If "Charlie Hebdo" is satire, could someone please explain to me how this cover

[jberryhill]

155. I thought you had asked a question

You asked "Is piss Christ hate speech?"

I foolishly thought you wanted to discuss that question.

In my opinion, it is a striking visual image of a glowing crucifix in a medium which reinforces the Christian myth of the "divine reaching down to become human" and the monumental indignity and lowering of the divine incarnation. Think of that word "incarnation"... Literally "God became a piece of meat" - that's where the word incarnation comes from.

So when you hear a Christian refer to Christ as "God incarnate", do you think of what is actually being said?

So you have this crucifix in this glowing light, suggesting the divine, which is filtered through something entirely and undeniably corporeal and incident to existence as a human.

That's what it suggests to me, and it is my opinion that it is fully consistent with Christian themes. Perhaps it suggests something else to you. But the tension between emphasizing Christ's divinity on the one hand, and humanity on the other hand, is the kind of thing Europeans excelled at killing each other over in the course of their development.

Again, I haven't kept up with this sort of thing, but I seem to recall people in Ireland being able to work themselves into quite a lather over that sort of thing in my own lifetime and not long ago.

I sure know that my opinion on that photograph is not widely held, but so what? Was your question a true/false one, or an essay question. And if you already knew the correct answer, then why were you asking?