Portrayal of Christ on the Cross

[atreestump]

Around the Medieval Period, the depiction of Christ on the cross would show him with a titled head, usually down towards the right side. It is interesting because it is conveying the very moment of death. Sometimes the tilt is subtle with a gaping mouth, which gives the impression that he taking a final breath.



This is what makes this symbol so powerful. The immanenece of death and in Christian terms, the death of Christ was the payment for our sins, bringing with it a debt of guilt imposes our fate in a way that is hard to ignore. We are not only contemplating the eventuality of death, but the moment of passing, the moment when life ends and death begins, although one could say this symbol reminds us of how every moment is living and dying and breath (the etymological root for spirit) is the indication of this inhaling for exhaltation and exhaling for the fall.

This PDF that @"thetrizzard" shared made me think of this: http://www.unm.edu/~ithomson/Thomson.pdf

[Socrates]

@"kFoyauextlH" perhaps you can comment here on 'last gasps'?

[kFoyauextlH]

Haha oh yeah. Anyone about to die really doesn't care what people think. They creek and moan and shout and sputter and I've seen death directly and it is the moment of truth. Everything else is largely a leisurely lie. The visceral is the best representative of the true philosophy of action. When the pretensions are dropped and the desperation is present and there is no more Mr. Show Guy, no more wanting the girl still, winking at the children and smirking at the crowd, that smirk is the grimace of a burned face when its true.

The truth is a hideous thing. Christianity could've been great had the story simply ended there, but it went on with something else which was far more torturous, making people wait as a punishment after the truth had been made apparent.

What was the truth? The truth was hideousness, heaped upon hideousness. To me, the symbol of the sado-masochistic God-Man is truly a divine message that few are willing to bare.

[atreestump]

Tell us more about the moment of death.

[kFoyauextlH]

Well what I saw, more than once, was terrible. The worst being a loved one suffocate to death due to an effort to try to bring them in for help and medical attention. In their trying to speak they suffocated and writhed horribly and then their eyes already had been going in and out of huge dilations and then suddenly they froze, like all time stopped and they stopped frozen. I tried to shake them back but they were gone. I cried and I cried and I cried for months upon months, slowly the crying had larger gaps in between and these gaps grew. I did not neglect or avoid crying though. I saw other deaths, each horrifying, but that was the worst of them on so many levels. Other horrifying things I have seen are a kitten shot in the spine and dragging its disabled back legs and crying and crawling for help which I gave them, they didn't know what had happened and nothing was done about the one who shot them in the spine even though there was video evidence. People mix up the words God and Good. There is no Good, there is only God and it is Evil in every sense.

That is only a tiny proportion of the terrors heaped upon my senses all my life, practically every day. Killing oneself takes great hope and faith, I would never dare to take such a risk seeing as how absolutely horrific things already are, expecting something better by killing oneself seems completely contrary to anything apparent, plus no one can experience nothing anyway so the whole thing is impossibly stupid.

The religion of worshipping a suffering man who was fine because they were a super powered God is just ridiculous as well. What about those who weren't super powered and couldn't escape and had no choice. To hell with God's melodrama and deceptive passion. It infuriates me, fills me with rage. It is nothing like the plight of a human being or the terror of the innocent. That a God should try to steal the show for itself is like a transvestite trying to take away womanhood from women and being the definition of the ideal woman, taking on the clothes imposed on them and whatever else and imitating them unecessarily, a mockery of slaves. F*ck God! No manners at all.

[atreestump]

Thanks for sharing. I would suggest there is only 'indifference' as evil would require a relation to good. 

This is where I guess I should question Derrida's Differance, which is not of our experience but of being and is transcendental. Differance is Justice and it is always calling to us. I think Derrida is referring to Nietzsche when he says we are valuing animals - while we live (and are dying) we value everything, that is part and parcel of being-in-the-world as such.

@"thetrizzard"

[kFoyauextlH]

Yeah. For me the word evil simply means that which can harm or is potentially harmful or destructive and/or does harm and destroy. It also encompasses moral evils, emotional disturbances, and even things like stars exploding and people dying and diseases and things like moment to moment apparent changes, destruction of one moment as replaced by another, like the Fire of Heraclitus and Change in every sense as destructive.

So wholly evil.
[hr]
Even Motion, which in the writings of Zoroastrians came to be associated with Ahriman.