Nine Inch Nails more. But Kurt’s music I’d been introduced to in 1995, alongside the 1995 Grammy Award Winners, on Easter Sunday actually, I got Unplugged in New York.
I remember playing “About A Girl” for my mother and she was like “wooww Pat this is actually pretty good” because Kurt was actually a blues singer who happened to do an imitation pop-punk-metal band because he was a redneck from the woods who had an idea of what city punks liked. About A Girl is about his first girlfriend, the man really only ever had two, though probably a lot of groupie threeways with Courtney and bi stuff before that, and his first gf was really a solid loving person. They got rent apart by the life-changing speed of Kurt’s ascent into artistic semi-deification. Courtney was a seasoned artist with a Lilith streak and was more that speed, and it would not be wise to just judge Courtney, or to assume she must have had him hit when maybe she wanted her daughter to have a dad, divorce aside. It’s a dark conclusion to jump to. More likely, the last song on Unplugged, which was done up with funerary wreaths at Kurt’s bequest and recorded mere weeks before his suicide, the last song is a soul bleed about heartbreak and infidelity.
Jesus said, if you divorce your wife and marry another you commit adultery. Hardcore people take that as a prohibition against divorce in all circumstances. I actually think there’s room to interpret this as having mutually consensual divorce as a thing. But I think to Kurt, the marriage breaking up and her dating Corgan and such, even if the timelines are clean from a secular “affective responsibility” point of view (e.g. no overlap, no cheat) Kurt clearly wanted this family more than anything and was spiraling psychotically into the heroin again in the wake of the rift.
So what’s Courtney supposed to do, stay married to a guy so he doesn’t kill himself?
Anyway here’s some Kurt Cobain vs. Jesus comparisons:
Kurt Cobain: Didn’t resurrect from the dead
Jesus: Suicide by cop kinda? Suicide by disagreeing vocally with religious conservatives? The messianic prophetics and passion in the garden set it up not as a suiiiicide per se but as an intentionally getting yourself killed
Kurt Cobain: Long hair
Jesus: Long hair
Kurt Cobain: suffered from stomach pains he claimed only heroin could sooth
Jesus: cured ailments
Kurt: had strong values about people being free, loving marginalized groups and hating oppression
Jesus: had strong values about people being free, loving marginalized groups and hating oppression
Kurt: bi/pan but sort of demi-heteroromatic
Jesus: seems to be ace unless had family, it would take a lot to be a 30 year old Jewish man in that society and not be married
Kurt: traumatized by abusive step-father, rejected by his father and grandparents
Jesus: raised by a nice step-father who gave him the loving base of self-esteem to be able to wander into John the Baptist’s camp in good faith, forsaken by his father “why have you forsaken me!?” for a great reason which was to reset metaphysics to be nicer for everyone
Kurt: lionized after death, lives on in the hearts of millions of followers who love him because they feel a sincere compassion and empathy that resonates through the pathos of his works
Jesus: ionized after death, lives on in the hearts of millions of followers who love him because they feel a sincere compassion and empathy that resonates through the pathos of his works
Kurt: died and descended into Heck, where he purged his sins out of the utmost sincerity of his soul and then ascended into Heaven
Jesus: died and descended into Hell, where he took the people in Abraham’s bosom up to Heaven, fueled by the utmost sincerity of God. Possible Invincible Ignorance helps a lot of non-Jews as well. Like Plato, right? Pythagoras? Eh.
Kurt Cobain: makes you wonder about the theology of Hell, how could someone who clearly sinned and sang at his own funeral that “Jesus Dont’ Want Me For A Sunbeam” as well as “Lake of Fire” be forgiven? It’s like Kurt knew where he was going… or did he?
Jesus: makes you wonder about the theology of Hell because people have attributed him saying increasingly more elaborate things about perpetual moral judgement, from a brief mention of “unquenchable fire” in Mark which may be a reference to the trash fire outside town, to the elaborate parables of Mathew and Luke. How could a loving God have introduced a *worse* afterlife than the shade world Greek style afterlife people assumed back then? How could even a benignly indifference God sanction any infinite amount of suffering? Vatican II introduces the personalist view that it’s actually like No Exit in that you reject god and it’s a permanent deal, so you’re trapped in your own bullshit mind for all eternity, and that seems more interesting because you can imagine a wide variety of dramatic trippy films involving people’s idiosyncratic ways of suffering through their own habit or folly.
Many Christians are hardcore and like to really apply these rules and delineate who is in and who is OUT, and to them Kurt would be OUT. Whereas, even a secular humanist feminist, or perhaps a wiccan, could acknowledge that Marilyn Manson, symbolism aside, did sexually abuse people including someone famous, and that is a real crime in most worldviews. But Kurt writing edgy stuff and singing about feeling rejected by god, the same way he was rejected by his family, that’s not a real crime. Having “satanic” dollheads is not a real crime. Vandalizing a church’s crucifix, sure, but this is all classic teen stuff. He was gravely derelict in his duty to his daughter for having killed himself, but you know it’s very common for men to react to a wife-induced divorce with worse. Cops hardly ever enforce or protect against feminicide, very common. Kurt would never do that. He was a softie.
