Today there are stations of the cross presentations in public spaces.
It's a very brutal spectacle around which our culture has been built. You've got children watching as a choice is made between brutalizing one of two people, then soldiers whipping Jesus in public, then all the violence to come...
The sheer hypocrisy of so much Western outcry over children being allowed to learn about other violence in their national histories, or different forms of love, when *this* is annual pageantry.
@MLClark such a weird 'tradition'
Just as An and Inanna and all the other gods of Uruk passed away... and Thor and Loki... and Ba'al and Asherah and all the other Canaanite pantheon gods from which only Yahweh now survives...
One day our religions will fade as well, with all their strange elaborate stories...
And then our descendants will look back on this era of pageantry and think "whew! glad we're not primitives like that anymore"... before going about their own weird rituals in service to the gods to come. 🙃