Apparently, crucifixion wasn’t all the Romans did to Jesus (and others) - there was also the scourging, etc.
I have a bit of a funny story about that … I may have told it before, but it is appropriate here.
I’m not Christian (in fact, I am Jewish by background), but my wife is from a very traditional, very religious “folk Catholic” family. When I was first dating her, many years ago, after some time she invited me to her parent’s house to meet the family. Her parents were making dinner, she was primping herself, so for some time I was left sitting by myself in her parent’s living room.
Now, I’m a compulsive reader. Left with nothing to do, I like to read - pretty well anything available. Unfortunately, I had nothing with me, and none of the stuff on the coffee table for visitors to read was in English (they are Ukrainian Catholics) … except one book.
This book was some sort of prayer guide. What it had, was a little daily meditation - like a calendar - of thoughts you were supposed to meditate on, while doing your daily prayers. It had perforated page corners to fold down so you would know you had “done” that day.
The interesting thing was this: that each day represented something nasty that had been done to Jesus. Given that there were 365 days, that meant they had to creatively “invent” a few that don’t actually appear in the Gospels. So poor Jesus, in addition to being cruxified, got abused 364 different ways!
Naturally, I turned to “today’s date”. What I learned was that, on this very day, her parents, while praying, were supposed to meditate on “the Jews” ramming turds into Jesus’ mouth (something I’m pretty sure isn’t in the gospels!). I knew they had actually done this meditation, because the corner was turned down … something that caused me a certain amount of new-boyfriend anxiety, as I was about to have dinner with them, and they knew I was Jewish.
[In actual fact, they have never been anything but courteous to me, and I’ve now known them for more than a quarter-century … but I still remember that anxiety]
To be honest, as a Protestant I do wish we stressed confession a bit more. In our Lutheran Church we have this little pre-written confession in our services and sing Kyrie Eleison and that’s about it. Some stuff about how it is good to confess our sins to God, but very unstressed. I have found that the few times I’ve been involved confession and being reminded that you are forgiven by God for whatever you may have done and whatever you though was unforgivable is an incredible feeling. That sort of peace and feeling of forgiveness has been immeasurably helpful in my faith journey and really helped me to forgive others.
There is a Lutheran order of individual confession and forgiveness. And the same rules of absolute confidentiality apply as in the Roman church. My wife is a Lutheran pastor, and she does this one quite a bit. She was raised Roman Catholic, so she is used to the idea.
IMHO, the only true party that can forgive a sin is the aggrieved or offended party. What happens if a priest forgives you (absolves you) when you steal some money from a relative, but the relative doesn’t forgive you at all? Why would you trust the priest’s forgiveness more than the relative’s? The priest is someone who wasn’t there at the time of the sin and no real connection to the sin besides what you choose to tell him or her.
Of course you can feel sorry for what you’ve done, but in terms of being genuinely forgiven, a priest, who does this to hundreds of people, can’t provide anything more than meaningless fluff meant to make you feel better. IMO you need to confront the offended party directly and look for forgiveness from them.
If they are for whatever reason unable to forgive you, or if you sin against something that cannot “forgive” (e.g. The earth, a small child or animal incapable of speech) you are screwed. The only place you can search for direct forgiveness is yourself. Because only you know the exact level to which you failed to meet your own personal standards. And there’s nothing wrong with that in itself. It just means that no priest knows you better than yourself. If you want forgiveness from God, pray and hope you find what you’re looking for. But confession seems to me to be glorified counseling with the hope that if you confess good enough, you can be forgiven and have the option to shove the real issues under the rug.
Some sins can’t be forgiven. Those that can’t should be acknowledged and meditated upon so that a person can improve. But saying you feel “free” and “at peace” is buying into the idea that the words of a person (or even God!) will fix the real problems, which stem from a personal failure and the victimization of another party, which may or may not be capable of being redressed.
This is partially addressed by something Nava said earlier:
IOW the priest isn’t offering you his personal forgiveness; he’s conveying to you God’s forgiveness.
