Jesus on a cross wallhanging - sending the wrong message?

DreAvaSuresh♥

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Feb 15, 2008
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MY starfishy friend took the antagonistic approach, and the question was deleted. So I'm taking the more politic approach, because I have always been curious about this.Isn't hanging a crusified christ on the wall counteractive to EVERY message he spoke, got people to see through his words and actions? Wasn't his main thrust that god- and Jesus - are about love and forgiveness? How is a scene of fear, torture and death conducive to that message of love and peace?All a jesus on the cross does for me is invoke sadness and a bit of disgust, because by displaying it thus, it seems as if you're condoning the ancient Roman practice of torture. And torture it was. Somehow, NOT the message he wanted out there. Do you concur?Also, I've seen relatively mellow, stylized ones, but I've seen ones that show every lash, the pain and fear on his face, the gauntness of his ribs, the swelling and injury of the nails, etc What is the point except to make small children cry?And please don't say a reminder of his sacrifice. If you're that poor a Christian you aren't always aware of the sacrifice, then you should study more, not put up stuff akin to pornography on the wall.And yes, I have read the bible many times. Yes I was Christian, and this has always bothered me since I was a little child. I'm grateful none of my family, even the highly devout, never saw fit to hang one of those in the house.I come from a large Catholic family on Dad's side - and none of them had a Jesus on a cross, so perhaps we've been in different Catholic homes.I see someoen didn't read the whole question - WHY do you need a reminder? Have you had a stroke and your memory is shot? Alzheimer's? No? IF you're a perfectly healthy human being and have bothered to actually learn about your faith, you don't need this reminder, IMO.And so far, THANK YOU ALL for the polite and reasoned answers - it is so rare on here I had to mention it.Raphael - Oh I realize the sacrifice quite well - do YOU realize that by dwelling only on his death and by missing the ressurection AND the words and actions of his before his death, you miss the REAL message? THAT is the point. Dwell on the death or get the message his martyrdom was presenting.And I STILL wonder why you need a constant visual reminder when Jesus's words should be more than enough of a reminder.
 
Meat puppets scare the children.My mother inlaw cried when I told her she had to take hers down or my son couldn't come inside her house. She hid it up in her bedroom. She's been very resentful about it too.
 
I suspect that it is because at its heart christianity is a death cult.
 
I am a christian and do agree with you. I remember Jesus sacrifice for me in how I live my life, not by looking at a torture picture of him. Also, I know that Jesus did not die on a cross, it was a stake and I too have read the bible and know that we are to have no idols. Wearing the cross and having it in our home is idol worship.
 
For me....I prefer to see the empty cross....The message being: Christ has died, Christ has risen...Christ will come again!
 
I don't think Jesus on the Cross hanging on the wall gives the wrong impression.
 
Yeah the very same thing makes me alittle angry. I don't know why they do but I think it is to keep them ashamed when they committe a crime like "oh Jesus died for your sins," and then off in a corner is a giant cross with Jesus on it. However Christians say that it is the reminder of sacrifice. They use alot of the shame method.
 
It is to remind of his suffering for the worlds sins, not to condone cruelty and torture. Not every one likes to see this image, and I agree it can gruesome. I just accept that, it is a part of the religion. This is accepted may many religions(par-phased)There is no greater love than to give ones life for another
 
This practice is NOT universal to all Christians. Many of us rather wholeheartedly reject this bloody, voyeuristic display of suffering, as if it were infliction of pain that was the necessity for Salvation.Christ resurrected, Christ Victorious, Christ Pantokrator, is how He should now be depicted.
 
You represent the meat puppet, you obey death you obey hunger you obey thirst, you must breathe, so wioth so much control over your life is not this the making s of a meat puppet. He became that puppet but he is not longer ther. do you ahve pictures of loved ones in your home, well symbolic love is cool, so it just represents the fact he did die budt he is not longer dead.
 
My personal view of Jesus on the cross as a "wall decoration" has been that these are the people that don't believe in the resurrection. They are stuck on the fact that Jesus died on the cross, that he was flesh.In my own personal experience, the homes displaying such items have a Catholic background, going to mass on Saturday because that's what their parents did and their parents before them. They are hung up on feeling guilty and feeling bad for their sins; so that want the reminder of the pain and suffering of Christ.I believe a better reminder would be a plain cross. I believe in the resurrection of Jesus, that he died for our sins--he is not flesh and blood but a spirit.
 
I agree and I am a christian. The cross is a graven image that should not be used in worship (not to mention the fact that he really died on a stake and not a cross). Anyway, it doesn't make sense to remind every one of the torture that Jesus went through. If Jesus were to have come in our time and was arrested and tried and put to death in front of a firing squad would everyone have an image of a gun hanging on the wall. What parent would want an image of the device used to murder their child hanging on the wall, I can't imagine that God would either.
 
