MASOCHISM AND PIETY - Robert M. Price

[Agnostic_Gabe]

I don’t want to violate copyright restrictions, so I’ll have to link to the short publication. It is probably only 2-3 pages robertmprice.mindvendor.com/art_masochism.htm

Some things I thought fascinating were:

Though the prima facie intention of this leaflet is to demonstrate the love of Jesus as it is expressed in the atonement, a form-critical analysis reveals that something quite different is going on here. In both structure and subject matter, The Whipping resembles nothing so much as the genre of Victorian pornography known as “flagellation literature.” Indeed, the parallels are striking.

Steven Marcus devotes a whole chapter of his The Other Victorians to the large mass of flagellation pornography. He points out that while such material might be thinly veiled as medical monographs, lyric poems, comic operettas, or historical treatises, "they regularly break down into small, disconnected units, and the natural form, so to speak, of the genre is the anecdote.”2 Precisely such an anecdote is embodied in The Whipping.

If Fundamentalist fervor is to a noticeable degree the rechanneling of that sexual drive forbidden expression elsewhere, one must ask if morbid spirituality is not the rechanneling of a morbid sexuality.

To approach this issue from the other direction, one might consider not religion in the light of perversion, but rather perversion in the light of religion. Susan Sontag’s essay “The Pornographic Imagination” makes exactly this linkage. She treats that classic of French pornography the Story of O in these terms. In the story, “0” becomes a “love slave” of one man, then another, who abuse her to the point of total submissiveness. One cannot help recalling the earlier illustrations of God axing the tree, gouging the stick, breaking the sheep’s leg, all in order to “use” them, i.e., Christian believers.

[anon12438761]

It is an interesting subject, just don’t know that it belongs here. Up to the mods.

Once a topic ‘catches on’ - as this type of thing seems to - it gets out of hand real quick.

[Cindy_Skillman]

Okay… that’s enough of THAT. Seriously? I’m only leaving this up so [tag]jasonpratt[/tag] can have a look at it.

[JasonPratt]

I don’t understand why something from Robert Price, of all people, is even in the “church” subcategory. He’s quite a radical loon.

it’s important to keep in mind the overall context of his article, which is his theory that Jesus Christ is a fictional character and therefore all the story details, even the ones which would otherwise be evidence of historical accuracy by ancient standards, must be explained away. No matter how farfetched the explanation-away might be. Any stick is good enough to flagellate the history of Jesus with, so to speak.

That said, he’s hardly the first person to observe and suggest that religious piety is, at least sometimes, a redirected form of sexual frustration. Christians have insulted each other that way, too, on occasion; and the charge does occasionally have prima facie plausibility. People are fallen, too, after all.

Anyway, given some other threads recently, if members want to pm each other in groups about this, they’re welcome to do so. But I’m fine with leaving the topic locked.