"Their cultists still decorate themselves with replicas of the murder weapon to This Day!!!"
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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I'm just here because I love seeing comments that read "deleted by creator" in all the threads about Jesus.
Klingons did it best.
Fun fact: the actual death from crucifiction was suffocation. Once the victim loses the strength to hold themselves up, the slouch puts some sort of stress on their lungs. There was an instance of the Romans not breaking someone's legs (which suggests that maybe that was part of the practice) so they would suffer longer. I don't remember where that info came from, but I've been reading lots of books about the first 200 years of christianity for about 20 months.
I'm an atheist, of course, just also a history nerd.
One other side note: around 1999, I wanted to make a "student" film (I was barely a student) about the life and times of christ. He'd fuck up and raise Lazarus as a zombie in one of the scenes. Never made it.
Would you recommend any of the books you’ve been reading about the era?
Your film idea makes me think you'd enjoy the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a book in the apocrypha starring Mary teaching baby Jesus not to kill his classmates for being dumb kids.
I just opened the wiki article to read next. That brief description sounds familiar. I might have read about that in Elaine Pagel's book, The Gnostic Gospels.
"I've read some more of this book. Apparently, if your neighbors show up at your house wanting to rape your guests, you should send out your daughters to be raped instead."
Crucifixion didn’t lead to death by starvation but by suffocation.
elaborate? (I could Google it, but I prefer human response)
Basically, once your feet/legs get too tired to carry your weight you hang from your arms. This basically means to breathe you have to push up your entire body weight with your chest muscles. After a while you get too exhausted to breathe and suffocate.
interesting, why can you breath? is the position stretching the chest making it harder?
Yes, it makes it harder to both inhale and exhale because it makes it difficult to expand or compress your chest since your whole body weight is keeping it stretched.
ok.
however, wasn't he nailed? wouldn't bleeding from those injuries kill you faster?
isn't there a part where he was also stabbed by a spear?
they really wanted him dead
The stabbing thing happened after he died.
Romans would brake the legs of crucified victims to check if they were still alive. In Jesus case they instead pocked him with a spear.
The person that wrote this part of the gospel (as in, very likley, made it up), had to write this in because they needed to keep the story of Jesus in line with old testament prophecies about the Messias, one of which speaks of said Messias beeing "unbroken". So they came up with an alternative to the leg braking.
It's one of several examples where gospel writers tried to write things into the gospel that made it look like Jesus was the Messias by inventing events about him that made his live line up with existing prophecies about the jewish messiah.
That probably would have killed him even faster yes. Usually with crucifixions people weren’t nailed but tied to the cross with ropes.
It is believed they nailed through the wrists not the hands.
You could probably put a nail through your wrist and just leave it and live your life without treating it. You'd have to be unlucky and hit a large vein and your body not clot properly, the nail would help stop the blood.
It's like the myth with a bullet. First thing is not to pull it out because it will make things worse. You can live with a bullet in you.
The stabbing of the spear, to my knowledge, was for mercy so he'd not suffer as long.
Crucifixion strikes me as the kind of punishment where they would endeavour to ensure the person would survive up there for a decent while — to prolong their suffering, and the display of said suffering. It's a grim method of execution.
It was pretty common to put a small board a little bit above the butt, placed so that you can't really sit on it without hurting your feet, but preventing that you die too soon.
I read up the current wikipedia article for this, and apparently suffocation isn't thought of as cause of death anymore since 2023! @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]
In 2023, an analysis of medical literature concluded that asphyxiation is discredited as the primary cause of death from crucifixion. There is scholarly support for several possible non-asphyxiation causes of death: heart failure or arrhythmia, hypovolemic shock, acidosis, dehydration, and pulmonary embolism. Death could result from any combination of those factors, or from other causes, including sepsis following infection due to the wounds caused by the nails or by the scourging that often preceded crucifixion, or from stabbing by the guards.
I recently read The World Until Yesterday which compares the way of life between tribal cultures and western cultures. The section about religion has a clumsy preamble that was obviously trying to cushion the blow for religious people reading the book who thought their religion was any different to tribal religions.
The author then goes on to treat them all the same.
It was quite funny to read. I was imagining how it must feel to see your religion laid out side by side with a dozen other equally stupid myths and think "Yep this is the right one. I was super lucky to be born to parents who picked the correct religion!"
a dozen other equally stupid myths
I think there is some missing context here that makes this an unfair comparison. In general, tribal cultures didn't treat their creation myths as literal fact. It was more of a poetic way to explain to the children of the tribe where their people had come from and give the tribe a sense of identity. Since they didn't have Science to actually explain how they got there, this seems as reasonable as anything honestly.