I don't have one in my house. I do have a cross in my house though. Yes Jesus died on the cross but he's not on it anymore. He died and rose again. That is the whole basis of Christianity.
 
It mayks me cross. Jess was a king, not a sacrifiec to be throne to the god.'remebering the scarifice' is nothnig but bloodthristy revarence of deth. Jesuss shuld be protrayed alive and pure, not bloodied and pitiful, offred up as meat.
 
For me, i think Jesus on a cross wallhanging give us a view that life is not always happy, there will be a time that we will feel sad, fear or any others bad feeling about our life.Let say, if we only having happy Jesus around us, dont u think it will make 'weak' moral ppl will even hopeless? Because they will only remember Jesus happiness and they realized that they life is a kind of torture.Just try to think, Jesus on the wallhanging is a kind of message that it's normal to have sth bad in our life, but we also must remember that, after every bad thing happened there's always good thing happened too, like Jesus, who alive after his death.
 
YOU SEE MY FRIEND THAT THERE ARE MANY MURALS,PAINTINGS,STATUES,CROSSES DEPICTING OUR LORDS CRUCIFICTION.SOME CHRISTIANS MIGHT SEE THAT WALL MURAL AND FEEL THE COMPLETE OPPOSITE OF WHAT YOU FELT.THEY MAY FEEL LOVE AND THANKFULNESS THAT THE LORD JESUS DID THIS FOR THE THEM.THAT HE WENT THROUGH THE WORST OF ALL POSSIBLE DEATHS TO CREATE THE PATH OF FORGIVENESS AND REDEMPTION FOR A FALLEN WORLD.I HAVE ALSO SEEN THOSE REAL GRAPHIC ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE CRUCIFIX.PERSONALLY,I THINK THAT IF A CHRISTIAN WANTS TO DISPLAY ONE OF THOSE,IT REALLY DOESNT MATTER TO ME.I THINK THE MESSAGE OF THE ACT ON THE CROSS IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE ACTUAL ILLUSTRATION.I DONT THINK MAKING SMALL CHILDREN CRY IS THE INTENTION OF THE OWNER OF THE PIECE.
 
By your question I do not think you and yours realise the awsome sacrifice that Jesus made for you on that day two thousand years ago, He died because of the weakness of Pilate and because of the jealous madness of the Jewish'priests of the time, Jesus' death was fortold in Isaiah as was His birth, because of His death you and I have the chance of eternal life, I personally wear a crucifix not to remind me of the barbarity of the Romans, but to remind me of the fact that Jesus shed the last dropof His blood for me on that cross, as He said in the garden at Gethsemane, "Father if it be possible let this chalice pass from me,but not my will but thine be done" rather than turn away from the crucifix look upon it with shame at what your sins brought to the Son of GOD. also we do not worship graven images, we look upon the crucifix to remind us constantly of the aforementioned.
 
