Furore over Christ's crucifixion

[FarCenter]

Source: The Times of India

LONDON: A noted literary theorist has sparked fury among Christians by uttering that the Crucifixion of Christ was not as bad as it has been painted, during a radio show which is scheduled for broadcast later this month.

Terry Eagleton, Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester, said so at BBC Radio 4's programme Lent Talks. It is learnt that he said that Jesus's scourging was a "blessing in disguise" because it hastened his death. "The Crucifixion of Jesus wasn't as bad as its been painted. All things considered, he got off pretty lightly," the Telegraph quoted him as saying. "If the New Testament account is to be believed it took him only three hours to die whereas a lot of those killed by this hideous mode of execution thrashed around on their crosses for days," he added.

The paper reports that Eagleton concluded his talk with an attack on contemporary Christianity, claiming that it had abandoned the poor and dispossessed in favour of the "rich and aggressive". "It's horrified by the sight of a female breast but nothing like as horrified by the obscene inequalities between rich and poor," the paper quoted him as saying. "By and large, it worships a god fashioned blasphemously in its own image and likeness," he added. Traditionalists are said to be angry with the BBC for commissioning Eagleton, whose remarks have come in the run-up to Easter.


Read more: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Furore_over_Christs_crucifixion/articleshow/2752123.cms

[seriousstan]

1. Are Christians taking to the streets burning effigies and demanding his death?

Oh, I forgot, it's that other religion that does that.

[Gman]

4. I haven't checked FR yet

If this is posted there, they're already out to get hi. They may not burn him in effigy or demand his death. But they will send emails to his higher ups demanding he be fired. They will also leave threatening messages on his voice mail and start stalking his house.

That type behavior is by no means confined to "that other religion". Christianity has it's fair share of violent people too. In America they're know as Republics and conservatives.

[water]

5. There's no denying that currently, Islam has the most violent followers.

In the past, Christianity has.

[ck4829]

6. Yes, because every single Muslim goes out and riots when something they don't like happens, right?

[ixion]

7. xians kill plenty... they just have other ways of doing so

to mock Islamic extremists and thus defend Christian extremists is intellectually dishonest.

[Adsos Letter]

2. ...well...

the flogging WAS intended to weaken the victim...and it is true (if the surviving accounts are correct) that he died before sundown, so that his legs did not have to be broken (as with the others) to hasten death by not allowing the victim to push themselves upright (death by crucufixion was uaually the result of asphyxiation, as the body no longer had the strength to force itself up and allow it to breath)

Still...it was an exceptionally cruel form of execution, which is why the Romans used it...plus, it served as a visible example to others...

:scared:

[annabanana]

3. "Latest Breaking News"? - maybe a coupla thousandsa yearsago. . n/t

[struggle4progress]

8. Terry Eagleton explains why a Marxist critic has written about Jesus Christ and the Gospels

The outspoken left-winger tells Alan Franks that it is quite possible to keep two faiths

From The Times
December 21, 2007

... “I guess I am still searching,” Eagleton says. The possibility of this astringent leftwinger having something other than a secular faith should not entirely surprise his readers. In the 1960s he was a member of the radical Roman Catholic group Slant and wrote a book called Towards A New Left Theology. Two months ago, in the London Review of Books, he castigated Britain's most prominent atheist, Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, for his alleged ignorance of that discipline ...Why did he choose to write an introduction to the Gospels? “Basically because I was asked to do it. They were running a series on revolutionaries, and would I do Jesus, knowing I had some background. So I said OK. They were bringing out one on Trotsky, and I said I think my man has the edge over him, as Trotsky didn't rise from the dead.”

Meaning that Jesus did? Or at least that Eagleton believes he did? He does not give so much an answer as a fairly broad, all-purpose kind of laugh that may be as much agnostic as evasive. The Christ of his 30-page essay is nothing if not revolutionary, and more profoundly so, Eagleton suggests, than any other historical figure.

“In his Crucifixion and descent into Hell,” he writes, “Jesus in StPaul's view is ‘made sin,' identifying with the scum and refuse of the earth, enduring a solidarity with suffering, evil and despair in order to transfigure it through his Resurrection. Like the classical tragic protagonist, he succeeds only through failure.” ...

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article3082442.ece

[struggle4progress]

9. Terry Eagleton: Class warrior

By Paul Vallely
Saturday, 13 October 2007

... That sense is rooted deep in Eagleton's personal history. He was born in Salford in 1943 into a third-generation Irish immigrant family so poor that his two brothers died in infancy. All young Eagleton and his classmates had to eat at lunchtime was beetroot, which they would puke up in the afternoons. What he could consume voraciously was books. He thrived at a grammar school run by De La Salle brothers. It opened a new life, unthinkable for his parents' generation. The school, like his family, was Roman Catholic. And though he was later to reject religion, it shaped his worldview ...

He fell into the orbit of a radical Dominican friar, Laurence Bright, and became a Catholic activist. Marxism and Catholicism were comfortable bedfellows, he said. Eagleton lived a double life, fleeing high table to deliver meals on wheels to the elderly poor. The dual existence continued when he moved to Oxford in 1969, rising at dawn to leaflet the local car plant or sell Socialist Worker, before rushing back to Wadham College to teach Dickens or T S Eliot. But when Laurence Bright died, Eagleton abandoned religion and threw himself entirely into Marxism ...

