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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cosmicforce who wrote (840)	1/13/2001 5:06:08 AM
From: YlangYlangBreeze	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

I'm not trying to diss Catholics, I'm just saying that cannibalism, or theophagy (?) is so bizarre as to be an unrecognizable description of a custom to which many of us are familiar whether in practice or in mere awareness. To some it's not a metaphor. They believe that Communion is the actual Flesh and Blood. How about eating the rotted glandular excretion from a mammal? A friend of mine at school said cheese is repulsive because of that. It's all in your perspective. So killing chickens, or public cremation, or anointing of oil, or symbolic cannibalism, or leaving bodies out to rot, or leaving out offerings to the gods, or burning houses if boy-girl twins are born there, or filing of canine teeth, or self flagellation, or twisting the body in asanas, all probably seem more or less normal if you're raised that way. I think all the ritual and metaphor are man made mechanisms and it is the meaning we ascribe it in our minds that gives it power. God sure wouldn't need them, I say. Man needs them for our thought to seem real.

To: cosmicforce who wrote (840)	1/13/2001 4:54:18 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

I was so grossed out by this when I was ten I had a hard time swallowing the communion wafer. I had the same reaction when I was a kid. Yech! I know that the term "cannibalism" means eating any human flesh and there's a stigma attached to all forms. But it seems to me that there's a big difference between chewing and swallowing one's cuticles and hunting humans for food, to define both ends of the scale. The ancient tabu against cannibalism is pretty straight forward--human flesh. Tabus don't work if there's a lot of subtlety. But I can draw a bright line between eating dead or symbolic flesh on one hand and killing humans with the intent of eating them. I gag at the thought of eating dead relatives or plane crash victims or afterbirth, but I can't say that there's any rational basis for it. Since killing humans for food is murder and would be covered under that tabu, I'd have to say that there's no good reason for the cannibalism tabu. Phew! I really sent the iconoclast-o-meter off the scale on that one.! Karen