While there’s a lot to be getting on with this week in the USA (and, heck, around the world, what with the novel coronavirus & all), it’s interesting to note that some of the old authoritarian tactics condemned many times here on FtB still have not gone away. This time I want to mention Poland, where queer women publicly displayed (and probably created, though that’s something I’m not sure on) an altered version of a famous painting: the Black Madonna of Czestochowa.
Black Madonna of Czestochowa, an iconic painting of the Virgin Mary with great historical and cultural significance in Poland.
The altered version changed the gold halos to rainbow ones:
The Rainbow Madonna
Three women are accused of injuring religious feelings by hanging and carrying posters of the Rainbow Madonna in association with a queer rights march in Plock in spring of 2019. (Among other places, the posters were affixed to trash cans & porta-potties, which is supposed to somehow help justify Catholic outrage and the prosecution of these three women.)
We do not yet know if the women will be convicted, but if they are, they face up to 2 years in prison. For toning down a gaudy, gold-leaf slathered image. Say it with me people:
Fuck anti-heresy laws, and the Catholic Church they rode in on.
As I commented on another blog, such anti-heresy laws exist because apparently their “god” is too weak to defend itself. Puny god.
I thought the Bible says a rainbow is god’s promise that when he destroys the world next time, it won’t be by flooding, or that he loves us or something. So actually, the rainbow Madonna is actually MORE biblical. Not that anyone cares.
By the way, the “black Madonna” painting, treasured by Poles, is of course not of an Africanized Madonna, which might be historically plausible. Instead, it looks like just a conventional European painting that accumulated candle smoke over the centuries. There are many other art works where traditionalists complained after a restoration revealed more vibrant colors than the public thought were there.
By the way, the two slashes on Mary’s face and neck also don’t look like the original artist’s punk creation. So people are not venerating the original, but a trashed version. The problem with the rainbow stuff is that it doesn’t look to them like their traditional sort of artwork-trashing.
What is the significance of religious people caring about the random historical dirt more than about any sort of ideas or message? I guess Christianity isn’t about the messages, but about the dirt they’re used to?
Christianity is “about” whatever the nearest Christian says it is. They do rarely seem able to agree even among themselves. They remind me of the political Left.
I figure Bible-god, if he’s offended by “blasphemy”, can defend himself, and doesn’t need humans making silly laws to help him.
“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”
― Marcus Aurelius
@sonofrojbnlake True. The left is a composite identity of various minorities (ethnic, political, gender, etc.) who on occasion can ride past their Balkanized special interest impulse. The right, largely comprised of white men and the women who are stuck with em (often by choice or convenience) is a more unified group, and far FAR more loyal to their party. Chants about lynching/hanging Mike Pence for his “back-stabbing” reasonableness coming from the insurrection crowd indicate this to be true. 🙂 You can also see it in the “where we go 1, we go all” (?) mantra of the QAnon crowd. Some *real* individualists there. 😉
There are over 2000 denominations of Christianity, counting Christian Identity denominations like the Klan (all Protestant) and the Nazis (who self-reported to be 40% Catholic, 54% Protestant, 3.5% non-denominational Christian, 1.5% agnostic, atheist, Free-Thinker, or unaffiliated with a religion, and 1.0% other. That was the official census data that Germany published in 1939, btw- they were quite proud to be 97.5% Christian. (check the wikipedia page titled Religion_in_Nazi_Germany if you want to verify this..) Quakers are technically also a Christian faith- they believe in complete non-violence / pacifist; just like Jesus taught. (Turn the other cheek / love your enemies / judge not… you know- the exact opposite of the kind of behavior we see in typical hyper-militant Hitleresque Christians.) So given the range of behaviors is so large, one could expect them, too, to be Balkanized.
Its easy to show this- the Roman Catholic Church burnt the followers of that idiot.. whats his name? OH yeah.. Martin Luther- they BBQ’d Luther’s peeps alive. Other priests who broke away from the church to start their own were sometimes tortured for 14 *YEARS* before being allowed the kindness of being burnt to death. Luther’s Protestants don’t get off easy though- they were the main force behind the Holocaust, and also almost every KKK member was Protestant. The KKK lynched Catholics too- not just Black and Asian people.
Nowadays, we hear skepticism from Christians when regarding the morality of atheists. And if you are a socialist- they recoil in fear – I would imagine hissing sometimes while also holding their fingers into a cross formation; to ward off Evil- but probably not very often. I sometimes try to explain that socialism shouldn’t be that scary to them; even Pope JP 2 endorsed something that sounded suspiciously like it. Proponents include Albert Einstein and MLK Jr. If they find thse two morally insuffient, theres a good chance they are more into Adolf and his crew.