Your Daily Moment of WTF?

[forsyth]

Near where I work, there's a large Family Chrisitan Bookstores. I've not been in it, because I work at a bookstore. But it's on the way I walk from work to a deli a couple stores down from the FCB. So I get to walk past and look at the displays, most of which are generally generic retail displays, with more religious overtones. Which is what they sell, so duh.

But there's this one thing displayed in the window, that makes me go WTF?

It's a replica Crown of Thorns. For $49.95. 12" across.

Double-ewe Tee Eff? No, seriously. Why? What are you going to do with it, wear it for Jesus cosplay? Or is there a larger faction (sect?) out there that fetishizes the pain and suffering and death part of Jesus's story over the "Love, Peace, and Don't be a Dick" parts? You know how sometimes asking the question will give you the answer, especially when Mel Gibson made a big "Pain and Suffering!" flick recently? Yeah.

Still. It's creepy, on so many levels.

Tags: Mindscribbles, Religion

Comments

[leticia.livejournal.com]

There's a crown of thorns - okay, it's more a wreath of thorns - in my pastor's office above his bookshelf. It stays there until Palm Sunday and Easter.

The pain and suffering is a part of the story. When you read fiction, does it have any meaning unless the main character has to struggle through pain or fear or doubt? A main character who walks in and solves everything without sacrifice?

...is boring.

Most churches - even those that choose to use a cross, not a crucifex (with artifical corpse attached) - remember the pain and suffering on certain days in the church calendar. The message is love - and no greater love has anyone than this: that he lay down his life for another. The crown of thorns and the cross become symbols of that love.

...Another Christian might have a slightly different reasoning. But. Suffice it to say, it is not by itself a 'fetish.'

[forsythferret.livejournal.com]

Well, how you put it makes some sense, Leti.

However, I think a large part of the WTF? factor is context. Something like that in a church or pastor's office is one thing (and still slightly weird, to me, but), having a display of 4 set up in a big window of a store in a strip mall, right between Veggie-Tales and little pewter angels is different. Yes, obviously, such things must be made, sold, and shipped for churches to have them, on the mundane level. I think it's the combination of commercialism and that it's displayed right in the big window, plus what it is, that makes it so amazingly WTF?-worthy.

And not everybody looks at it the same way you do, especially in more fundamentalist circiles. Who almost have to be the "core" audience of any kind of Christian Bookstore, I'd think, the same way a comic store targets comic geeks, or so on. But I don't know their internal workings, and I know that most businesses have important core groups, but also make > 50% of their money from "random" people. Usually quite a bit more, even for niche businesses.

Also, this is unrelated, I still find it kinda odd so many of the crucifixes in churches have a Jesus on them that's paler than I am. And scrawny. Carpenter, living in the middle east.