Wouldn’t it be really strange if people adored and fawned over an instrument of torture? If they talked about “the glory of the guillotine”? Perhaps even wore little gold guillotines around their necks?
And yet it seems completely normal when it is a cross — a horrible, bloody, barbaric instrument of death. Richard Dawkins makes note of this in The God Delusion:
It is, when you think about it, remarkable that a religion should adopt an instrument of torture and execution as its sacred symbol, often worn around the neck. Lenny Bruce rightly quipped that “If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.” (p. 285)
It might actually be worse if Christians focused on the resurrection as their symbol, though — being harder to represent, they might be wearing a large golden stone around their necks.
Hello!
Well, I believe that the use of a cross as a Christian symbol began because Constantine I saw it in a vision (the one about “in hoc signo vinces”) prior to the Milvian Bridge battle, on 312 C.E. Before that, doves, fishes, anchors, etc., where used instead.
I often find strange that none of these symbols seem to be apparent in archaeolgical sites before the year 200 C.E. Furthermore, there are no buildings identified as Christian churches earlier than that year either. Where were all the Christians? I know they were there, but maybe they were quite different from the ones we see today, with symbols and beliefs that would seem un-Christian to us, and maybe they would feel the same about present Christian symbology and beliefs..
Brg.
Actually the cross was in use well before Constantine. Other symbols were favored in the early church, but by the second and third centuries the cross was already there. If the cross iconography wasn’t there, Constantine would have probably seen a fish in his vision instead. Or a Mithraic bull icon and we’d all be Mithra worshippers now. (Wikipedia’s article on the Christian Cross has a few pointers to early uses of the cross by Christians pre-Constantine).
I believe that most who called themselves Christians were in hiding up to that point- it was still an underground religion and many were being persecuted at the time for that belief system.
I have often found it disturbing that Christians wear the cross as well, particularly those who wear the crucifix- displaying the tortured body of one’s savior around the neck seems nearly sadistic to me. Why proclaim one’s faith in such a way? The dove is also used as a symbol of Christianity- I wonder why more people don’t choose that symbol instead?
There’s an online book, The Pains where people worship nooses instead of crosses.
And didn’t the Norse associate Odin with the gallows? Though they didn’t adore gallows so much as sacrifice people on them, though.
Also, guillotines are hardly instruments of torture. Execution, yes, but not torture. Can’t really put a guillotined person back…
And didn’t the Norse associate Odin with the gallows? Though they didn’t adore gallows so much as sacrifice people on them, though.
Perhaps not, but the Norse did have a high regard for Yggdrassil the World Tree. Which was the tree that Odin supposedly hung from for nine days as he learned the secret knowledge of the runes for his people.
Also, guillotines are hardly instruments of torture.
A point I was going to make – guillotines were actually invented as a humane form of execution – a quick death rather than the more-than-occasionally torturous death of hanging, where if your executioner screwed up and tied the knot wrong you’d die slowly by strangulation rather than by the quick neck snap that was supposed to kill you.
Well, it also *did* stick the world together, so it wasn’t all that bad :p
Ironic, how similar the two myths are, coming to think of it.
Odinists wore spears, actually… the Norse gods, of course, were more celebrated for their lives, in general, than their deaths, so followers of Thor, for instance, wore little hammers.
Or big hammers. With which to crush the opposition. Mwahahahaha.
:D
I know a modern Odinist and they wear hammers. And oddly enough they have a prayer where they make the sign of the hammer and looks very much like the sign of the cross.
Ironic, how similar the two myths are, coming to think of it.
Odin was also pierced with a spear as part of his sacrifice. The parallels are interesting, if you look closely. I suspect at least some of it is cross-pollination from Christian missionaries, though (much as early Christians picked up myth-themes from surrounding cultures) – the source we have for most Norse myth is the Eddas which weren’t written down until the 13th century, so there was a lot of time for storytellers to have heard things that colored their own re-tellings of the myths.
And as far as I know, one of the most famous sources is Snorri’s Edda – Snorri Sturluson’s retelling of the myths; he was a Christian, wasn’t he?
Here ya go. http://wists.com/electrickecho/necklace/b67ef5e91363f001dd49eeb88de9383c
Because wearing severed-head-of-Jesus around your neck is plain creepy. Or body of Jesus. Or anything else involving a tiny human figurine or parts of it.
Like a crucifix, you mean?
Hence the Buddy Christ. A big improvement, if you ask me.
I would call that truth in advertising.
The Christian cross as an icon probably grew out of older traditions that influenced the early Christians. Notably the Egyptian ankh which was already associated with the afterlife in that part of the world. But crosses older than Christianity are always cropping up in archeological digs – like Christmas and Easter it was probably a symbol that was co-opted by the early Christians and incorporated into their own religion because it was part of the religions that surrounded them as they were growing up and those associations stuck in their heads.
That’s interesting. Likewise the rising-from-dead judge-in-afterlife god was also a part of ancient Egyptian religion. Christianity seems a later version of this earlier myth. An evolution of God.
That’s funny you bring that up- I remember hearing a sermon by Stephen Manley many many years ago and he was talking about taking up your ‘electric death chair,’ and wearing little ‘electric death chairs’ on chains around your neck. (Except that he’s very loud and vocal, so it was more like ‘Electric! Death! Chair!’ Also, since he’s an evangelist, he wasn’t speaking with irony like Dawkins or Bruce.)
Not only is the resurrection harder to symbolize, it lacks all the macabre drama of suffering that the cross brings. The cross fits the Christian persecution complex, it affirms suffering as something righteous (because one is being persecuted and/or identifying with Christ’s passion and/or self-sacrificial). People can get massive satisfaction out of feeling like persecuted altruists suffering with Jesus. Plus it’s a gruesome guilt symbol for making you feel ashamed for ever deviating from Christ’s alleged commands for you. I mean he DIED for you, how can anything you want to do that deviates from his supposed orders not be petty by comparison?
Plus it doesn’t hurt to have such a completely easy to draw and geometrically elemental symbol to rally around. :)
What about tiny little electric chairs on chains? an Electrocucifix perhaps?
Does it come with batteries included?
Nope…it runs on FAITH!
The great Bill Hicks “nailed” this years ago….
““A lot of Christians wear crosses around their necks. You think when Jesus comes back he ever wants to see a fucking cross? It’s like going up to Jackie Onassis wearing a rifle pendant, you know.”
I thought this was originally a Lenny Bruce comment. Perhaps we could now be wearing little syringes around our necks, at least those of us in a lethal injection state….
duh, it was credited. wups.