Word: ransoms
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...this time, Jesus is both priest and sacrifice, spilling, "not the blood of goats and calves but his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption." The Gospel of Mark favors Roman legal language for the freeing of slaves: "the Son of Man came ... to give his life as a ransom for many." The First Epistle of Peter, meanwhile, takes a radically different tack, posing Jesus' trials as occasion for imitation: "because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps." And Paul's letter to the Colossians pauses only briefly at the Cross...
When the early church fathers did pick up on the scriptural language of Christ's death as a ransom, the payee was not God but the devil, who some felt had legitimate claim on humanity because of Adam's fall. But others preferred another scenario: to see the Crucifixion and Jesus' subsequent descent into what they called Hades as a kind of divine bait-and-switch scheme, whereby the devil thought he had claimed a particularly virtuous human victim only to discover he had allowed into his sanctum the power that would eventually wrest humanity back from his grasp...
Anselm too read the New Testament lines calling Christ's death a ransom, but he could not believe that the devil was owed anything. So he restructured the cosmic debt. It was, he posed, humanity that owed God the Father a ransom of "satisfaction" (to use Anselm's feudal terminology) for the insult of sin. The problem was that the debt was unpayable: not only did we lack the means, since everything we had of value was God's to begin with, but also we lacked the standing, like a lowly serf helpless to erase an injury to a great...
...armed guards to ensure the extortionists don't target his part of the market. Outside Dhaka, the level of lawlessness has been equally bad, especially in Chittagong, where many businessmen have been targeted for kidnappings by extortionists. "We live with the constant threat of either being kidnapped for ransom or killed," says a businessman in Chittagong, who declines to be identified out of fear...
...religious tolerance. Bangladesh's Hindus, who constitute about 10% of the population of the predominantly Muslim nation, say they are increasingly being intimidated by gangs of Islamic fundamentalists, who attack them in their homes, warn them to pack up and leave for India and, for good measure, extort ransom from them. "The condition of religious minorities has become terrible under the present government," says Subrata Chowdhury, a Dhaka-based Hindu human-rights lawyer. The brutal attack on well-known intellectual Azad, a moderate Muslim who is an outspoken critic of Islamic fundamentalism, has also led many in Bangladesh's intelligentsia...