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CTclay -> RE: Opus Dei (3/6/2005 4:34:08 PM)
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quote:
Mortification of the flesh [snip] is also a staple of a great many of the world's religions and appears to go back the the very roots of human development.
Yeah, there's this one society where men and women, often together, gather to mortify themselves through exhaustion (perhaps something like the whirling Dervishes, I dunno). They work themselves into a wild, masochistic sweat by various methods. Sometimes it's just movement back and forth, sometimes they do it with mechanical devices (shades of the Inquisition). If they're not using the machines, they sometimes engage in the ritual together, all doing the same thing at once.
They're so intense about it that they'll sometimes go from ritual to ritual using different machines that attack different parts of their bodies. Often they have large mirrors in the rooms where they do this, so that they can see that they mortify themselves in the proper way.
The women, I've heard, often wear tight, sexy clothing for these rituals. I'm not sure what the men wear. At some points they exercise to special music. "Sweatin' to the Oldies" was, I think, one of their spiritual chants.
The women seem to go in for mortification more than the men do. They'll often go on to other places where they change their appearance -- wearing excruciatingly painful shoes, other clothing that can be painful to wear, and changing their hair constantly, often in ways that they have to laboriously have to keep up. They even change their fingernails -- can you believe it?!
I consider myself pretty tolerant to all kinds of kinks, but man -- some of that stuff is sick, sick sick! Personally, I'm thankful I don't live in one of these exotic, masochistic societies with their irrational, neurotic practices. Gimme some old-fashioned S&M kink any day, I tell you ...
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