Where or how do children learn to hate? Perhaps they learn from example. Maybe they are taught specifically. Maybe humans, even as children, are all cruel and fierce animals just under the surface (see William Golding’s Lord of the Flies).

Today’s saint and martyr, Mark of Arethusa (in present-day Syria), suffered a series of horrific tortures before finally succumbing to death. He had been involved in destroying pagan temples when Christians in his area were in the ascendant, and, when Christians were out of favor and they were ordered to rebuild these temples, Mark refused–as a matter of faith. [Frankly, my sympathies to this point lie with the pagans–what gives Christians (or any other religion) the liberty to destroy those places and those symbols that others find holy or gather for worship? If the Gospel isn’t good-enough news to draw persons to Christianity, then it is a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal…and if that percussion has money and power behind it sufficient to compel others, then so much the worse.]

Back to Mark and the tortures he suffered: whether the pagans, temporarily restored to power, were wrong to insist that those who had destroyed their temples must subsequently rebuild them upon pain of torture and death, they were most definitely wrong in engaging their children as agents of torture. Odd and gruesome as it sounds, Butler recounts with respect to the public torments inflicted on Mark:

Having taken him from thence [an outhouse into which Mark had been cast], they left him to the children, ordering them to prick and pierce him, without mercy, with their writing styles, or steel pencils. They bound his legs with cords so tight, as to cut and bruise his flesh to the very bone; they rang off his ears with small strong threads; and in this maimed bloody condition they pushed him from one to the other.

I am horrified when I see photos of children carrying signs in their parents’ church’s protests (such as “God Hates Fags” or “Abortion is Murder”) and being encouraged to yell hate at those with whom their parents disagree. Likewise, I am disgusted by the ways in which children’s minds are warped under the guise of home schooling, as they are meticulously taught to dismiss and ridicule the ideas others hold that run counter to their parents’–it’s simply a more socially acceptable way of using educational tools (much like writing styles) to prick and pierce Those Deemed Wrong.

I don’t know how any of those children who participated centuries ago in the ridicule and murder of Mark later felt about their actions? Did they ever feel shame? Or did they get sufficient social reinforcement throughout their lives to keep such feelings at bay?

Either way, Mark was not the only one damaged that day.