If someone from a different nation were to come visit and relate their account of creation, they wouldn't argue with the person and insist that their creation myth was the 'correct' one and that the visitor was wrong. They were a different people so it makes sense they were 'created' in a different way. Since neither was attempting to explain things in a literal way, the two different stories weren't incompatible with each other.
It's likely that the creation myths of the ancient Hebrew people were looked at in a similar way at first, they were a tribal people after all. At some point (likely to do with the Agricultural Revolution, but that's a whole different topic) they started conquering and subjugating the neighboring tribes and insisting those people adopt their spiritual practice, that's when the whole deal of insisting it was the literal truth came about.
In the bible Yahweh and the Hebrews spend a lot of time worrying about what 'gods' the other tribes worshiped. Much more so than would be rational if you considered Yahweh to be the one, true, only and actual God. The reason that so much time was spent on it was because Yahweh was just a story, just like all the other Gods and you had to go out of your way to get people to follow along with the narrative that that one story was 'true', otherwise who would believe it?
So while it's easy for us to look back on the beliefs of tribal cultures and dismiss them as stupid, we are misunderstanding the purpose and intent of these stories. It's only 'stupid' if you take it literally. In context it was a lot less dumb and probably somewhat necessary to a harmonious life.
We have the benefit of pretty much knowing exactly how humans and the world got here, so we were never in a situation of having one of our children come up to us and ask how we got here and only being able to answer with "I have no idea." That would have been the situation that tribal societies would have been in if you were expecting them to give a scientific answer to the question. So it's really not the case that their creation myths were "Stupid", but more it was the best system they could possibly have had at the time.
I see what you're getting at, and I personally think that's probably how a lot of the myths/religions start, but I don't think you can outright say that tribes only thought of them as children's stories.
In the book I was referencing, the author noted the "cost" of a religion, in that the tribes were usually required to spend a significant amount of their time worshiping, and/or discarded resources in the name of sacrifice. One of the tribes studied spent 1 out of every 3 days worshiping. A very large commitment for people who have a very real risk of starvation if their hunts go badly. He then goes on to argue that there must be an evolutionary benefit to religion or an atheist tribe would have out-competed all of these tribes (but that's another tangent). I bring this up because it implies that they do actually believe their "stories", otherwise why risk starvation?
That's a good point, I worded it poorly. I didn't mean to imply that the adults didn't 'believe' it and just told that to their children. I think that is was more the case that they believed in the spiritual truths behind the stories and not necessarily that they were literal, although I can't say for certain that was the case in all instances. Maybe some of them did believe it literally or didn't really make a distinction between spiritually true and literally true. It's not like they had the scientific knowledge to know what the alternative was.
I think it's natural to try and explain the world around you, and if you don't have the tools to know what is really going on- then yeah you will probably make some crazy guesses. And then if you tell it to your children as if it were fact, then they might not question it seeing as how you are a trusted elder.
I think my point though was that it really isn't what I would call 'stupid' to do something like create a silly myth and pass it on. For me where it becomes stupid is when you insist it's the literal truth and that other people believe it, or when you refuse to update your worldview in the case where better evidence comes along because you are a zealot about your mythology.
Yeah you're right, I didn't mean to imply that they're stupid. It's stupid to us, but that's only because we're standing on the shoulders of giants.
For me, a historical fiction that put norse and chriatianity on similar footing was the push that got me from "ugh this religious stuff is annoying" to "oh, it's probably bullshit, too". In hindsight, it's pretty telling that christianity puts the most emphasis on having faith no matter what evidence or lack thereof is presented, to the point where that alone determines whether one is punished, ignored, or rewarded in a way that is completely unverifiable to anyone living.
I've been saying for years this is literal training for anti-intellectualism and ultimately fascism and hate. As soon as you can convince yourself to believe something just because someone said to without any evidence or even contrary evidence, you're primed to start doing that in other areas of your life. Grifters and fascists will absolutely take advantage of people like that without a second thought, and they scream their propaganda all over Fox news. Religion is more than just some stupid bullshit people believe, it's a threat to democracy and freedom.
Absolutely.
Blind faith is an incredibly dangerous habit.
It's crazy that we accept it as a normal human variation.
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