A Messiah could make no significant difference - leaves the problems of Life untouched

There has usually been, and commonly, a yearning for a Messiah - a deliverer or saviour of a people or the world. 

The deep problem is not that the Messiah never actually comes; but that even if there was or is a Messiah, and even if he actually liberated or saved his people or the world; then doing this would leave the fundamental problems of Life untouched.

This because even if "my people" or the world was somehow genuinely and lastingly saved from any kind of worldly-affliction such as enslavement, poverty, natural destruction, war, poverty... then there would still be entropy (disease, degeneration, death) and there would still be evil. 

This came to mind in reading Philip K Dick's Exegesis - and considering that for many years he yearned desperately for a Saviour; in the last weeks of his life, he announced his vision of "Tagore" whose role was vicariously to save the planet from Man's ecological destruction.  

But PKD was being short-sighted and overwhelmed by current emotion - like when we are sick or afraid; and imagine "if only" we could be well we would never be unhappy again. 

Even if Tagore had been true and had achieved exactly what Dick hoped he would - this would have made zero qualitative difference to the human condition. 

It is the problem of double-negative values; the Messiah is supposed to save-from - and no matter how many things he was able to save me or us from; then the problems of entropy and evil would still remain.

 

Indeed; no matter what I personally was saved-from - I would still have the problem of my-self and of my-death. 

Like everybody I have ever heard of; I am quite capable of tormenting myself into misery (even despair) even when I am currently un-afflicted by any significant problem - when I am free of pain, of hunger, when I am warm and comfortable and here-and-now secure. 

When I imagine or dream terrible things - I am doing this to myself, and the evil is from me. 

There is the evil in me; there are an uncountable number of bad things that could happen, that cannot be excluded - and there are the universal actualities and possibilities of entropy (especially death) and evil.

The most that could realistically be achieved by an actual Messiah would be to impose on his people (because few would accept it) a kind of irreversible blissful ignorance of the fundamental problems - which would need to be some kind of permanent annihilation of consciousness...

Which is, if not exactly death, then subjectively indistinguishable from being unalive; and amounts to the wish that we never had lived. 

This is the terminus of the primacy of any double-negative values: a preference for not-existence.