The Passion of Christ is basically gore and I hated it. The hyper focus on Jesus’s suffering instead of focusing on his message is a huge problem in Christianity in my opinion. It’s had this bizarre tendency to normalize abuse in the name of one of the most loving human beings ever to walk the planet.
I 100% understand an emphasis on the suffer of Christ as a personal meditation on the nature of suffering and how we relate to God in our suffering. But the kind of glorification of the torture of Jesus that is common in a lot of Christianity is really twisted.
Yeah it’s a real extreme-Catholic/Orthodox thing to focus on the blood and pain I think. Catholic art, especially those little wax icons tends to show more of the blood running from the wounds on the cross. Mel Gibson is one of those extremists, hence his barely concealed antisemitism.
Huh, maybe it’s all Christians then… I don’t know I started to get the feeling like I wanted to explore more about faith (I’m a permanently wavering agnostic) and started reading the New Testament. And very early on in Matthew Jesus says something along the lines of don’t pray in front of all the others in the temple to show off how holy you are but do it in private. And that line of thinking inevitably leads to questioning the need for a church
Of course it was St Paul and not Jesus who formalised things a bit more.
The Passion of Christ is basically gore and I hated it. The hyper focus on Jesus’s suffering instead of focusing on his message is a huge problem in Christianity in my opinion. It’s had this bizarre tendency to normalize abuse in the name of one of the most loving human beings ever to walk the planet.
I 100% understand an emphasis on the suffer of Christ as a personal meditation on the nature of suffering and how we relate to God in our suffering. But the kind of glorification of the torture of Jesus that is common in a lot of Christianity is really twisted.
Yeah it’s a real extreme-Catholic/Orthodox thing to focus on the blood and pain I think. Catholic art, especially those little wax icons tends to show more of the blood running from the wounds on the cross. Mel Gibson is one of those extremists, hence his barely concealed antisemitism.
That shit is rampant among American evangelicals as well. Just Calvinism and puritanism at their worst
Huh, maybe it’s all Christians then… I don’t know I started to get the feeling like I wanted to explore more about faith (I’m a permanently wavering agnostic) and started reading the New Testament. And very early on in Matthew Jesus says something along the lines of don’t pray in front of all the others in the temple to show off how holy you are but do it in private. And that line of thinking inevitably leads to questioning the need for a church
Of course it was St Paul and not Jesus who formalised things a bit more.