The answer used to be provided at Easter, with the Christian climax in death by crucifixion, followed by resurrection.

The Jesus story wrestled with death not being merely death. Today, however, the sacred meaning of Easter is little more than a dusty relic.

For the secular modern age, belief in any form of life after death is in doubt.

The metaphysical supports that directed earlier generations, keeping them on their feet and moving, have lapsed.

Most no longer believe in a supernatural being — whether providential, guiding, punishing, or forgiving.

God has become a figment of the archaic imagination; gods of any type are mere alien superstitions, held once upon a time by naive, even primitive ancestors.

Belief has long gone in an eternal destination for the departing soul at death — heaven or hell.

The existence of a soul is in question; never mind whether that hypothetical soul survives the death of the individual human.

All in all, human consciousness has narrowed down to focus on mortal life, lived here and now, on a this-worldly plane; a finite span bound by birth and death, governed by everyday pleasures and pains.

Individuals today find themselves in the position of Socrates, if they are honest.

After being sentenced to death at his trial in Athens in 399BC, the 70-year-old philosopher reflected that he did not fear death.

He told his fellow citizens that he did not know what awaited him once he was gone.

There were two possibilities.

Either death was final, like a form of eternal dreamless sleep. Or his soul was immortal and would migrate off, somewhere beyond, to join other immortal souls. Socrates was the paradigm agnostic.

The death question has not gone away.

Its centrality for all humans, and in all times, is illustrated by the fact religions pivot their theology on finding an answer to it.

The first great work in the Western tradition, Homer's Iliad, focuses on death: even though it is a war and conquest story, the nature of mortality is of much greater concern than fighting and glory.

Christianity instated the cross as its commanding symbol, a death and transcendence symbol.

A different world

Today, in a seemingly quite different world, what is it possible to believe?

Let me open by considering a room full of people.

When a stranger comes through the door, those whom they encounter will recognise that a kind of force has arrived, changing the atmosphere.

An extraordinary concentration of presence has infiltrated among those assembled.

That individual human being is more than the sum of their known and observed parts: physical form, the complex of their gestures and expressions, voice, and attributes of character, and its biography.

The derogatory Yiddish term nebbish underlines the point, in negation, referring to an inconsequential person whose presence on entering a room creates a vacuum.

We see this in parenthesis in some fictional examples.

When Achilles stands up unarmed on the edge of raging battle, in Book Eighteen of The Iliad, and the goddess Athena bathes his head and shoulders in metaphoric golden light, the fighting Trojans stop in mid-stride, quaking in fear, although they are armed and winning the battle.

When Audrey Hepburn enters the royal ball in My Fair Lady the assembled throng is hushed, awe-struck by her shimmering beauty, a beauty that outshines gorgeous gown, gracious figure, and finely proportioned face.

She is a modern goddess, a film "star", the many associations with divinity indicating that some kind of supernatural glow is seen to have manifested, emanating from her.

The stranger who enters the room is more than personality, although personality may have its own impact, whether brashly domineering, slyly insincere, sparklingly alert or even darkly gloomy.

Personality may even predominate.

It, in turn, may be amplified by physical bulk, litheness of movement, fidgety restlessness or languor.

Nor does the stranger introduce just a new energy field.

Shadowing the physical form, some kind of spiritual aura has been revealed.

Those already in the room, were they to calm themselves, put their egos into recess and half-close the eyes, might sense a concentration of spectral force.

Sacred impregnation of the ether contrasts with carnal thereness.

Here lies the supreme potential power of living humans.

Intimidation may follow, as with Achilles on the edge of battle.

Alternatively, a process of psychic contagion may impose myriad other influences.

The presence of the other can inspire, excite or charm; calm or unsettle; or distress, deplete and depress.

Psychic contagion is arguably the least understood factor in personal and social relations, and the most underestimated.

This is why a corpse is unnerving.

The physical form is there, largely unchanged. But the animating presence has gone, the light switched off.

The face is a mask, whether chalklike or heavily made-up, ghastly, quite different from the prosaic outer form of the person who recently was.

The eerie horror that leaves the observer grave, shaken and mute — that simply cannot be comprehended — is that this person, lying here as a ghostly physical residue, is gone forever.

No breath remains to flutter the veil.

The body, cold to the transgressive touch, commands deathly silence, awakening consciousness of the vacancy of life, its little consequence when seen in the context of the infinite, eternal nothing.

This negative power in turn, however, implies an opposite positive truth — two sides of the same coin — a truth of such engaging potency that to remove or deny it may paralyse the witness.

It is difficult to believe that the concentration of spectral force that, but an hour earlier, animated the human entity that is now a cadaver simply disappears into nothing.

