Kontextmaschine

24th August 2018

Post reblogged from enlightened student and sportive friend with 39,234 notes

warpedellipsis:
annoyingtastemakerpeanut-blog:
redfoxflying:
earthly-chairs:
mudbloodedslytherin:
Me: *thinking about Christian memes* What if Jesus had come in 2017 instead of back during Roman times? Would He, instead of using parables, have spoken in memes?
Roommate: I hate you. You aren’t allowed to have any more thoughts about Jesus.
Me: It’s not like its heresy! It isn’t insulting!
Roommate: Yes, it is! Memes are inherently sin, a sign of the Devil’s influence on this fallen world!
Satan: turn these stones into bread
Jesus: bold of you to assume that man can live on bread alone
#satan: yeet yourself from this high place for the angels will surely catch you #jesus: i think the fuck not you trick ass bitch
Townsperson: Lazarus is dead
Jesus: fake news
crossing yourself would be a pose like planking
ok so this is a joke obviously but it’s adjacent to something I think about a lot, which is that so much of our religion and Christianity in particular is expressed in terms meant to be accessible to farmers and pastoralists, and it’s so completely removed from modern experience (even modern farming experience in most cases) that we have to learn these parables and metaphors like learning a foreign language, with these dense layers of mediation that didn’t exist for the intended audience. It’s sort of like reading writers from periods when English was notably different but still intelligible, and coming to understand things that were natural to their audience but unnatural to us as aesthetic signifiers of that genre of work.(Even Marxist rhetoric has this problem, in that it’s tied to this industrialist workerism that’s become fetishized for its anachronistic appeal, but it’s really noticeable in religion.)
If this stuff was aimed at modern audiences in an otherwise similar context, we’d have a lot more parables and metaphorical sermons about people who live in apartments or men’s shelters, and at retail, warehousing or call centres. And a genuine localization would I think have to take that tack – it’d have to be wholly transformative in its substance in order to preserve the intended reading. But the value people place in tradition is mostly invested in its visible markers, so that concept is a hard sell – the more anachronistic and removed from daily experience something becomes, the more “traditional” it feels, and so the same weight that makes these old-ass metaphors unweildy also makes them lasting.