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@dennisnilsenstie are u a STRAGGOT ☹️

[ID: Not quote as awful as it sounds, Public executions, Okay maybe as awful as it sounds]

#ao3 #ao3 tags #Not quote as awful as it sounds #Public executions #Okay maybe as awful as it sounds #execution mention

In 1730, two guys in France held a mock trial for a bunch of cats, sentenced them to death at a mock trial, and then hanged them at an adorable little gallows AS A HILARIOUS PRANK. And somehow, someway, it was actually all about class warfare.

Yes, this really happened and you can read about it here.

#french history #history #cats #great cat massacre #fun proletariat pranks to play on the bourgeoisie #fun facts #public executions #class warfare

THIS! WE MUST DEMAND PUBLIC EXECUTIONS OF ALL THE TREASONOUS TRUMPS AND THEIR TREASONOUS ENABLERS!

#TREASON #TRAITORS #THEY HANG TRAITORS DONT THEY?#TRUMP #GOP #ENABLERS #execution #public execution of traitors #public executions

Pisanello, Saint George and the Princess. Fresco, 1436-38. Pellegrini Chapel, Sant'Anastasia, Verona.

#pisanello #saint george #dragon #trebizond #fresco #international gothic #early renaissance #renaissance painting #pellegrini chapel #verona #quattrocento #italian art #damaged fresco #hanged man #public executions

At the Cross

Memoir and sermon

Our faith calls us to be present before the cross.

It’s a big ask.

I say this based on a personal experience. The course of my life had taken me, at one particular point in my mid-thirties, to a place where I suddenly realized that it would be possible for me to attend a public execution—to witness the intentional infliction of death upon one human being by other human beings. This is, of course, what happened at the cross millennia ago. But the awesome possibility that now confronted me so abruptly was in the here-and-now, not in the remote past, and was to be part of my immediate experience, not to be relayed to me second-hand through the written word.

My reaction was shock and horror. I suspect many others would have reacted the same way.

This all came up in the course of a casual conversation that had begun in the most warm and friendly spirit imaginable. I had just arrived in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where I had contracted to serve a one-month temporary position on the medical staff of one of the country’s major hospitals. It was the middle of the night; my nerves were jangled by having spent many hours on planes and then in a scary taxi ride from the airport, and I now needed to pass some time waiting in the hospital’s guard house while the night administrator looked up my housing assignment. Five or six security guards were staffing the station that night, all speaking English and all quite friendly. One offered me a cup of tea while I waited. I was drawn to one particular guard, a woman in her twenties, whose accent clearly identified her as an American. Having stumbled through the deplaning process and taxi ride using only the few phrases I knew in Arabic, it felt wonderful to be able to speak in my own language with someone from my home country.

It didn’t take long for the young female guard to begin showering me with advice about local attractions that I could see while I was in the country. She may have begun by describing the gold and carpet souks (open-air markets) in the city center; I don’t really remember. But I well remember how the blood froze in my veins when she next spoke of how I should certainly plan to go to an execution. “After all,” she said, “this is practically the only country you can travel to these days that holds public executions, and you really should take advantage of the opportunity while you’re here.” At this point, I felt a panicky need to run away from this conversation, but we were in a confined space with no real escape routes. I sat frozen, trying to maintain a friendly demeanor, while she went on to describe the steps to be followed. Executions were always scheduled on Fridays, the holy day of the week in Islam, so, unless I were on call for emergencies, I would not have a work assignment in the hospital to prevent me from attending. The Wednesday before the event there would be an announcement in the local English language newspaper, in the public notices section, so I should be sure to check this out every week. They were performed in the public square before the clock tower, and all the taxi drivers knew how to get there. I weakly expressed my thanks to the young lady, just as another guard at the wheel of a jeep showed up to whisk me off to my living quarters.

The feeling of horror abated as the days rolled on and my thoughts were mostly absorbed in my work. I occasionally took a break from work in the hospital’s library and would sometime leaf through the newspapers I found there. Almost without thinking, I found myself skimming the public notices, although it raised a sense of shame as I recalled what the guard had said to me. I came to think of these explorations as arising in a side of me that was insatiably curious, a side of me I was not sure I liked very much.

