The crucifixtion and the torture and suffering Jesus went through as a catalyst for religious furvor has always puzzled me. I mean, many people have suffered far worse in human history. Mankind is very keen to devise the most agonizing ways of prolonging death and creating unmentionable, humiliating suffering.
The suffering of Christ is valid when you consider the theological viewpoint that he was taking on all of mankind's sins. When you take the physical and mental suffering purely as the catalyst for your religion, I fear your perspective is way off. Hint-hint Mr. Mel Gibson and the "Passion" of Christ. I've heard countless statements or sermons about how horribly Christ suffered and it seems all engineered to generate piety of out some false sense of guilt.
I mean, can you imagine being put on a wheel? That's probably 10-times worse than crucifixtion.
http://www.francesfarmersrevenge.com...re/devices.htm
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The victim, naked, was stretched out supine on the ground or on the execution dock, with his or her limbs spread, and tied to stakes or iron rings. Stout wooden crosspieces were placed under the wrists, elbows, ankles, knees and hips. The executioner then smashed limb after limb and joint after joint, including the shoulders and hips, with the iron-tyred edge of the wheel, but avoiding fatal blows. The victim was transformed, according to the observations of a seventeenth-century German chronicler, “into a sort of huge screaming puppet writhing in rivulets of blood, a puppet with four tentacles, like a sea monster, of raw, slimy and shapeless flesh mixed up with splinters of smashed bones”. Thereafter the shattered limbs were “braided” into the spokes of the large wheel, and the victim hoisted up horizontally to the top of a pole, where the crows ripped away bits of flesh and pecked out eyes. Death came after what was probably the longest and most atrocious agony that the ingenuousness of the power structure could inflict.
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