Once I read the blog assignment for this week I could only think about images and how they are represented in our society. According to Isaac Watts, "An Idea is generally defined a representation of a thing in the mind; it is a representation of something that we have seen, felt, heard, &c, or been conscious of."
The image I can't stop thinking about in relation to all of this is...(and I hate to go this route) the image of the cross. Today, we see the cross all over the place, and for the most part when we see it we know that the building or place that it is on signifies christianity or Catholicism. However I can't help but think about how different things would be if the cross was something else. The fact of the matter is, the cross is a torturing device but today, for me at least, I don't think about that whenever I see one. I can't speak for everyone, maybe a lot of people do see a torturing device every time they look at the cross but for me it is a symbol of religion. What if the meaning behind this symbol was more thought about? I'm sure if it were it might get younger people thinking about whether or not christianity or catholicism is such a great thing.
Or what if the symbol wasn't a cross, and was actually an angel's halo, or something more heavenly and happy. I know this might have the potentiality of changing the bible or changing something that shouldn't be changed but I wonder if the symbol for these religions was different whether or not more people would be religious. The thought processing today behind seeing a torture device a lot may be really subtle but I feel as though maybe if from the beginning it were something evoking happy emotions that would have changed a lot of attitudes toward christianity and catholicism.
But just to make things clear, I don't know a lot about religion, and thats why I wonder about these things.
Knowing a lot about religion is tricky. I mean, you could read the Bible, but that won't do it, at least not entirely. You could go to church, and that would work well, but it isn't all there is. It is ok not to know a ton about religion, but I think you know more than you let on. We all do. You have preconceptions about the cross, about religious symbols. What would happen if it was different?
ReplyDeleteI think that, if one day, the Pope was like 'hey, yo, the cross is so old..... we are totally gonna go with something new' and implemented a new sign, everyone would go nuts. The cross has such enormous history that changing it would be near impossible. Alphabets as described in the reading were around for only a few hundred years.
There are some minimal connections to the prompt and the questions asked, here; see the models in the wrap-up blog post for how this question was best answered.
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