I came across only one execution notice in the month of my stay. The event was to occur in a different part of the country, so there was no question of my actually going. The announcement was terse and started with the name of the man to be executed and a listing of the crimes of which he had been convicted, among these the rape and murder of a child. It closed with a prayer and a statement that the execution was being performed in compliance with God’s will and in furtherance of God’s glory.

After the passage of many years, I no longer regret my curiosity about the execution announcements. After all, one of my main reasons for making this trip was to learn something about a country and a culture foreign to me, and I now had encountered an aspect of this country that was very difficult to understand. It made sense to try to puzzle it out. Why was an event that, it seemed to me, would provoke horror and revulsion in most people, made into a civic ceremony in this society? Why did the government invite members of the public to be present as the horrific act was being carried out? And what motivated the individuals who decided to attend an execution? Considering these questions, it struck me as very important that the announcement used language ascribing the motivation for the planned killing to God rather than to the intention of any individual human being or human organization.

A deeper question was why the prospect if witnessing a public execution evoked such a profound feeling of horror in me. Death and the process of dying were nothing new to me. I had, after all, witnessed many deaths during my years of training and practice of medicine. But the moral context in all these cases was a thing quite different: doctors act to prevent death, to preserve the lives of their patients, and if death occurs it represents the failure of their efforts. It can be viewed with equanimity given the noble effort that was made to stave it off, and the recognition that not all efforts, even if noble, can be expected to succeed.

No, the horror, I thought, arises not from death in itself, but from the moral context in which death by execution occurs. Death by execution is produced as the goal of a human action, an intentional, rational, planned action to fulfill a purpose determined by human beings. Ascribing the motivation to God may soothe the consciences of the executioners, but does not hide the fact that it is human hands that are wielding the sword. The eyewitness to the act of execution absorbs its emotional as well as its visual manifestation; he sees the muscular effort with which the sword is hefted, and the force of the blow that achieves the end. What inner emotion could underlie such an action, other than overwhelming hatred of the victim? The realization of the depth of the executioner’s hatred for the victim, within the heart of the onlooker, I believe to be the source of the onlooker’s horror. The death which is produced is the indicator and metric for the hatred we infer from the act, but it is the reality of the hatred, and its human origin, that is the source of our horror, not the death in itself.

Men who have witnessed death in military combat, another instance where death is produced by human intention, will frequently refuse to speak of their experiences, which I take to be an indication of the horror that persists in their memories, perhaps not fully processed even after many years. Growing up in my home town in the 1950’s, I was aware that a number of the local men of my parents’ age had seen combat in World War II and seemed to share an oath of silence about what they had witnessed. One, the proprietor of an auto parts store, had survived the death march from Bataan. It was well known that he would never talk about it.

Witnessing Jesus on the cross takes us to a new level of horror, and to a depth of lethal human hatred, that are difficult for a modern person to imagine, even in societies that practice capital punishment. This was not the near-instantaneous death of a Saudi decapitation passed off as a worshipful enterprise, which seems humane in comparison. It was an act of humiliation and torture extended over a period of days, culminating in a death that was almost an afterthought and probably welcomed by the suffering victim as he took his final breath. Crucifixion was the way the officials of the Roman Empire exacted retribution from the provincial commoners who got in their way. It was performed before the horrified eyes of the public, with full knowledge that it was the will of the Empire itself being carried out, thereby ensuring that the viewer would know the devastating cost of disobeying the state and understand the power it had over him.

The gospels do not give us a clear rationale for Rome’s crucifixion of the particular man Jesus; presumably one or another of his acts or pronouncements during his ministry were seen as being in defiance of the Empire’s authority. Interesting speculations about the specifics of his crime have been offered by biblical historians. That the gospel writers do not explore this suggests to me that they don’t consider it an important part of the story. They’ve fashioned their versions of the crucifixion story to teach their readers a wider, more universal truth about human existence, not to simply explain the Romans’ methods of social control or ideas about criminal justice. I take the fact that the crucifixion story is given so much weight in all four gospels as evidence of its importance to the development of our faith. But it is a hard story to hear. When we do hear it, we empathize with Jesus, we imagine ourselves on the cross experiencing the pain and humiliation he must have endured, writhing in the burning hatred being focused on him and hence upon us. Why must we experience this horror even once, let alone returning to it repeatedly as we observe the holy days of the church calendar year after year?