So does being a huge sweetheart who spent his young life pretending to be a worse person than he really is out of pathological self-loathing due to childhood neglect and adolescent breaks, who was vaguely Christ-like in several ways — but not in others! — merit eternal suffering?
Or could it be that Jesus actually wanted Kurt Cobain for a sunbeam after all?
How much work can we do on ourselves after we die? Could it be that despite being a pansexual, a junkie, a blasphemer and paternal abandon-er via suicide, that Kurt still merits salvation for the underlying good intentions in his heart?
Hardliners say no, Unitarians and Quakers and such say Yes. Molly Bloom says Yes one thousand times. Not everyone can be correct.
I’d really like it if God’s eternal love is so powerful that it saves people like Kurt. It seems to me that this is the essential prescription of Christianity. But some people are really paranoid about kids getting possessed by alien subverters via heavy metal music and proceeding to do what millions of years of evolution tells them to do, instead of not doing it! There are all these Christians out there who support violent foreign policy, racist systems, hoarding wealth instead of helping the poor, fearing sexual sin while loving guns, judging people, hassling people over the internet or via the law, and also hating Kurt Cobain and every artist who ever blasphemed or hereticized (Darren Aronofsky I am looking at you).
But it seems like the more Christ-like one becomes the more you’d want to be a Universalist. And then God says well we can’t do that because there are child murderers here, and you say well maybe some of those child murderers could get therapized in purgatory and then the kid can forgive them from heaven and they could reconcile what lead them down that path, and God says well they need to have a little faith to make that possible at all, and you say well can faith be interpreted extremely broadly? And God says, sure I’m a forgiving father and son and holy spirit, of course, and you say ok how about everyone actually has faith to the extent that they commit themselves to deontological or consequentialist models of consistent “good” behavior based on their best-efforts formulation of a worldview given available information and social constraints, and God’s like: <modal logic diagram> — because God can speak in extremely high-bandwidth symbolic forms, and you’re like, ok ok that checks out.
And this is the story of how Abraham talked God into not destroying a city with fire (for they were child abusers… no word on what happened to the victims) based on there being 1 good man in it, Lot, who offered his daughters to the crowd to rape instead of the angelic guests, for they were women and thus you know, this is what I have available in my home, but you would treat my guests this way?! He was a righteous man. And if that fucking sexist piece of shit dad can be considered righteous, well then by Job, by Jobs, by heck, by fuck, sir, by fuck I say to thee: Kurt Cobain can be saved too.
For if we are all called to become like Christ, we would grow so deeply in empathy for all minds that we’d really want the minimal suffering possible. And if these ontological gulfs between those who GAF and those who hurt and truly do not GAF, are so wide, that the love of God cannot cross them due to Free Will, which is always 50% to 99% compromised by imperfect information, mammalian impulse and circumstantial constraints, then let us as least save almost everyone. Or everyone that can be saved.
What was most Christ-like to me about Kurt was how he had a very pure sense of position. He wasn’t turning over forex tables in the temple but he did repudiate materialism, instead emphasizing things like feminism, gay rights, environmental protection (bandmate Krist is more into that activism in particular) and other secular humanist values. You could take the doctrine of Invincible Ignorance and apply it to Kurt because his family didn’t really give him a proper, loving christian upbringing; fact, meet supposition.
So then only people who have pretty good parents and get religious indoctrinate and then rumspringa themselves out but die, do they get a pass? They didn’t live long enough for the acetlycholine in their brains to chill out and make them less horny wankers and more loving responsible potential parents, ok so you pretty much have to have had a priveliged life and then do most of the right stuff, come back, and then cheat on the wife or something, or like push the nuke button, or perhaps encourage gullible people to over-invest in your crypto thing and then they kill themselves, you’ve got to life a life where you aren’t doing horrible fucked up shit. Like, I can use profanity to communicate a self-evidentiary threshold of moral depravity that 99% of humanity, even atheist communists, can agree to, just by evoking the visceral impact of the profanity, and tack on the horrible. We know the horror genre exists as fiction and in reality too, and we don’t damn Wes Craven (though like, I could see him getting damned because he has spent his whole life thinking about hell, but so too have most Christians… hmmm) and we do damn people who kill children or target civilians for pointless wars of aggression. But then, we kind of give a pass to people in those militaries who were following orders, because what are they supposed to do, start shooting at their CO? I mean, you better fucking get into heaven for blowing your CO’s head off instead of the kid and then go down in a hail of gunfire — maybe the kid escapes in the confusion.
