Drawing a cross in the dirt
So there's this thing about how McCain stole his story about a Vietnamese prison guard drawing in the dirt from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. And it seems that the charge is at least partly if not fully BS. It's not necessary for McCain to have stolen the story from Solzhenitsyn because Solzhenitsyn isn't the person who invented the concept of drawing christian symbols in the dirt. That's a custom that's been around since the early Christian church, when the fish symbol ichthys was (and still is) used as a low-key way for early christians to identify each other. I'm pretty sure that there's a scene in The Ten Commandments or Ben Hur where someone does this.
This doesn't mean that the story is legit. Solzhenitsyn probably made up the story and McCain could have made it up as well. But it doesn't strain credibility to imagine that all three of them - McCain, Solzhenitsyn, and a North Vietnamese Christian guard on the down-low - could have been inspired by the same old custom, or each other. It seems a lot more likely that someone thought of Solzhenitsyn when the story came up since he died 2 weeks ago.
Side note: Christians appropriated a lot of holidays and symbols from other cultures and Ichthys is no exception: the vescia picis is a common symbol not just in religion but in art, architecture, and woo which was formerly used vertically as a pagan fertility symbol representing the vagina and anus.
Side note 2: McCain's campaign explains the same thing here, while adding a puzzling dig at "the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd [who] disparage a fellow countryman's memory of war from the comfort of mom's basement". Way to lose all my persnickety-fueled sympathy, dickhead.
This doesn't mean that the story is legit. Solzhenitsyn probably made up the story and McCain could have made it up as well. But it doesn't strain credibility to imagine that all three of them - McCain, Solzhenitsyn, and a North Vietnamese Christian guard on the down-low - could have been inspired by the same old custom, or each other. It seems a lot more likely that someone thought of Solzhenitsyn when the story came up since he died 2 weeks ago.
Side note: Christians appropriated a lot of holidays and symbols from other cultures and Ichthys is no exception: the vescia picis is a common symbol not just in religion but in art, architecture, and woo which was formerly used vertically as a pagan fertility symbol representing the vagina and anus.
Side note 2: McCain's campaign explains the same thing here, while adding a puzzling dig at "the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd [who] disparage a fellow countryman's memory of war from the comfort of mom's basement". Way to lose all my persnickety-fueled sympathy, dickhead.