Blixa wrote:Chap wrote:One of the results of my gradual mental liberation from the Christian culture I was brought up in is my present perception of how bizarre and frankly yukky this kind of thing sounds to people who encounter it without the necessary acculturation to teach them that it is a normal way for nice people to think.
We want to suck body fluids from a guy through a spear wound in his side? The depiction and description of this are 'lovely'? There is some moral content to this?
Oh well, at least no animals were harmed. We're not heathens. Chicken blood is of course disgusting, and not a suitable subject for poetry or painting.
While I often wish I could seal myself up in Montaigne's Solitarium, I remain in the world and of it. But someday, like him, maybe I can paint the words of Publius Terentius Afer across my ceiling: ""Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto"
The Christian world is just one part of the modern world. And the part of the Christian world that feels comfortable with poems and depictions about quite literally drinking blood from wounds in a man's body is a limited part of the Christian world.
The quote you give from the playwright often called Terence (which we may translate as "I am a man, and nothing that concerns a man do I deem a matter of indifference to me") is usually quoted as if it was some kind of general liberal life-slogan, but in fact it is an utterance by a character in one of his plays made in a very particular context - to justify in fact what is obviously a piece of nosiness that is not very welcome to the person to whom this sentiment is addressed:
P. Terentius Afer (Terence), Heautontimorumenos: The Self-Tormenter
Act 1 Scene 1, in Riley's translationCHREMES
Although this acquaintanceship between us is of very recent date, from the time in fact of your purchasing an estate here in the neighborhood, yet either your good qualities, or our being neighbors (which I take to be a sort of friendship), induces me to inform you, frankly and familiarly, that you appear to me to labor beyond your years, and beyond what your affairs require. For, in the name of Gods and men, what would you have? What can be your aim? You are, as I conjecture, sixty years of age, or more. No man in these parts has a better or a more valuable estate, no one more servants; and yet you discharge their duties just as diligently as if there were none at all. However early in the morning I go out, and however late in the evening I return home, I see you either digging, or plowing, or doing something, in fact, in the fields. You take respite not an instant, and are quite regardless of yourself. I am very sure that this is not done for your amusement. But really I am vexed how little work is done here.1 If you were to employ the time you spend in laboring yourself, in keeping your servants at work, you would profit much more.
MENEDEMUS
Have you so much leisure, Chremes, from your own affairs, that you can attend to those of others-those which don't concern you?
CHREMES
I am a man, and nothing that concerns a man do I deem a matter of indifference to me. Suppose that I wish either to advise you in this matter, or to be informed myself: if what you do is right, that I may do the same; if it is not, then that I may dissuade you.
Frankly, I think there are things that are all too human that we
ought to feel alien to us: murder or mistreatment of the helpless, encouraging hatred of those who are simply different from "us", the promotion of shame and guilt in the young over their bodies and their natural functions, religious teachings that waste peoples' lives in imaginary quests for what can never do them real good, sadism under a cover of religious sentimentality or submission to a deity's will, and a lot else besides.
The obsession of some Christians with blood is something I am glad to be well out of. It is now alien to me, just as the blood-sacrifices of Kali and the tearing out of hearts by the Aztecs is alien to me - and I am profoundly grateful that fate has allowed me to be free of it.