It is said that death is final. But those are mere words.

For the preceding 3000 years in our culture, it was assumed that a soul inhabited the living person.

According to most beliefs, it arrived at birth and departed at death. With their last breath, the person expired. The spirit that was breathed out for the last time was the "immortal soul".

To progress further we need to distinguish between two quite different phenomena animating the human psyche.

On the one hand, there is vitality, energy, life force and ego.

On the other, there is soul.

The former constellation is mortal. Energy ebbs as a person gets older or sickens; the ego shrinks, even withers. When the person dies their vitality is snuffed out.

If we reflect on the nature of the human ego, it appears unambiguously mortal.

The novel (and film) Gone with the Wind makes the point — a 2014 survey found it still the second favourite book of American readers, just behind the Bible.

Gone with the Wind contrasts Scarlett O'Hara, as lead character, with Melanie Hamilton.

Scarlett is a force of nature, extraordinarily vital and resilient; petulantly childish, selfish, insensitive and indomitable; all ego, yet shrewd and realistic in practical matters.

Melanie is soulful, an exemplar of selfless charity and goodness.

She is low on ego, naive and sickly, whereas Scarlett is diminutive of soul.

Scarlett's vitality seems to have its source less in a love of life's potential fulfil­ments than a tenacious clinging, driven by an assertive, buoyant ego that refuses to be cowed.

The inference may be drawn that once the struggle is over nothing will be left — and indeed for Scarlett, the life essence is struggle.

Scarlett's one reverent attachment is to her land, Tara, expressed at the end of the novel, if only as a consoling flicker.

In general, the animal life force, which Scarlett incarnates to the full, does expire.

With Melanie, the grip on actual living is weak; the influence of her spirit strong and resolute.

Most who move within her orbit, hold her in awed respect.

She is the unassuming centre of gravity, her grace, kindness and incandescent virtue a beacon to others.

It is more difficult to imagine the extinguishing of her spirit when she dies.

St Augustine made a distinction between two deaths, the death of the soul and that of the body.

The soul may die but the person goes on living — they die twice. As an illustration, those rendered permanently unconscious by a severe stroke, with the body still breathing, the heart beating, may give the overwhelming impression to those close to them that the spirit has already absented itself — the animating aura of the person, or the soul, appears to have departed.

Primo Levi, in If This is a Man (1958), his account of his experience in Auschwitz, draws an inflexible distinction among humans between those who are saved, and those drowned — a more useful distinction today, it seems to me, than the moralised one between the saved and the damned.

The distinction was more obvious in the extreme environment of the Nazi concentration camp.

Those who had lost the will to live but were still alive formed an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who marched and laboured in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer.

JK Rowling's Harry Potter is the singular book and film phenomenon of recent times.

The seven-volume Harry Potter series posits a similar understanding of the immortal soul, by casting sinister black, wraithlike creatures called Dementors, which chill the atmosphere whenever they are present, making anyone in their vicinity gloomy — they represent psychic contagion writ large.

When Dementors attack, they attempt to kiss the victim, to suck out the soul through the mouth.

In a largely post-Christian world, it is telling that Levi and Rowling should evoke almost identical imagery for the existence of the soul. Auschwitz had swarmed with Dementors.

What would sceptics say?

In fact, they can counter with one simple axiom: fear of death gives birth to many a powerful illusion.

The pure atheist, at the extreme, does not believe in God and goes further, to reject all metaphysics.

A counter-faith is set up, a new orthodoxy staked to materialist science which, it is held, explains everything.

Human beings are but material entities and, when they die, matter rots and decays, returning to dust.

Acute human experience, notably death, may however leave psychic residues that are more substantial than fantasy imaginings.

Once, when visiting the German city of Munich, I was shocked to see a station at the end of an ordinary train line named Dachau.

How, I thought, could a "normal" suburb be built on the site of one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps?

Experience points in two opposite directions here.

It is common to revisit a place in which fateful personal events had taken place — tragedy, romance, sporting triumph or even the house in which one grew up — to find it resistant to nostalgic memory, cold and empty, indifferent to the past.

Maybe the suburb of Dachau is just like any other modern Western community, with a bank, a supermarket and a playground.

The minds of the living may be haunted by ghosts from their own past, but those ghosts will vanish with them, or even before.

Yet the opposite is equally true.

There are places haunted by ghosts from the past — personally, I find it hard to imagine this is not the case with Dachau.

There are spaces that resonate with sacred atmosphere — Delphi comes to my mind, as does the inside of Bourges cathedral, the Alhambra in Granada, and some ancient Australian Aboriginal ceremonial grounds.

