Reply #32: actually... [View All]

Yes, this is a common joke about the crucifix. George Carlin started it, I think - saying he preferred Buddha, because he was fat and laughing, and Jesus was hanging nailed to a cross.

The crucifix is designed to remind us of Christ's - and thereby ALL of mankind's - suffering.

The idea is that, wherever there is hunger, Christ is being crucified; wherever there is war, there's a crucifixion; wherever there is intolerance, etc.

And this idea works as a great motivator for social change - if Christ is being crucified today in the poor just as he was crucified 2,000 years ago on a hill, it's time to fight for the poor, against injustice. God is in solidarity with the poor, the hopeless, the oppressed - and we should be, too.

That's the idea. I agree it's a gruesome icon. But so is the actual injustice in the world that it seeks to remind us of.

Saying that it's "disgusting" is EXACTLY the point, I guess. This stands in marked contrast to the Buddha - which is another take on the idea that we can all have access to the universal (and similar to Christianity in that sense) - but leaves us with an entirely different feeling. And so it becomes a matter of personal tastes, perhaps -- do you want your spirituality to give you a sense of peace, or do you want it to shake you up? (Not to say that Buddhism doesn't inspire activism, it just does it in a different way, I think, from Christianity. But I don't know enough to comment beyond the iconography of the two religions.)