Roman church decorated with 4k skeletons

The living can consent

I get text messages like that. Still don’t know who it is.

Paris, I hope.

There's a bag at the exit for visitors to return "souvenirs" if they change their mind.

I went to a Catholic school growing up, my parents weren't religious and I largely had no relationship to the faith but one thing that always fascinated me growing up was the old, imposing Gothic church that the students celebrated mass in, which as a kid always was a little bit scary to me.

This church with death on display reminds me of that and to me what's always been striking is that there's almost a pagan or occult undercurrent in Catholicism. I think Midnight Mass, a great show btw, captures this as well. Trying to show how much of an actual blood ritual the Catholic Eucharist is. (in Catholicism bread and wine are taken to be transformed into literally(!), not figuratively the blood and body of Christ).

Also wherever Catholicism mixes with folk traditions this is visible, with figures like Santa Muerte in Latin America. And while the Catholic church usually distances itself from this, it's always interesting how easily these traditions blend.

I don't think that's how it happened. You can make arguments for all sorts of burial practices.

It was a classic argument, recounted by Herodotus:

When Darius was king, he summoned the Greeks who were with him and asked them what price would persuade them to eat their fathers’ dead bodies. They answered that there was no price for which they would do it. Then he summoned those Indians who are called Callatiae, who eat their parents, and asked them (the Greeks being present and understanding by interpretation what was said) what would make them willing to burn their fathers at death. The Indians cried aloud, that he should not speak of so horrid an act.

Herodotus used this anecdote, rather dubiously I think, it as an argument that everyone should stick to their own customs and not think too much about what other people do. But I think Darius himself, if it actually happened, used it more as an argument for tolerance, agnosticism - and cruelty.

Because it's a bit cruel to shock the poor Greeks and Callatiae like that, isn't it? And rulers of most large (and thus multicultural) empires always seemed to be a bit on the cruel side to me.

What do you do, when you encounter people, for whom everything you consider important, sacred, meaningful, just doesn't register at all, and they care about completely different things? Do you shut it out? Or do you allow yourself to drift towards indifference and nihilism, that maybe none of that stuff matters at all?

As I recall, Popper called it "the strain of civilization", how it gnaws on people to have to deal with so many people who don't share their basic values of what's important in life. And how they can resort to isolationism and cruelty to cope with it.

The Christian church's innovation was to seek a tight core of meaningful beliefs, with divine justifications of course, but be fairly tolerant of more secondary sources of meaning, those coming from custom and culture. Like Paul, who insisted that no food was forbidden to eat, even food that had been served up to idols, but that he'd nonetheless respect the dietary customs of the people he ate with because it was important to them ("Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother to stumble, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause him to fall.")

It was really the first truly multicultural faith, since up to then, faith, customs and culture had been one and the same.

So it's not so out of character, really, that the Catholic church a few years ago ruled that the Madagascar custom of exhuming the dead and dancing with them wasn't contrary to the faith, since it was "just" a cultural practice and didn't necessarily imply any beliefs incompatible with Christianity.