Romain Rolland wrote of an "oceanic feeling" he was never without, of something limitless, unbounded, a sensation of eternity.

He suggested that this feeling is the universal source of religious energy, whatever the religion and whatever the particular forms of belief and worship.

We are in territory in which there are no proofs.

Even Rolland remarked that the oceanic feeling does not necessarily imply personal immortality.

There are cases in which the soul is stifled by the housing personality.

Shakespeare's Richard II, as king, is a case in point, lacking judgment: he is proud, wasteful, lazy, irresponsible and unjust.

Once he loses power, however, he switches into a dignified, majestic reflection on life:

Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs, Make Dust our paper, and with rainy eyes

Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth … For within the hollow crown; That rounds the mortal temples of a king... Keeps Death his court; ….

Once Richard tunes in to things of ultimate gravity, he stills the audience.

He has been transported out of the realm of worldly ambition.

Liberated, he surrenders to timeless truth, embracing it, and he gains the rare power of being able to speak with its voice.

The deep and eternal truths about the human condition are one of the soul's currencies.

What I am suggesting here is that Rolland's abiding sense of eternity beyond the individual is matched by a sense of eternity within.

An electric current needs two poles. It is the conjoining of the two, beyond and within, that counters the threat of drowning.

The belief in the immortal soul has its roots somewhere here.

• John Carroll is professor emeritus of sociology at La Trobe University.
• First published in The Australian. Republished with permission.

"Christ emptied himself," Dr. Timothy Millea said in a talk at his Catholic parish .

"As a surgeon, two words that make our hair stand on end are ‘bleeding out'," he said.

"If you can't stop it, you can't keep that patient alive."

Millea, who is an orthopedic surgeon, said an adult male has about 1.5 gallons (5.7 litres) of blood. The loss of 40 percent of that can lead to hypovolemic shock, a life-threatening condition.

This means probably that Jesus surpassed that threshold after repeated beatings through the night, an intense scourging at the hands of Roman soldiers that included wearing a crown of thorns and having nails driven through his upper wrists and feet.

"Some people ask, did Jesus really die of physical factors, or did he - as God - say ‘OK, my work is done,'" Millea told his audience.

After explaining Jesus's physical and emotional suffering - from the Agony in the Garden to his death on the cross - Millea said "how he lived this long is one of the biggest divine mysteries."

While Millea said Jesus's passion and death is "a tragic story, a horrible story, a painful story," he ended his talk by showing an image of the resurrected Christ to illustrate that "this story doesn't end with where we finish tonight."

He acknowledged that other physicians and historians have other ideas about Jesus's cause of death. One idea suggests Jesus might have died from asphyxiation because breathing was so difficult on the cross. Others say he may have had a heart attack after the hours of physical exertion and trauma.

Millea feels the blood loss theory is not only medically likely but it also corresponds with the theological teachings of atoning sacrifice, with Jesus taking the place of the slaughtered lamb.

Source

• Crux
• Image: cinemablend.com

Four men are on trial at York Crown Court accused of religiously aggravated assaults.

All four deny the charges and three claimed the incidents were part of general workplace banter.

The mock crucifixion was one of several incidents of alleged bullying the teen said he suffered.

The young man, now aged 19, testified in court by video link.

The alleged mock crucifixion incident - which was said to have been filmed by co-workers - involved the teen being tied to a wooden cross and suspended three feet in the air.

This allegedly happened after he refused to hand over his phone.

"At the time I didn't know what to feel. I felt ashamed, everyone could see what was happening to me. I was embarrassed," he told the court.

"Afterwards I was thinking they were trying to take the Mickey out of my religion. Otherwise why was there a cross made?"

The victim, who is a churchgoer, told the court that the abuse had started not long after he joined the firm in July, 2014.

Other alleged incidents included one of the accused spraying deodorant towards the teen's head and lighting it while the teen was asleep in bed.

There was another alleged occasion which involved tying the teenager to a chair and pulling him off the ground by his underpants - leaving him with cuts and bruises to his buttocks.

In another alleged incident, the teenager was pelted with eggs and flour by three of his co-workers while he was in the shower.

One month later, while the workers were staying in Essex, one of the men allegedly struck again while the teen was sleeping.

This time, the teen was left with crosses, phallic symbols and other marks drawn on his body.

The teenager was too ashamed to report the incidents and feared he would be sacked.

The trial started on Monday.

Sources

• Daily Mail
• Daily Mirror
• BBC
• Image: Hookedoneverything.com

The scientist leading the study suggested that being crucified in a "Y" shape would be very painful and would probably cause asphyxiation for the victim.