I have an explanation to offer, but it’s not a simple one.

The novelist George Saunders has pointed out three illusions that all human beings share, illusory beliefs all of us hold in common about ourselves, and he proposes that we must recognize their illusory nature, getting them into a true mental perspective, if we are to achieve salvation. (He comes at this from a background of Buddhism, but I believe his conception of salvation is not all that different from that of contemporary Christians.) First, each of us mistakenly believes himself the most important being in the universe, at the very center of all that is real. From the time we are infants, all our information about the external world come to us through our senses, converging from all directions around us upon the inner experiencing parts of our minds, so it’s natural for us to take this viewpoint. Second, each of us mistakenly believes himself to be a free actor, a being unto himself, separate and independent of all other beings in the world. Third, each of us also mistakenly believes, at least on an emotional level, that he is immortal. Each of these illusory beliefs exaggerates the primacy of the self, so I’ve come to think of them as the “fundamental narcissistic illusions.” We all recognize them as a false when we are thinking intellectually, when drawing up a will, for example, and we might even deny vigorously that we would ever believe in anything as ridiculous as our own immortality, all-importance, or total autonomy. Yet they lurk in our hearts when the intellectualizing is done. When we act instinctively, act in the moment, we tend to act as if they were true. This is probably something programmed into our DNA, explainable by evolutionary psychology; those of our remote ancestors who acted impulsively on the logic of the narcissistic illusions when faced with imminent danger, e.g. those who reflexively acted to save their own lives when a predator invaded their community, were the ones who survived to pass on their genes. Saunders refers to the illusions having a “Darwinian logic.”

When we empathize with Jesus on the cross, or with the convicted criminal undergoing public execution, when we sense the all-consuming lethal hatred directed toward the victim, and hence vicariously toward us, the narcissistic illusions play a key role in our response. If we believe in our hearts that we are the most important beings in the universe, how could it possibly be that another human being hates us so much? If our life is permanent, how could it be about to be extinguished by a fellow human being acting on what seems a mere whim, a volatile, passing emotion we’ve experienced ourselves, many times? If we are free beings, how could our captors, free beings themselves, not recognize this and allow us to continue our lives? All these questions illustrate the cognitive dissonance inherent in the process of execution, and, I think, it is this cognitive dissonance that constitutes our horror.

To view the horror at the cross in this way offers us one way to explain why our Christian faith asks us to be present in spirit at the crucifixion. It tells us that the very horror we would so like to avoid may in fact be of benefit to us. When we encounter cognitive dissonance, we are compelled to resolve it by questioning the truth of each of the contradictory premises. The horror of the cross engages us on a gut level, and also on a gut level, we are brought closer to fully realizing the untruth of the narcissistic illusions, and in so doing we come closer to knowing salvation.

My own experience suggests this is not a simple linear ascent to a permanent state of salvation. I find the narcissistic illusions too deeply ingrained to allow me to jettison them completely. The best I can do is to periodically remind myself of their inherent untruth. Revisiting Jesus at the cross, from time to time, is a help.

Our returns to the cross must also be viewed from the perspective of the resurrection which is to follow. If the cross were the end of the story ours would be a bleak, nihilistic faith indeed. The horror of the cross cleanses our hearts of our inborn self-centered delusions. It leaves us with a new, blank slate in our hearts. We need to know that there is another chapter to follow in this story, a chapter that will draw a new roadmap on the blank slate, a roadmap which will direct us to more fulfilling and meaningful lives.

We should remember also that the crucifixion is as necessary for the experience of the resurrection as the resurrection is for the experience of the crucifixion. The two are irrevocably conjoined. If we bypass the crucifixion step and proceed immediately to embrace what the resurrection holds for us, we run the risk of doing no more than amplifying our narcissistic illusions. We begin to see life eternal as a validation of our illusion of our own permanence. And we may even feel justified in seeing those with other beliefs burned at the stake.

#jesus #crucifixion #public executions