Alternate Uses for Traditional Religious or Political Symbols Thread.

This idea came to me when I attended a Buddhist ceremony a few weeks ago and saw the prominence of the swastika. Thinking of how ludicrous it was for such a peaceful, holy and auspicious symbol to be manipulated by Nazis into a symbol of hatred and oppression. It got me to thinking of other symbols that could have undergone such drastic transformations in representation and use.

Post alternate explanations for the use of particular symbols and their connections to particular organisations, religions, political parties or just general society .

I'll start, I thought it was interesting to change up the meaning of the hammer and sickle. I even created a nifty picture.:p:D

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Shi Daiyang was born in 967 AD in a small village on Song Shan, Henan Province near the Shaolin Temple. He was the son of a local blacksmith (his father) and a rice farmer (his mother), he split his early childhood years assisting both his parents and learning their trades. When he was 10, Daiyang's parents realised that was a very diligent and gifted learner, but that they were far too poor to send him off for schooling. The institution that could provide for Daiyang a decent education, that remotely nearby was the Shaolin Temple.

The Shaolin Temple was also renowned for instilling pride, physical ability and toughness and above all, discipline and honour. Shi Daiyang was sent off to the temple, never seeing his parents again, only bringing with him a sickle and hammer as a reminder of them.

Shi Daiyang quickly became known as the most dedicated of all monks training at the temple. Daiyang supposedly remained awake and trained long after all the monks and the abbot had gone to sleep. Daiyang was recorded as having mastered all major forms of Shaolin Kungfu by his teens and even developed a reputation for being a most accomplished Buddhist scholar. When the abbot of the Shaolin Temple died in 1001, Daiyang was handed the role.

A most capable teacher and leader, under his period as Abbot, the Shaolin Temple produced some of the greatest Martial Artists in all of China and some were called to the Imperial Guard. Shi Daiyang is also the attributed creator of the martial arts style, Chuí Lián Dào 槌劆道 (The Way of the Hammer and Sickle)
 
Could Islam take up the Gammadion (swastika) from the Persians instead of adopting the crescent moon? IIRC, the latter was originally a symbol for Constantinople, not the faith.
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
Could Islam take up the Gammadion (swastika) from the Persians instead of adopting the crescent moon? IIRC, the latter was originally a symbol for Constantinople, not the faith.
Well, seeing as Islam is a religion strongly wedded to ritual practice, and the rituals are calculated in terms of the lunar calendar, the moon is not entirely unrepresentative of the faith. But there's strong evidence that it wasn't viewed as a religious symbol until comparatively recently. You can visit Topkapi palace in Istanbul and view a pair of imperial silk trousers decorated with crescent moons, which seems a hardly fitting use for a religious symbol.

I haven't heard that the crescent moon was a symbol for Constantinople before. It's one of those symbols (like the swastika) that pops up everywhere in a variety of contexts, and you'd be hard pressed to find the exact context in which it was first adopted by Islam.
 
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