So anyway, I can see why people like reincarnation for the early Church and the reincarnative reading of Christ’s chat with Nicodemus. You must be born again doesn’t mean, get baptized (pretty big symbolic leap in that), but literally means, you’ll reincarnate and do better next time. But also Christ emphasized to Nicodemus that being a very pious legalist guy is not bad, but it’s not enough to transcend to the big time with the Laird. Nay, ye must do better next time. It’s a serious long-term journey and what Christ offers is a one-lifetime ticket. There’s another reading of Genesis where the guys are reincarnating and adding up centuries of total life on earth, incld. Jacob being killed by Essau, literally ascends ladder to heaven as a dead guy, reincarnates does better next time.
Now, this is formal heresy, even though there’s these ways of reading it, because the Valentinians were a serious mini-Manicheanism type stuggle in the early church with the Orthodox. And the Orthodox believed in the harder line religion, Augistine struggled with it a lot in the 400s, because idk it seemed more consistent to them, with the texts. But the idea of demons was, that’s over, Jesus mopped that up, the idea of hell was muted, it was more about getting to heaven. Then we got Purgatory doctrine. This helped people imagine a field in which justice is applied with some more nuance. It’s not an evenly distributed justice though, over a line is infinite bad, and then there’s finite bad for most people leading to infinite good.
So we can place Mr. Cobain in Purgatory, where he is rocking out with other flawed people or in his own personal Evangelion series-ending type gestalt.
So Purgatory helped people accept the theology, but for a trade-off. Sure this means only maybe 5% of really nasty people go to Hell, but it means 94.99% of people go to Purgatory.
Well with reincarnation it’s like that but it’s much more smoothly distributed, and it’s a much older belief that about as many people share. So whose to say? Irenaus, the Council of Nicea, the consensus of church fathers.
Well maybe the 1000 year reign in Revelations was just the 1000-ish year reign of Christian Roman Empire, including Byzantium, we’re talking 320 legalization, 380 state-mandated religion, to 1453 fall of Constantinople. So things got bad temporarily but then we saw the printing press, the age of exploration, protestant reformation etc. Then medicine. Population boom. Quality of life exceeding kings by a mile. Maybe the Kingdom of God is at hand here on earth, we’re creating it by being nice people, not nuking, doing good work with our hands or with the technology, improving life-expectancy and healing the sick, eliminating pain from child birth, stuff like that.
That’s called Full Preterism btw and it’s not a formal heresy, you can believe that and still go to the same church barbeques. It’s a way to say syncretism and liberal pluralism and freedom of religion are good things because people get to chose to be good more than they were political able to before. Sure it’s not perfect there’s still evil, but we can do something about it. This points to a sort of long-term incrementalist utopianism, which has its more vanguardist cousins without any theism like the ol’ Marxism or the ol’ Liberal Activism and their many children.
In conclusion Kurt Cobain, born in an age of plenty, grew up to be a rich rockstar and then threw it all away in a death spiral: saved or no?
I think that if orthodox Christians who follow the Law are getting 50% of it right viz Faith and faithless artists who really vibe high even when they’re vibing low, who advocate for a better world or shine light on those suffering in darkness via the pathos, they’re getting maybe not 50% but something, they’re getting some other % of Christ-likeness.
Maybe the more Christ-like you get the more you force yourself to see the theology a bit differently in order to amplify compassion.
Maybe Kurt could have been a very Christ-like man if he had lived these decades. And this is what I mean by the purportedly inflammatory and blasphemy-baiting phrase “the aborted christ” from his notebook etching “Abort Christ” which I think he also vandalized on a church once. Here was another Christ-in-the-making, whose progress was defrayed. And so too are we, and whether our mission may abort or not, are we not at least trying?
If he hadn’t killed himself, it would have better so much better.
I can see him on stage at a local place in a small town, singing rockabilly blues, finally unafraid of revealing he is a redneck from a small town who can actually sing without scratching his throat.
He sings a Leadbelly song at his daughter’s wedding. “Ain’t it a shame to go fishing on a Sunday” — Leadbelly’s lyrics examine legalistic paranoia about pissing off god by breaking sabbath rules, then “Ain’t it a shame to beat your wife on a Sunday, ain’t it a shame” — Leadbelly is talking about serious sin here. There are few worldviews where beating your wife any day of the week is not a shame. So Kurt plays the Leadbelly song at the wedding but he changes the lyrics to “Love your wife”, because he doesn’t want to put a bad vibe on the event and most of his catalogue or favorite covers have dark lyrics. Kurt Weird Al’s Leadbelly lyrics out of love.
At the reception Krist offers him some champagne and Kurt declines, he’s done AA and sees a glass of bubbly as an unfortunately slippery slope to full dosing of opiods. Krist says: “yeah that’s right I’m sorry… shit man, sometimes I remember the 90s and I can’t believe you made it.”
Kurt lets out his take on the Beavis and Butthead chuckle and says: “Not Everybody Makes It!”