Scientists at the Liverpool John Moores University in the United Kingdom announced their findings at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences earlier this year.

They argue that the Shroud of Turin, believed by some to be the burial cloth of Jesus, shows an image of a man with blood stains streaking down his arms.

Matteo Borrini, who led the shroud study at the John Moores University, argues that these stains could only have been obtained if the victim's arms were hung over his head in a "Y" shape, instead of the "T" shape that is so prevalent in Christian art.

The scientists reached their new conclusion after having scientist Luigi Garlaschelli of the University of Pavia, Italy, act out different crucifixion poses.

He had donated blood dripping down his arms via a cannula.

As Borrini told the New Scientist, this new crucifixion position would have been much more painful than the "T" shaped crucifixion.

Being hung with one's arms above their head makes it very difficult to breathe.

The Shroud of Turin is a 14-foot linen that has a full-length photonegative image of a wounded man on the front and back of the cloth.

Researchers have never been able to conclusively show how it was formed.

In 1988, carbon testing dated the cloth to the 12th century, leading many to conclude that the shroud is a medieval forgery.

These results have been contested on various grounds, included claims that the piece tested was a medieval repair.

Borrini said that if the shroud is a forgery, it is expertly done since the blood stains line up as accurately as if they were produced from an actual crucifixion.

Sources

• Christian Post
• National Catholic Reporter
• Image: The Telegraph

The trouble with the crucifix is we no longer see it, but rather filter the image through our eyes of faith. Some people wear it as an accessory like gold earrings or a necklace; others use it as a talisman to ward off evil, if not vampires. A few brave souls even have it tattooed on various parts of their anatomy. The truth is, if we actually took the time to see the crucifix, we, like the Chinese, would be shocked, if not thoroughly scandalized.

While the Romans did not invent this particularly brutal form of capital punishment, they certainly perfected it. They were not interested in simply killing criminals; they intended to demean and dehumanize them. The slow, tortuous death was a bonus. The public spectacle served not only as a punishment for miscreants but also as a warning to anyone who harbored similar rebellious thoughts.

When I ask Bible study groups why Jesus was crucified, I get the formulaic "He died for our sins" or sometimes "He died to show God's love for us," which are true enough, but not complete. Certainly the powers-that-be who conspired to silence the pesky rabbi from Nazareth didn't have the salvation of the human race in mind. Rephrasing the question: "What did Jesus do to deserve crucifixion?" proves more thought-provoking. Clearly Jesus and his message posed a threat to the status quo, both religious and political. His cleansing of the Temple was the last straw. But the physical expulsion of merchants and moneychangers from the Court of the Gentiles was simply the final, dramatic manifestation of Jesus' scandalous message throughout his ministry: God loves everybody, unconditionally. Continue reading

Sources

• Joseph R Veneroso in National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Vimeo

Maryknoll Fr. Joseph R. Veneroso is a former editor and publisher of Maryknoll magazine and Revista Maryknoll.

Such a move would bar thousands of pilgrims and visitors from the church that is considered to be the most holy Christian shrine on earth.

Already the Israeli company that supplies water to the property has frozen the bank account of the Greek Orthodox Church, which has the major ownership rights to the church. Ownership is shared with Catholics and Armenian Orthodox, while Coptic Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox an Ethiopian Orthodox have rights to use some parts.

The Greek Orthodox say they are now unable to pay stipends and salaries for some 500 priests and the 2000 teachers in its 30 schools. Cheques have bounced for services such as telephones, electricity and food.

For more than a century the Church of the Holy Sepulchre operated without paying for water under successive Ottoman, British mandate, Jordanian and Israeli governments. Then in 1996 the Jerusalem municipality handed its water supply to a corporation called Hagihon Inc.

In 2004 Hagihon sent the church a bill for 3.7 million shekels ($NZ1.1 million). Officials at the church, thinking it was a mistake, ignored it and Hagihon did not press for payment.

Earlier this year Hagihon sent a revised demand for 9 million shekels, covering seven years plus interest on the unpaid debt.

The two sides began negotiations, assisted by representatives of government departments and the municipality. According to the Greek Orthodox patriarchate, an agreement appeared likely when Hagihon suddenly enforced a court order to freeze the patriarchate's bank account.

The patriarchate has written to Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and president, Shimon Peres, for support. It also plans to approach Russian president Vladimir Putin, United States president Barack Obama, King Abdullah of Jordan and the prime ministers of Greece and Cyprus.

Hagihon says it is prohibited by the Israeli Water Authority from giving any party an exemption from water charges.

