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Absolutely! Trying to understand world religions better, it stops very soon once you keep digging deeper. Asking it, why a torture instrument (the cross) became the symbol of Christianity , it tells me that „This content may violate our content policy“

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Tangentially, as a catholic myself, I recently began to find it weird how openly my religion is displaying a medieval torture setup with an obviously tortured, wounded and half-dead man on it, mid-suffering. Not only is it everywhere in churches, but often villages will have big close-to-life-sized, colored statues of him bleeding. And grandmas have it hang all around their house too for everyone to see.

Imagine if we replaced every cross statue with some other form of torture that is less symbolic. Say, the scene from saw where he just cut his leg off.

Would you object to that scene being displayed as a big ad in your city, or to it being immortalized in your local cemetery as a colored statue? What would your grandma say if you hung posters of that in her living room and her bedroom?

I have to admit though, I never found it weird as a child, and I don't think it affected me one bit. Whereas the Spiderman movie spiderbite really upped my phobia of spiders when I saw it at 6.

I don't know what to make of all this, I just learned to pause and find all of it weird for a second every once in a while.

> a medieval torture setup

Why would you call it medieval?

Because that word doesn't only mean "from the medieval period".

> "having a quality (such as cruelty) associated with the Middle Ages", or

> "extremely outmoded or antiquated"

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/medieval

I am not a Christian, but AFAIK the "Jesus suffered and died for our sins" bit is pretty central ?

Also, IMHO "leg cut off" would be much more traumatic for the viewer. AFAIK most representations avoid the blood too, or don't color it, or don't show much of it ?

They always have drops of blood coming out of crown of thorns and the stakes dripping down

I am thinking of Nietzsche's thoughts on Christianity being built on slave morality.

Catholic art got a lot more explicit highlighting suffering as a response to Protestantism. I remember studying this in art history.

From wikipedia:

The Council of Trent proclaimed that architecture, painting and sculpture had a role in conveying Catholic theology. Any work that might arouse "carnal desire" was inadmissible in churches, while any depiction of Christ's suffering and explicit agony was desirable and proper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Reformation#Baroque_ar...

It's especially interesting to contrast this rise in the brutality, violence, and realistic physicality of western Christianity's art with traditional Byzantine iconography. My first thought goes to Myshkin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot. Seeing an image of the dead Christ from Holbein [1]:

"At that painting!" the prince suddenly cried out, under the impression of an unexpected thought. "At that painting! A man could even lose his faith from that painting!" "Lose it he does," Rogozhin suddenly agreed unexpectedly. They had already reached the front door. "What?" the prince suddenly stopped. […]

By contrast, I once read or heard somewhere that in Byzantine depictions of the crucifixion, one cannot really know if it is the cross that holds up Christ's body or He who holds up the cross.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_of_the_Dead_Christ_in...

I can assure you that there are plenty of crosses that very clearly and unambiguously hold up the crucified Jesus in Eastern Orthodox churches and homes.

Its weird but without that sacrifice there would be no "christ" as it is a core event of the entire faith. So while weird it's logical it's so universally symbolic.

Catholicism is weird. (I say this as a Catholic.) St Lucy holding her gouged-out eyeballs, relics (super old pieces of human bodies), etc. Everywhere you look, there’s something quite strange. And the deeper you go, the stranger it all is. I love it, though.

I object to any religion that tries to impose its principles on the entire population. Just like, you know, those right-wing USA lunatics who prohibit abortion or Taliban in Afghanistan who deny basic human rights. Essentially, these 2 groups of people are just about the same.

> Trying to understand

Now meditate about the issues in the idea of trying to understand things that require intelligence through asking the very implementation of unintelligence.

(Intelligence is evolving a world model through critical consideration. Unintelligence is acritical disconnected repetition.)

...Furthermore: intelligence is developed (like muscles are developed by moving) by asking oneself questions; exercising creativity and selection in the conception of hypotheses; noting the issues - foundational, satisfactional etc. - in the provisional possible answers found; investigating further to make the candidate ideas more solid or more productive and iterating the process for the inherent branches.

Asking an "artificial lunatic" contravenes a few of the implications of the above - starting from the idea of your own exercise.

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