Worship of violence
No, it’s not just another ‘choice’.
It may be an unusual case, but it’s hardly the first time that extreme religious belief has resulted in cruelty to children. Now that the “misery memoir” has become a cliché of contemporary publishing, it’s worth remembering that many of the most significant accounts of childhood misery have been associated with religious repression…[I]n Memoir, one of hundreds of books chronicling brutal Irish Catholic childhoods, John McGahern writes of a life in which sudden physical blows were followed by sudden instructions to bow down in front of a crucifix (a fetishisation of extreme violence if ever there was one) and pray. “Authority’s writ ran from God the Father down and could not be questioned,” he says. “Violence reigned… in the homes as well.”
It’s a violent God. The crucifix itself (as Christina Patterson notes) is a symbol of violence. It’s one of the weirdest and most repulsive things about Christianity, that it uses an execution device as a pervasive symbol. Don’t tell me about atonement; the cross has no more to do with atonement than does the gallows or the guillotine or the electric chair or the lethal injection. People don’t walk around with little gallows around their necks – but crosses, oh, that’s a different matter. It isn’t though – it’s an ancient form of execution by torture. It was common as mud – it wasn’t special to Jesus, it was just what the Romans did with anyone poor and obscure and non-Roman who misbehaved, and that was a lot of people. It wasn’t glamorous, it was as squalid as possible. One might as well walk around with a photo of someone being waterboarded as a decoration.
We live in a country in which the proliferation of schools established only to impose particular sets of religious prejudices on young children unable to know, or seek, better is encouraged. Like everything else, it’s about “choice”…No, it isn’t. In this country – whose state religion, incidentally, rarely did anyone any harm, except a bit of boredom on a Sunday morning – we should do better. If parents have the right to believe what they like, their children have the right to an education that teaches them that certain things are wrong, and that, as Edmund Gosse says in Father and Son, it is “a human being’s privilege to fashion his inner life for himself”.
And to say no when the man with the knives comes around.
It’s worthwhile pointing out, I think, that the Qu’ran specifies crucifixion for some offences.
When adults become excited by inflicting wounds on children, we have fairly clear rules. This character should be sharing a flat with Gary Glitter.
It always struck me as one of the more melodramatic aspects of Christianity that so much was made of Jesus’ suffering on the cross.
Sure (assuming he existed) he would have suffered on the cross, and it was a profoundly unpleasant way to die – but his suffering can surely be no greater than that of anyone else executed in this way (or any number of other unpleasant ways).
Aside from all of which, if you believe the Christian story, unlike any number of people executed by crucifixion, Jesus had the comfort of knowing what would ultimately happen to him.
So his suffering was greater because he was dying to atone the sins of humanity? Why would that make being nailed to a cross any the worse? And how would he differ from any number of political martyrs? Leaving aside the question of when humanity gave him authority to atone for anyone in the first place.
So Jesus died for our sins because he loved us? But isn’t he also God? In which case, why not just absolve sins in a less melodramatic, guilt inducing way? Why go to the trouble of all that pain – unless of course it’s not really about love at all, but about a passive-aggressive desire to have everyone in your debt…
I’m aware that this is tending towards incoherent rambling, and in defence I can only say that the whole story or meaning of the crucifixion seems equally incoherent.
Not to mention, patricidal.
What would folks be wearing if Jesus had been impaled? [Or was that question raised in the story?]
It was too close to mealtime for me to read the article, but I think got the drift…This sort of thing bleeds over (you should pardon the expression) into nonreligious households. My firmly atheist stepfather used to slap me around (Mom just stood there like a bump on a log) over trifles, and at other times good old Mom liked to gouge up my face with her nails because she thought there was something wrong with my skin. Whatever each one did to me was fine with the other one (they had the best marriage in town…cemented with my blood.) Both were raised by religious people. And lied to me that there was a god I had to grovel to, to keep me in line. –Or was all this just an example of human sicko-hood?
All right, that may have been a bit off topic, but sometimes I wonder what would have happened if Christ got 5 to 10 with time off for good behavior. (Forgot who I stole that one from.)
Don’t worry, I’m not going to do a memoir.
‘what would have happened if Christ got 5 to 10 with time off for good behavior’
Wasn’t going to happen. When pharoh was ready to throw in the towel, god used the old mind control to ‘harden his heart’ so he could get to righteously use all those plagues. If god’s plan has you down as the fall guy, free will ain’t going to help. You think god would let Pilate wake up in a good mood thinking,’What the hell, give the kid a break.’?
The whole crucifixion, Jesus is going to die for your sins thing always seemed to me like a big set-up job, even when I was a little kid at church. It just seemed so stupid. I remember asking my mom, if Jesus knew all that bad shit was coming down, why the hell did he go along with it? I can’t remember what she said, but she might well have said she didn’t know, or that it’s just a story. That’s what she said about most Bible stories, that they were just really symbolic pieces of fiction, where the words and the people mean something other than what we think they mean. I think I learned that big word “metaphor” when I was 5 or 6.
My second fave part of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Saramago is when Jesus finally gets the whole story of the set up from God and says, nope. No way in hell I’m going to do that. Forget about it. And takes off and pouts. At least Saramago provides some kind of narrative sense of the whole deal. (My first fave part of the book is the glowing dirt).
That does it; got to read that book.
It was the glowing dirt that did it, right?
More the bit about pouting. I do love a good pouter.
McGahern’s novel The Dark was banned in Ireland for its alleged pornographic content and implied clerical sexual abuse.
In the controversy over this he was forced to resign his teaching post. He subsequently moved to England.
Yeah, writers (such as McGahern) in the past were forced out of their country because of the Roman Catholic church and the censorship it put on their artistic writings.
Thousands of Children from industrial schools fled Ireland also because they were ashamed of having merely been born in circumstances that did not befit the Roman Catholic churches’ teachings.
Crucifixes, alongside long leather black belts – which hung neatly on robes of the religious, of both genders were very handy weapons to lash down daily on small children.
Well, for the want of repeating myself – when children were habitually told by the religious of the industrial school in Goldenbridge that they were worse than the soldiers who beat, scourged, nailed and crucified Christ to the cross – should it not automatically follow with physical reminders of blows by them to the bodies of children with the aforementioned weapons.
They were only a hand away. Such was the temptation and agony in the garden.
INRI = Iron nails right in – or so we were as children led to believe.
They told you that?
Godalmighty. There’s just never any bottom to it – the poison.
Even though most children in Goldenbridge did not know the meaning of the “parent’s” word – they were constantly reminded by the Sister’s of Mercy that their parents and they were responsible for Jesus having been by the jews slain and tortured and placed on the cross to die.