15-year-old voluntarily crucified to celebrate Easter - is there a limit to the abuse fundies inflict on kids?

As you state in your question, it is the ROMAN CATHOLICS -- not the fundamentalists -- who do this annually. Please don't insult fundamentalists that way.

My fifteen year-old son is sitting not 5 feet from me, playing XBOX-Live with his friends while I use his computer. He's slightly taller than me, with hair that lays in soft waves, and which really needs trimmed but he refuses a cut. He's thin, painfully so, and can't weigh more than 130 pounds. He and his friends are searching for glitches on the new Rainbow 6 game he bought yesterday, and from what I can tell they are having a wonderful time.

His Easter candy is in a bowl between his feet, and his bedroom floor is littered with Starburst wrappers. He knows I'm tucking some cash into his wallet for a planned trip to Pittsburgh on Monday, and he's done nothing but talk about the clothes he wants to buy at the mall after my doctor appointment.

This is what childhood should be. Playing with friends, eating candy and looking forward to a day in the city. Not beating yourself bloody and enduring crucifixion.

Just reading this story makes me want to cry.

Dressing up the boy as a princess will not make him gay, or a serial killer, or depressed as he gets older. He may be embarrassed by it but who doesn't have any embarrassment from their childhood? If this was the other way around and a girl wanted to dress up in as a prince nobody would say anything. Is dressing up as a princess his idea or yours? It sounds like it is yours. My advice would just ask him what he wants or take him down the costume isle and let him pick a "boy" costume.

Jesus took the punishment so we don't have to. Imagine Gods position on this: get literaly SHREDDED to peices to defeat deaths hold on your children, and then they go out and abuse the crap out of theirselves. Would that not hurt God? It's almost like a spit to the face because it practicaly defeats the whole purpose of God doing it at all.

But I'm sure their hearts are in the right place and that is what counts the most.

Note the word "voluntary". Philipinos take their religious displays very seriously, and there's nobody more devoted to a crazy idea than a worked-up teenager.

Hey Philipinos! Get with the times. Self flagellation is, like, so Middle Ages. Pshhh.

And they say believing costs nothing other than an hour or two a week at a place of worship.

These people should cease to be and qualify for the Darwin awards

www.darwinawards.com

Ummmm

That's a Catholic country, and in many countries, 15 is no longer a child. It is voluntary, and to presume that all countries should behave just as we in the United States is quite narrow minded.

In Spain, there is the running of the Bulls. There are towers of people, where children who are younger than 10 will fall 30 feet or more. Is this all child abuse?

You are speaking from a country (presumably the United States) where children are losing the meaning of family. Parents both work and farm their children out to strangers to care for them so that they can "provide for their children", when all they are providing is more expensive child care workers, more expensive clothes, homes and schools, but no idea of family.

Some children in the United States ride bulls and get seriously hurt. Some take part in BMX, Motocross, Mixed Martial Arts and all sorts of other activities in which they can be seriously hurt, but that's not child abuse. How many children are killed in drive-by shootings? How many are left to fend for themselves because they are LGBT and ran away from insensitive or abusive homes? In the United States, children as young as 13 are sentenced to life in prison for crimes committed so young, when those at fault are actually the parents and society for failing to properly raise them.

With all of this, people in the United States have the audacity to look on the practices of another country and claim that they are abusive toward children or primitive?

What you speak of in the Philipines is not Fundamentalism, it is traditional Catholicism as practiced in that country. It is something quite apart from Fundamentalism, which is quite anti-Catholic.

You have expressed contempt without investigation. This is called prejudice. You don't understand the culture. You don't understand any of the groups you are showing contempt for ... the Catholics, the Fundamentalists, or the Philipinos.

Maybe you should learn something about these people before showing such contempt.

That, I cannot explain.

Perhaps you must ask that boy why he wanted to, however, the deed is done.

St Catherine of Sienna received this mark (the Stigmata) on her body, but asked Jesus that the marks would not show, and so she suffered the stigmata without any visible marks, until her death, when the marks appeared on her body.

I like St Catherine of Sienna.

I'm all for cultural customs, but now I think I'm gonna be sick...that is horrible...they actually nail people to crosses....thank God no one has actually died yet though...those pictures were horrifying.

Peace!

Damn I hope he got a lot of eggs for that!!

btw the daily mail is the worst newspaper in the world!!

its so right wing!! dont read it!