rjb2112:

I am been observing the reactions of people to the death of Michael Jackson and I find that there is at this time as when any iconic celebrity dies percievably before their time, a fairly large number of people who react in an almost religous manner, bordering on deity worship. Which leads me to the question: Is celebrity culture a kind of religion?

Personally I think it comes very close to it at the least, and is full blown at the extreme. I don't see it as or bad, I just see it as being.

An accurate observation.

Princess Diana was the last comparable event.

I think that if Jesus existed, he was a nice guy who told some common sense to his followers.

When he died - and in such hideous fashion - it's no wonder that every word he said was analysed and written down and exaggerated and made him out to be the panacea for all the world's ills over every successive re-writing of the story.

"He must be a deity or we couldn't bear it otherwise ..." - that sentiment applies to Michael Jackson or Princess Diana or Elvis. That is how many people deal with loss.

Neither were that clever - but in death, their contribution to the world gets subconsciously analysed and then consciously exaggerated.

But what about Einstein or Gallileo or Darwin - why are there no cults sprung up about these people? Whose collective intellect benefitted mankind so much that neither Jackson or Diana would have had any kind of explanation for their deaths without them!

It's because the masses don't understand the advanced thinking of a scientist. When a scientist dies, most think of him/her as a clever weirdo spending their life in a lab. And yet these people have given us everything - even freetime to do with as we please (such as listen repeatedly to Michael Jackson's songs over and over again on devices made by our forgotten heroes - or 24 hour news endlessly repeating a report on the death of Diana thanks to satellites in orbit around the Earth)!

I heard Jackson described several times as "a genius" - he was not. He was a talented musician who was thick as pigshit with a short-term brain - so short-term that he never grew up to be a proper adolescent. And he used his riches to keep himself "young" in his own way - an effort which cost him his life at the age of 50 thanks to his "elixir" cocktail of drugs. (when they tell you there's no external trauma and that it will take 6 weeks to work out cause of death, you know it's definitely drugs, and lots of them).

Nobody remembers the true heroes to humanity - the people whose wisdom we have real evidence for in our daily lives. Isn't that funny?

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