Was that the case in connection with the execution of God’s Son? It is noteworthy that the Bible also uses the word xy′lon to identify the device used. A Greek-English Lexicon, by Liddell and Scott, defines this as meaning: “Wood cut and ready for use, firewood, timber, etc. . . . piece of wood, log, beam, post . . . cudgel, club . . . stake on which criminals were impaled . . . of live wood, tree.” The book The Non-Christian Cross, by J. D. Parsons (London, 1896), says: “There is not a single sentence in any of the numerous writings forming the New Testament, which, in the original Greek, bears even indirect evidence to the effect that the stauros used in the case of Jesus was other than an ordinary stauros; much less to the effect that it consisted, not of one piece of timber, but of two pieces nailed together in the form of a cross. . . . It is not a little misleading upon the part of our teachers to translate the word stauros as ‘cross’ when rendering the Greek documents of the Church into our native tongue, and to support that action by putting ‘cross’ in our lexicons as the meaning of stauros without carefully explaining that that was at any rate not the primary meaning of the word in the days of the Apostles, did not become its primary signification till long afterwards, and became so then, if at all, only because, despite the absence of corroborative evidence, it was for some reason or other assumed that the particular stauros upon which Jesus was executed had that particular shape.”—Pp. 23, 24; see also The Companion Bible (London, 1885), Appendix No. 162.Thus the weight of the evidence indicates that Jesus died on an upright stake and not on the traditional cross.What were the historical origins of Christendom’s cross?“Various objects, dating from periods long anterior to the Christian era, have been found, marked with crosses of different designs, in almost every part of the old world. India, Syria, Persia and Egypt have all yielded numberless examples . . . The use of the cross as a religious symbol in pre-Christian times and among non-Christian peoples may probably be regarded as almost universal, and in very many cases it was connected with some form of nature worship.”—Encyclopædia Britannica (1946), Vol. 6, p. 753.“The shape of the [two-beamed cross] had its origin in ancient Chaldea, and was used as the symbol of the god Tammuz (being in the shape of the mystic Tau, the initial of his name) in that country and in adjacent lands, including Egypt. By the middle of the 3rd cent. A.D. the churches had either departed from, or had travestied, certain doctrines of the Christian faith. In order to increase the prestige of the apostate ecclesiastical system pagans were received into the churches apart from regeneration by faith, and were permitted largely to retain their pagan signs and symbols. Hence the Tau or T, in its most frequent form, with the cross-piece lowered, was adopted to stand for the cross of Christ.”—An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words (London, 1962), W. E. Vine, p. 256.“It is strange, yet unquestionably a fact, that in ages long before the birth of Christ, and since then in lands untouched by the teaching of the Church, the Cross has been used as a sacred symbol. . . . The Greek Bacchus, the Tyrian Tammuz, the Chaldean Bel, and the Norse Odin, were all symbolised to their votaries by a cruciform device.”—The Cross in Ritual, Architecture, and Art (London, 1900), G. S. Tyack, p. 1.“The cross in the form of the ‘Crux Ansata’ . . . was carried in the hands of the Egyptian priests and Pontiff kings as the symbol of their authority as priests of the Sun god and was called ‘the Sign of Life.’”—The Worship of the Dead (London, 1904), Colonel J. Garnier, p. 226.“Various figures of crosses are found everywhere on Egyptian monuments and tombs, and are considered by many authorities as symbolical either of the phallus [a representation of the male sex organ] or of coition. . . . In Egyptian tombs the crux ansata [cross with a circle or handle on top] is found side by side with the phallus.”—A Short History of Sex-Worship (London, 1940), H. Cutner, pp. 16, 17; see also The Non-Christian Cross, p. 183.“These crosses were used as symbols of the Babylonian sun-god, [See book], and are first seen on a coin of Julius Cæsar, 100-44 B.C., and then on a coin struck by Cæsar’s heir (Augustus), 20 B.C. On the coins of Constantine the most frequent symbol is [See book]; but the same symbol is used without the surrounding circle, and with the four equal arms vertical and horizontal; and this was the symbol specially venerated as the ‘Solar Wheel’. It should be stated that Constantine was a sun-god worshipper, and would not enter the ‘Church’ till some quarter of a century after the legend of his having seen such a cross in the heavens.”—The Companion Bible, Appendix No. 162; see also The Non-Christian Cross, pp. 133-141.Is veneration of the cross a Scriptural practice?1 Cor. 10:14: “My beloved ones, flee from idolatry.” Ex. 20:4, 5, JB: “You shall not make yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything in heaven or on earth beneath or in the waters under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them.” (Notice that God commanded that his people not even make an image before which people would bow down.)Of interest is this comment in the New Catholic Encyclopedia: “The representation of Christ’s redemptive death on Golgotha does not occur in the symbolic art of the first Christian centuries. The early Christians, influenced by the Old Testament prohibition of graven images, were reluctant to depict even the instrument of the Lord’s Passion.”—(1967), Vol. IV, p. 486.Concerning first-century Christians, History of the Christian Church says: “There was no use of the crucifix and no material representation of the cross.”—(New York, 1897), J. F. Hurst, Vol. I, p. 366.Does it really make any difference if a person cherishes a cross, as long as he does not worship it?How would you feel if one of your dearest friends was executed on the basis of false charges? Would you make a replica of the instrument of execution? Would you cherish it, or would you rather shun it?In ancient Israel, unfaithful Jews wept over the death of the false god Tammuz. Jehovah spoke of what they were doing as being a ‘detestable thing.’ (Ezek. 8:13, 14) According to history, Tammuz was a Babylonian god, and the cross was used as his symbol. From its beginning in the days of Nimrod, Babylon was against Jehovah and an enemy of true worship. (Gen. 10:8-10; Jer. 50:29) So by cherishing the cross, a person is honoring a symbol of worship that is opposed to the true God.As stated at Ezekiel 8:17, apostate Jews also ‘thrust out the shoot to Jehovah’s nose.’ He viewed this as “detestable” and ‘offensive.’ Why? This “shoot,” some commentators explain, was a representation of the male sex organ, used in phallic worship. How, then, must Jehovah view the use of the cross, which, as we have seen, was anciently used as a symbol in phallic worship?As you can see not only are pictures like that repulsive to men, it is disgusting in Jehovah's eyes.People who venerate such objects, are not pleasing in His sight.
 
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