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This reminded me of the following quote (from the book ‘Beyond Sleep’ by W.F. Hermans):
“Was there ever an Aztec who raised his voice to protest: “What we’re doing is insane!””
Of course, those wind up on the altar to be sacrafifed.
The ones that raise their voices are called Volunteers.
Sad but true. Most human beings just don’t have the ability to think critically. And it’s still going on today. They may not sacrifice their children on an altar, but they do it in other ways for religion. Fighting wars, with-holding medicine from a child for religious reasons, and so much more.
Fascinating. I’ll reserve judgment, though, since they aren’t from my culture and my culture is responsible for their annihilation. (A sad and horrible fact of history.)
I don’t agree with the “we can’t judge other cultures” you are implying here. A human sacrifice is a murder, no matter the culture doing it. We can try to understand them, we can try to explain the social rules that were behind those acts; but if any culture were doing that now, we should try to stop it.
I agree. As individuals and societies, we have a standard of morals, and they are not all equal. I believe that you can assess how evolved a culture is by how it treats its young, its old, and its poor. Any culture that murders children is backwards, especially since they are doing it for false reasons. Although here in North America, people still do bizarre and violent things in the name of god too. But we don’t go to this extreme (anymore).
I believe her point was that Europeans probably killed as many of their children as they did…
so we all suck.
Yeah, I guess that was pretty vague. I meant that christians have been violent almost up until the present day. We all know about historical atrocities, but recently colonization of American and Canadian Indians. Tribes were slaughtered, they were given blankets with smallpox to kill them off, and thousands of children were put in resdiential schools (in Canada) for over 100 years, where many of them died of illness and hunger. The purpose of all this? To get natural resources, and to convert the heathen. Sounds a lot like the Iraq war, doesn’t it? I guess things don’t change much, except that we don’t LITERALLY sacrifice our children to the gods.
Hey, and it worked, didn’t it?
What will cultural anthropologists and ethnologists of the far future have to say about our Age? Will they be dumbfounded by the extent of both our scientific/technological development and our stubborn refusal (culturally) to let go of unfalsifiable, gaseous vertebrates with flashing eyes and all-too-human flaws who live in the sky beyond the sky? What will they say (assuming the history perdures) of White House memos with religious propaganda on them, exhorting the “leader of the free world” to embark, on false grounds, on a “God-sanctioned” crusade against another nation? What will they think of our first non-white president, who struggled against a failing economy and the intractable problems of the Middle-East even as he affirmed that gay people don’t deserve the rights of heterosexual citizens in America? And finally, what will they come to think of us as they consider that an overwhelming amount of science warned us of imminent, dangerous, world-altering global climate change (specifically as AGW) and our response was to politicize it and argue it to death while undermining any practical hope of stopping or significantly slowing it? Or will there be no scientists at all to study it (the ruins, the now indecipherable records, the evidence of our long lost history), because our distant progeny will be too busy trying to eke out a living in an inhospitable world where few survive long enough to breed? Will one of them wonder if, in fact, those humans of the past made the ultimate sacrifice–that of the future itself?
They do get a month though. A full one too, not like the runt of the months like they gave to blacks.
The potlitical lines of friends or enemies by her abuses of the weakness of humanity drowns your voice.
I am soooo not able to parse this sentence.
Eg. USA, Iran and Isreal.
Very optimistic of you to speculate that there will be future cultural anthropologists.
Very well said.
James, I am in awe of your post. That should be a poster, posted all over the place.
This type of superstition is the pagan roots to the Jesus story. He was a human sacrifice to appease god. Why do so few people see the connection there? Why do christians assume that sacrifice was actually required for forgiveness of “sins”? Why have we not moved past this yet? Mark Twain wrote many years ago about how he believed humanity was finally moving past superstition. Clearly he was wrong. It is alive and well in most religions.
Why have we not moved past this yet?
Moved past it? Catholics regularly engage in ritual cannibalism to commemorate the event.
Evolution, religion, schizophrenia and the schizotypal personality
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/06/evolution-religion-s.html
Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky, one of the most interesting anthropologists I’ve heard lecture, gives us 90 minutes on the evolutionary basis for literal religious belief, “metamagical thinking,” schizotypal personality and so on, explaining how evolutionarily, the mild schizophrenic expression we called “schizotypal personality” have enjoyed increased reproductive opportunities.
If people were trying to mummify me, I’d have white hairs.