I think there’s a sense in which your sin, if it’s against another person, is also a sin against God—in a way that may or may not be analogous to the way, if I harmed a small child, I’d have sinned against, and want forgiveness from, the child’s parents.
The only true party that can forgive a sin is God. And every sin can be forgiven by Him. He has the capacity that humans don’t. The priest doesn’t offer “meaningless fluff to help you feel better”, he offers the forgiveness of God.
As has been mentioned, you are also encouraged to make recompense to those you have harmed.
Which includes, if reasonably possible, asking for forgiveness.
Father Mendiburu (may he have been received in His grace) was an amazing psychologist. He asked about the specific circumstances surrounding fights with siblings (which I expect to be the sin most reported by kids), then go sort of Socratic on how to avoid escalation from “he pushed me” to “we’re rolling on the floor kicking and biting”, and then he would give us instructions to ask for forgiveness if we ever found ourselves having a fight with our siblings again; “don’t go and ask for his forgiveness now, when he’s not angry and can’t even remember the last time you had a fight, ask him if you ever have a fight again”. We were to stop fighting and ask for forgiveness right then and there. I can’t speak for others, but in my case it was a big deterrent to letting a bit of snarling evolve into a lot of yelling. I remember that he would also say that there are situations when anger is a perfectly reasonable reaction, but what’s wrong is letting that anger cause you to do something worse than whatever triggered it: getting angry because some little turd of a brat is trying to kick you, ok; beating him up, Not Ok.
So, a sin in general is acknowledged to be more an offense against yourself and your relationship with God than against the victim? Isn’t that odd? That means that your victim is doubly victimized because you don’t even have to say you’re sorry. You are “encouraged to make recompense to those you have harmed.” It’s therefore not required that you try to make amends with those you wronged, it’s only required that you find forgiveness from God. If God forgives everything, it seems a skip and a jump away from using God as a crutch to get away with some bad shit.
You are telling me the Father offers the forgiveness of God. Is it possible for forgiveness to be denied? I hate that true contrition wins you spiritual points, but ignores the victimized party. This forgiveness seems to be the goal, rather than the actual redress of the victim. Once you have been forgiven, does it even matter that the other person still feels slighted? How can you put more stock in this spiritual idea than another person literally telling you, for example, “I will never forgive you and never want to see you again?”
A person’s feelings are subjective, yes, but they are valid. I can’t imagine leaving someone wronged and after a nice confession think that I’m back on God’s good side.
You don’t see a contradiction between these two sentences? Or are you just bothered because “encouraged” =/= “required”?
Is it “true contrition” if it ignores the victimized party?
Depends on what you mean by “valid.” Another person telling you “I will never forgive you and never want to see you again” is definitely relevant to your relationship with that person, but it might not be relevant to the state of your soul or conscience. What if they were saying that to you because you had made an innocent mistake, or because you had done the right thing but it was something they didn’t like? Their failing to “forgive” you shouldn’t be counted against you.
It’s not just about forgiveness – it’s about remorse. If you don’t really regret what you did, and you’re only going to confession for the sake of doing so, it’s pretty meaningless. That’s what’s what penance is.
If the offended party doesn’t forgive you, there’s nothing you can do about it. I can still regret what I did.
I was raised Christian myself — Protestant, Methodist to be precise about it.
Don’t know how other kids reacted to it; I can only speak from my own experiences.
First, it was emphasized more than anything else that Jesus was God and he had powers like being able to raise other people from the dead and do miracles and stuff. And long before I had a coherent understanding of what they meant by “crucified” it had been explained over and over and over again that he rose from the dead and was just fine subsequent to the experience.