Sources:

Associated Press

The Independent

The Guardian

Image: Seetheholyland.net

"There are few places on earth where religious fervor is matched in such graphic shows of penitence and resolve to do better", Asian Pearl Vision, a small luxury travel designer in the Philippines writes on its website.

In an article "Crucifixion in the Philippines: Tourists Welcome", the travel agency gives a link to various Good Friday events.

A Dutch woman, a travel show host from Holland, lamented to Reuters she did not get the full experience.

"We tried to carry a huge cross, we couldn't because everybody was filming us, and we tried to suffer like these people suffer, but it's very hard. We were the centre of attention instead of them."

Despite repeated requests from the Catholic bishops, for some Philippines Catholics' devotion calls them to this extreme expression of their faith.

"This is a vow I had made to God so that He will spare my family from sickness," the penitent, a faith healer, Arturo Bating, told ABC News after his ordeal.

Another, Alex Laranang, 57, also told ABC News had had himself crucified every year for the past 12 years.

"I had made a vow to do this every year until I die," Mr Laranang, who sells snacks aboard buses for a living, said.

"I do not expect anything in return. I do this for my God."

Like Mr Bating, he said the physical pain was a minor inconvenience.

"I hardly feel any pain. The nerves have been deadened," he said.

"After this, I go home, eat and go to sleep. After two days I go back to work."

In some cases the devotees - who do not take painkillers - also had their feet nailed to the cross and one person had to be rushed off in a waiting ambulance after his feet suffered from heavy bleeding.

Crucifixions are the grisliest, but by no means the only extreme acts of penitence on show in the Philippines.

Dozens of barefoot male devotees wearing black hoods whipped their own bare backs bloody with strips of bamboo tied to a string as they walk the neighbourhoods on Thursday and Friday.

They were followed by groups of children who covered their faces as blood from the whips sprayed on to their clothes.

The ceremonies are supervised by local governments, which put medical treatment on standby, said Reynaldo Sulit, a district official in Paombong.

The Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines has urged penitents against crucifying themselves, reports ucanews.com.

President of the Catholic Bishops' Conference, Archbishop Jose Palma of Cebu, said the Church would rather have people renewing their faith than inflicting pain on themselves.

"While we are trying to discourage these practices we cannot also judge their intention, especially those who have made it as their vow," the prelate said.

"We do not judge and condemn [the practice] but we discourage it," he added.

Sources

• ucanews.com
• Reuters
• ABC News
• Asiana Pearl Vision
• Image: Reuters

Archbishop Jose Palma of Cebu, CBCP president, said the Church would rather have people renewing their faith than inflicting pain on themselves.

"While we are trying to discourage these practices we cannot also judge their intention, especially those who have made it as their vow," the prelate said.

Yesterday tourists flocked to see at least 24 Filipinos take part in the annual ritual which Church leaders reject as extreme devotion and a distortion of the Easter message.

"The Church asks you to deny yourself through mortification, prayer and sacrifice. So it is more of self-control rather than physical infliction on our body," Pampanga Archbishop Paciano Aniceto told The Philippine Star. "The Church does not ask you to punish yourself corporally."

However more than 30,000 people, including tourists watched and took pictures. An ambulance stood by and more than 20 tourists fainted or became dizzy in the heat, officials said.

Ruben Enaje, a 50-year-old sign painter, screamed in pain as villagers dressed as Roman centurions hammered four-inch stainless steel nails through his palms and set him aloft on a cross under a brutal sun in San Pedro Cutud in Pampanga.

It was Enaje's 25th crucifixion after surviving, almost unscathed, a fall from a three-story building in 1985.

"I hope the Lord will grant my wish to make me win big in the lottery this year" Alex Laranang, a 55-year-old food vendor who said he can't read or write, told Reuters before two 5-inch nails were driven into his hands on a scorching hot day.

Laranang, a father of five, said he had won 3 thousand pesos (NZ$87) twice in the five years he had himself crucified on a cross.

"The first time I was nailed to a cross, I was terrified, but I prayed to Jesus to take the pain. Now, I don't feel anything. It's like getting an injection," he added.

Ahead of the cross nailings, throngs of penitents walked several miles through village streets and beat their bare backs with sharp bamboo sticks and pieces of wood, sometimes splashing spectators with blood. Some participants opened cuts in the penitents' backs using broken glass to ensure the ritual was sufficiently bloody.

Foreigners have been banned from taking part after an Australian comic was nailed to a cross under a false name a few years ago. Authorities also believe that a Japanese man sought to be crucified as part of a porn film in 1996. "They made a mockery of a local tradition," the authorities said.

Sources

• Reuters
• The Guardian