(April 3, 2015 at 6:13 pm)JuliaL Wrote: It shows me how very different the minds of others are from mine.
I consider religion as a mind consuming replicating pattern, much like a tune you can't get out of your head, but more persistent.
Behaviors like this, physically damaging, must have some compensating benefits or they could not persist.
Support from the community?
Status?
Without more context, I just don't get it.
I think there are plenty of religious people who cannot relate to self-flaggelation and devotional crucifixion and other forms of "mortification of the flesh." It is an extreme thing to do, though such things have been going on for a very, very long time. So it is not unique to any particular age, nor to any particular religion. But most adherents of most religions don't go to such extremes.
It is also not unique to the biggest religions in the world either. See (don't click on any link below if you are too easily upset):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_ritual
There are also some bloody initiation rites in some cultures, and often they are pretty well required rather than being purely voluntary (unlike devotional crucifixion):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initiation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarification
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penile_subincision
The above is just a short list of things that were found with just a little poking around online; there is much, much more of this sort of thing.
There are quite a lot of strange things that various people have done in many different cultures that involve either self-mutilation or being mutilated by others for religious and possibly other reasons.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