But be that as it may, by the end of elementary school I had sorted out that he had told people to be nice to each other, to forgive and share and not be judgmental and not act like you’ve got some kind of infallible righteousness when dealing with other people, and then he got nailed up to a cross, which killed him, and that it would be a seriously fucking horrible way to die, “and then he rose from the dead”. Oh, and that a big part of Christian attitude of reverence to the event was a sort of horror that we, collectively speaking, had done this incredibly shitty thing to someone who had been trying to get us to play nice with each other. I soon drew the conclusion that whatever-the-hell it meant for him to have “risen from the dead” subsequently, the meaning of that did not take away from the fact that yeah, we (people) killed him; I came to see it as intellectually and emotionally cowardly to pretend that somehow it did not count as a horrible deed because, well, after all, he “rose from the dead”.
Then in junior high I was exposed to people who (to my horror) thought it was jolly good and wonderful that he’d been nailed to the cross. Because somehow it was necessary that this happen or else God could not forgive us for our sins. That this sacrifice was necessary, worthy is the lamb who was slain and all that shit. “But that makes no fucking sense”, I said, “if Jesus is God… you’re telling me that God made a rule that said that in order for God to forgive us for ‘original sin’, God had to become Jesus and get hisself killed?” And I found the idea of Jesus as some kind of wind-up toy, a Messiah-ton “sent” down to get nailed up, was really creepy. And over all of it was the way that emphasizing this life-after-death stuff totally detracted from the message he’d brought to us, about sharing and caring and forgiving and not judging. As far as I was concerned that was the important part, that plus the realization that we were so fucked up that when someone told us we should live that way our reaction was to find some bullshit excuse to kill him.
Yet later I learned that there were all kinds of complexities involved to explain just why (in down to earth political and social terms) he had been killed, many of which are not emphasized in the Bible and even less so by our sunday school teachers. And that crucifixion was a fairly standard punishment of the day.
Why don’t Jewish children run away screaming when they are exposed to the baby-killing God of the Hebrew Bible? For that matter, why don’t Jewish adults run away screaming when they read Deut 28?
[QUOTE=Moses]
15 But if you do not obey the LORD your God to observe
faithfully all His commandments and laws which I enjoin upon you this day, all these curses shall come upon you
and take effect:
16 Cursed shall you be in the city and cursed shall you
be in the country.
17 Cursed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl.
18 Cursed shall be the issue of your womb and the produce
of your soil, the calving of your herd and the lambing of your flock.
19 Cursed shall you be in your comings and cursed shall
you be in your goings.
20 The LoRD will let loose against you calamity, panic,
and frustration in all the enterprises you undertake, so that
you shall soon be utterly wiped out because of your evil
doing in forsaking Me. 21 The LoRD will make pestilence
cling to you, until He has put an end to you in the land that
you are entering to possess. 22 The LoRD will strike you
with •consumption, fever, and inflammation, with scorch
ing heat and drought, with blight and mildew; they shall
hound you until you perish. 23 The skies above your head
shall be copper and the earth under you iron. 24 The LoRD
will make the rain of your land dust, and sand shall drop
on you from the sky, until you are wiped out.
25 The LoRD will put you to rout before your enemies;
you shall march out against them by a single road, but flee
from them by many b roads; and you shall become a hor
ror to all the kingdoms of the earth. 26 Your carcasses shall
become food for all the birds of the sky and all the beasts
of the earth, with none to frighten them off.
27 The LORD will strike you with the Egyptian inflam
mation, with hemorrhoids, boil-scars, and itch, from
which you shall never recover.
[/QUOTE]
That’s probably about as much as I can quote under fair use, but it goes on, and gets worse. It says that things will get so bad that the most delicate woman will eat her newborn child and its afterbirth in secret, so she won’t have to share them with her husband.
That’s the punishment for not obeying every law in the Torah, including those that sophisticated Christians and Jews like to pretend aren’t there, e.g. making premarital sex and gay sex capital crimes, or executing a rape victim under certain circumstances (like being inside the city limits). If you’re an observant Jew, you have to read Deuteronomy at least three times a year, so you can’t claim ignorance of it, like a Christian would.
So, OP, the answer to your question is that when children are indoctrinated with religion, they are taught to believe that what they are reading or hearing is wonderful, and apparently that sticks with them, even after they’re old enough to understand the implications.
