Grendel. The Green Knight. Count Dracula. The nameless homogenized members of zombie hordes. These are all members of a family tree capable of tracing their origin back to an unusually precise abstract element of human nature. These are monsters whose very existence challenge preconceived notion of what it means to be human by suggesting that what it means to be monstrous is to be nothing more or less than abomination of the one inviolate code capable of ensuring the propagation of the species.
Tag: Religion
An analysis of the difference in opinion over natural theology expressed by Karl Barth and Emil Brunner.
What are Marian Apparitions and why do they always seem to spike during periods of questioning of the authority of the Catholic Church?
According to legend there were two different Popes who took the name John VIII. The first was a woman whose revelation of her masquerade couldn’t have been more dramatic.
. For well over two hundred years the Malleus Maleficarum was the demonological equivalent of the DSM IV handbook for psychologists today. Part one of the book undertook to offer evidence of the existence of witches, while part two engaged in surprisingly uninteresting text used to describe ways in which witches could be detected.
Although the Catholic and Protestants were both quite hearty in their pursuit of witches, in the countries where witch hunting really flourished there was also a strong secular government backbone. The lesson to be gained from this correlation of a strong religious and secular movement to accept the idea that witchcraft really existed despite not one iota of evidence is that when religious leaders and government leaders become too intimately intertwined, well, seriously scary scat happens!
Despite the assumption of the female to a more blessed state in the wake of the Virgin Mary, however, there has been a concerted effort through the years to point to such elements as the refusal of the Catholic Church to allow women to become priests as evidence that the stultifying patriarchy still stands as an obstacle to Christianity’s empowerment of women.
Witches do not exist, therefore there were no witches in Salem. Ergot poisoning seems hardly…
There has always been a question to how so few Spanish soldiers could have dominated so many Aztec warriors, as well as questions to why Aztec emperor Montezuma acted in such an indecisive manner that probably sealed his fate. The answer may just lay in his belief in this creation myth and how the Spanish soldiers may have represented destruction of yet another world at the hand of Quetzalcoatl.
Removal of the gonads to ensure high voices was discovered at some forgotten time in the early days of the AD period, and by around the second century after Christ it was already a boom business. It was the movement toward writing Christian choir pieces that really put a fire under the business of castration, however.