About This Forum: Social Sciences, Moral and Religious

[marct]

Hi MA,

It's Ellis theory on Liberia, not mine. But I must say that it fitted well in the paysage.

Point taken and, yes, it does fit....

About the Christian symbolic, yes I agree. The Christian rite is symbolic canibalism. But what is really disturbing is to face people who really believe that they did a Christian act by eating human flesh and drinking human blood.
Even if you're not Christian.
Taking distance with the subject of study does not help much.

Those people who believe that they have committed a "Christian act" by doing so, they need to study their own religion. Unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen .

Most cultures have a really strong taboo against cannibalism, except in certain, extremely limited, circumstances. Being able to distance oneself somewhat does let you deal with that, at least analytically, and to try and figure out what the barriers are.

Once that barrier has been breached, there are some very interesting "opportunities" that develop. For instance, people who start using blood magic, which is what this appears to be, are extremely susceptible to certain types of symbolic attacks. They tend to become paranoid in the extreme and, at the same time, become wide open to being psychologically manipulated, especially if they are inverting a dominant symbol system. Of course, that assumes that the people opposing them a) know what they are doing symbolically, and b) are prepared to "go the distance" as it were.

Cheers,

Marc