“You think if Jesus comes back he ever wants to see another fucking cross? Thats probably why he hasn’t come back yet. ‘Nope, they’re still wearing crosses.’ That’s like walking up to Jacky Onassis wearing a rifle on your lapel. ‘Just thinking about John, Jacky.’” finger guns
- Bill Hicks
Ironically, the cross is a symbol of unjust suffering. Something which the more prominent wearers like to inflict on others.
I can’t speak for everyone, but when I wear a cross it’s in reference to Matthew 16:24
Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?”
To me the cross is symbolic of finding the courage to live our lives motivated by a radical love in order to overcome the fear of death and pain.
It’s like Goku once said while fighting to save the world “this is the power to go further beyond”
I feel though like wearing a token cross in honor of being told to take up a more literal cross seems like paying lip service to a very serious call to action with very low actual stakes.
Like being told to stand up to the guns of an army to stand firm for justice and then wearing little rifle pendants instead claiming that means you look to live your life consistent with that principle even as you stay well away from actual fighting.
You may personally of course live your life consistent with the values and that is just a symbol, but it’s broadly a symbol that has been cheapened by casual overuse, and to some extent corrupted by folks using it as a symbol of their alignment to God and implied divine authority granted by that association.
Yeah, in my opinion it shows the power consumer culture has to erode the meaning of things. “This symbol used to stand for something, but it got too popular and now it’s just slapped on stuff to sell merch.”
It’s a bit like being told to go out into the world and tell everyone about your religion, and you do it by taping a cardboard sheet to your front and back with “Jesus is Lord” written on it.
Haha, I can actually get down with that. Anyone crazy enough to do that is probably a genuine person who’s willing to engage with the insanity of existence.
I was joking, though. There are actually people who wear sandwich boards with religious messages on them, specifically to fulfil the call to proselytise.
They often stand near shops.
I almost respect people who really try to talk to me more for actually fulfilling the spirit of it, rather than the letter.
the whole point of Christianity is that Jesus sacrificed himself to absolve humanity of the original sin. The cross represents the sacrifice.
And yet having sacrificed himself, he’s now back hanging out with his Dad in heaven and having a great time. That’s not a “sacrifice”, it’s more like a bad time at summer camp.
It was a bad three-day weekend.
If God is all powerful then why not just absolve us from the sin?
If this sacrifice was required, then he is not all powerful or he is into torture pron.
I’m not an expert in the Bible, but I don’t think it really ascribes omnipotency to God. I think it’s better to understand it as God being able to do all that can be done. So He may have limitations, but they are such that no other being can do something that He is unable to do.
From that sense, He is not able to save humanity freely, but he can set forth a process through which He can achieve this goal with some cost. I.e., He can create a divine being (that is either Himself in whole, Himself in part, or a direct descendant of Himself depending on your interpretation) that is able to spread His message and display an act of extreme self-sacrifice.
I don’t really understand exactly what the sacrifice did or what needed to be fixed, but I do think the stories make a lot more sense if you accept that God has some limitations. For instance, I assume that Noah’s flood was his first attempt to fix the problem (by killing everybody except for the most righteous of His creation), but it failed because He can’t do everything and doesn’t know everything. And the story of Jesus was His next attempt to sort things out.
But that’s just me thinking about them as fictional stories that really need to be edited rather than a divine and infallible truth.
Ok…so there are rules that God must obey…so he’s not all powerful, otherwise he would just change the rules
I have always thought that choosing the cross as the universal symbol of Christianity is the most twisted and sad thing in the world.
That is why I prefer the Ichthys. It represents Jesus’s high point, when he performed a miracle for the all the people. For me, it’s better to remember people at their best than at their worst.
Referenced by my favorite Philip K Dick novel VALIS, the symbol of early Christianity: Fish cannot carry guns.
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It also means that! The fish and the loaves, the fisher of men, the fish that Jesus ate after his resurrection. It is a symbol with a very broad meaning.
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The American Christian message: Act like Jesus and we will crucify you too.
Of course he liked crosses! There was even that one cross he used to hang at.
Nailed it.
Jesus was born in September and christmas trees are giant dicks. Yes you read that right. They’re penises. Festively festooned penises. Blame the catholics. They steamrolled every pagan tradition they could find into the catholic canon in order to convert the peasants to their particular cult.
Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
Not a religious person here, but I think it’s a metaphor, where we all are carrying a cross, like jesus did, but smaller… and lighter…
just another example of Christians cherry picking what they what to use from their religion and using it out of context to better serve their agendas.
It was inherited from Zoroastrianrism.
Christianity is just another weird death cult. I never understood why the Romans had an issue with him until I learned that Jesus was literally proselytizing that people were going to raise from the dead. I am not talking about the afterlife, he was saying that people are going to unalive and his kingdom would be on this earth with everyone who died coming back to life.
Fucking whacko to say the least and then sure enough his cult had him come back to life like he said everyone else would. Sooo yeah they were fucking crazy and so is everyone who thinks a ancient book contains all the answers. Hint: it doesn’t.
Sam Kinison had a routine where he was pretending to be Jesus explaining why he hadn’t returned yet: “yeah, I’ll be back as soon as I can PLAY THE PIANO AGAIN! OH OHHHHHHHH!”
Y’ever think about how if Jesus died by a guillotine there’d be guillotines everywhere
You think if he was shot the gun manufacturer would use that in their advertising?
Jesus is lord.
Cross defeats Jesus.
Cross is lord.
I like crucifixes, i study their design and craftsmanship while the Karen wearing it is berating me at work and threatening to call my manager.