But it is also because, he insists, Marxism offers the blueprint for a moral society. The failure of the Soviet Union discredits Marxism only to the extent that the Inquisition invalidates Christianity, he says. He is adamant, with the young Marx, that "philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it". The overthrow of capitalism has its counterpart in the religious concept of redemption: the world is so deeply flawed that only a complete transformation can cure it.

For Eagleton politics, religion and literature teach the same lesson. He quotes one of Paul's letters to the Corinthians, "God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong", to show that morality begins with a recognition of one's weakness and mortality ..

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/terry-eagleton-class-warrior-396770.html

[struggle4progress]

10. The armchair revolutionary

Sunday December 16, 2007
The Observer

... The book about Jesus is a new reading of the Gospels, out in time for Christmas, in which Eagleton asks the question, 'Was Christ a revolutionary?' and answers it mostly in the affirmative. It .... places Jesus on the fringe of Palestinian insurgents against Rome, in the political wing of the anti-imperialist Zealots. The essay takes Eagleton back to his earliest intellectual outings at Cambridge in the Sixties, where he made a name for himself contributing to a curious Marxist Christian magazine called Slant. It is also the latest offensive in his argument with what he likes to call 'smug, liberal, rationalist' opinion ...

Would Eagleton call himself a Christian? 'I am a lapsed Catholic; the Church is cunning in that you can never really leave it. I have deep objections to the way it has screwed up people's lives, though I have gone to Mass occasionally right through my life. It's like keeping a foot in a culture that I value.' ...

'One has to understand fundamentalism as a kind of fear,' Eagleton says. 'A theologian friend of mine maintains that the opposite of love is not hate, it is fear. The image of Jesus in the Gospels is of someone who is fearless. People clutching on to their region or sect are very fearful of what lies beyond, and therefore very dangerous.' He puts some of this fear down to the fallout from 'transnational capitalism' that destroys regional and religious identity ...

Eagleton lets out a sharp laugh. 'I certainly hope I am morally superior to people who believe in slaughtering innocents. But what I object to is the dangerous fudging of the line between the Muslim world and the Taliban, and the easy moral superiority that leaves us blind to our own crimes, or the crimes done in our names. It is an obvious point, but one still worth making, that it was our own barbarism and colonialism in the Middle East that has helped to create these situations in the first place. Amis and Hitchens have become perversely silent on the crimes of Western civilisation. Western civilisation has produced enormous advances, but not to see the darker side of that, not to see the barbarism of the West, and not to see that at a time when we are killing thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan, seems extraordinarily naive.' ...

http://books.guardian.co.uk/interviews/story/0,,2228156,00.html

[struggle4progress]

11. Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching

LRB
19 October 2006
Terry Eagleton

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

... Jesus did not die because he was mad or masochistic, but because the Roman state and its assorted local lackeys and running dogs took fright at his message of love, mercy and justice, as well as at his enormous popularity with the poor, and did away with him to forestall a mass uprising in a highly volatile political situation. Several of Jesus’ close comrades were probably Zealots, members of an anti-imperialist underground movement. Judas’ surname suggests that he may have been one of them, which makes his treachery rather more intelligible: perhaps he sold out his leader in bitter disenchantment, recognising that he was not, after all, the Messiah. Messiahs are not born in poverty; they do not spurn weapons of destruction; and they tend to ride into the national capital in bullet-proof limousines with police outriders, not on a donkey.

Jesus ... was a joke of a Messiah. He was a carnivalesque parody of a leader who understood, so it would appear, that any regime not founded on solidarity with frailty and failure is bound to collapse under its own hubris. The symbol of that failure was his crucifixion. In this faith, he was true to the source of life he enigmatically called his Father, who in the guise of the Old Testament Yahweh tells the Hebrews that he hates their burnt offerings and that their incense stinks in his nostrils. They will know him for what he is, he reminds them, when they see the hungry being filled with good things and the rich being sent empty away. You are not allowed to make a fetish or graven image of this God, since the only image of him is human flesh and blood. Salvation for Christianity has to do with caring for the sick and welcoming the immigrant, protecting the poor from the violence of the rich. It is not a ‘religious’ affair at all, and demands no special clothing, ritual behaviour or fussiness about diet ...

Jesus hung out with whores and social outcasts, was remarkably casual about sex, disapproved of the family (the suburban Dawkins is a trifle queasy about this), urged us to be laid-back about property and possessions, warned his followers that they too would die violently, and insisted that the truth kills and divides as well as liberates. He also cursed self-righteous prigs and deeply alarmed the ruling class.

The Christian faith holds that those who are able to look on the crucifixion and live, to accept that the traumatic truth of human history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life – but only by virtue of an unimaginable transformation in our currently dire condition. This is known as the resurrection. Those who don’t see this dreadful image of a mutilated innocent as the truth of history are likely to be devotees of that bright-eyed superstition known as infinite human progress, for which Dawkins is a full-blooded apologist. Or they might be well-intentioned reformers or social democrats, which from a Christian standpoint simply isn’t radical enough ...

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html

[Geoff R. Casavant]

12. I just read the excerpt, not the link, but . . .

. . . seems to me he's spot on with his observations and his opinions.

Crucifixion took days to bring about a painful death, and Jesus's three hours is definitely a short time to die.

As for his opinions regarding Christianity's change in priorities, one need only look at how often Jesus discusses the poor in the gospels, then compare it with the large, expensive mega-churches to see how far removed it has become from its origins.

[Zhade]

13. If, depsite lack of evidence, it even happened.

NT!