Posted on 09/21/2006 12:09:56 PM PDT by reagandemocrat
Channel 4 is to broadcast a documentary showing a human corpse being hung on a cross to depict Christ's suffering.
Anatomist Gunther von Hagens will use a real body to show how people died when crucified in the 90-minute film.
Why would anyone want to know how someone dies by crucifiction?
90 minutes of crucifixion! Oh! Boy! Make some popcorn and gather round the box kids!
How about a burning at the stake or breaking on the wheel video as a followup?
If I'm not mistaken, many years ago, Jim Bishop wrote a chilling essay about the mechanics of a crucifixion and the resulting horrible death. Since then, others have been as explicit.
Not sure why someone else needs to add to the bizarre nature of this form of execution.
IMHO what's obscene about this is nothing to do with Jesus, but everything to do with the respect we owe to a corpse that once was the locus of a human person. This is about devaluing humanity and what you might call, by analogy with the US, "human exceptionalism". I'm sorry any station would agree to carry this, expecially since the use of a corpse adds nothing but obscenity to the show.
Most, if not all, of von Hagens' plastinated human beings bear a striking resemblance to, you guessed it, Gunther von Hagens.
He sells a macabre chamber of death and passes it off as 'medical science'.
If the body is already dead, then the depiction is false from the beginning. A living breathing person would writhe in agony and gasp for breath as his lungs were slowly collapsing and muscles stretching beyond the imagination, not to mention the horrible pain from the spikes (not nails) that are used to pierce the wrists (not palms) and ankles (not feet)............
Even in Mel's great movie, I don't think the depiction of the crucifixion was as real as they actually did them in those times.........
My thought exactly! I don't think I need to know that!
Freakin' OSHA wussies...
Never heard of him, doesn't sound like anything I'd care for.
Exactly.
"Out of the door. Line on the left. One cross each."
I didn't watch that either, so I can't understand the fascination.
"Freakin' OSHA wussies.."
Yeah the fall protection layard because he was over 4 feet seemed a bit out of place to me, too.
maybe he could demonstrate by actually crucifying madonna
I doubt that Gibson was going for verisimilitude as much as for stringing together, as it were, moving icons. There was one long shot of the Via Dolorosa that I'm sure was a "quote" from a Giotto (or the work of someone else of that time).At least, I was certain I'd seen it before.
Anyway, my viewing was partially devotional, and partially aesthetic. This sounds entirely gross. Human bodies aren't for TV-edutainment.
I remember a very serious, interesting, and well presented small documentary that used to be shown every Easter season on local Chicago TV, sponsored by either De Paul University or Holy Name Cathedral- I don't remember, where a learned priest described crucification in very clinical scientific terms, and then of Christ's crucification specifically, as explanation of the the argument for authenticity of the "Shroud of Turin". Of course, only some photographs were used, as the content was mostly descriptive narration by that scholarly priest.
This new stunt sounds like Von Hagen means to border on morbid bad taste in the very least, using a corpse to pound nails through the wrists and feet, etc. This would be sickening and I hope this program and its originators are thoroughly castigated if it turns out as such.
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