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As a literary reader of the bible, I noticed that there are literally one hundred different passages in the bible where God says that he absolutely does not wan
by narrator 8y ago
As a literary reader of the bible, I noticed that there are literally one hundred different passages in the bible where God says that he absolutely does not want his followers to sacrifice children to him or condemns other religions for this practice.
https://www.openbible.info/topics/human_sacrifice https://www.openbible.info/topics/human_sacrifice
That they had to repeat it over and over again gives me the impression that this practice was disturbingly widespread in the ancient world.
- duxup 8y agoI'm imagining numerous editorials "I don't know how to tell you to stop sacrificing children...."
- avn2109 8y agoSpeaking of editorializing, the article's author took to Twitter [0] to defend her article's reverent/respectful tone and (nowadays-common) unspoken premise that all cultures and ideologies are equally good and valid. You'd think it'd be easy to use ritual vivisection, human sacrifice at scale, organized child murder, and cannibalism [1] as an absolutely unambiguous black-and-white line by which to demarcate civilization from barbarian savagery. But amazingly she's willing to defend the latter in writing. In my opinion this constitutes dispositive evidence that the article's author is absolutely batty. [0] https://twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/1010178681334050822 https://twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/1010178681334050822 [1] She has conveniently omitted from her article any mention of the American natives' widespread and well-documented cannibalism.
- duxup 8y agoI can get giving people in different situations various levels of leeway as far as comparing my decisions sitting at my computer here to their decisions and such. But damn... what does she even mean by "horrific"... how is that even a thing you would bother to dispute?
- mirimir 8y agoBecause what "horrific" means depends on your culture. So sure, it's horrific for you and me. But it arguably wasn't horrific for Aztecs back then. Or even for their victims. Analogous in the Western tradition is the belief that honorable soldiers should freely give their lives to protect comrades and country. To me, that's also horrific, but whatever.
- duxup 8y agoI don't think anyone describing the practice intended to be role playing / speaking as an Aztecs....
- mirimir 8y agoIt's not that they're role playing. It's that they're professionally neutral.
- duxup 8y agoI'm talking about people on Twitter who might call the practice 'horrible', they're not role playing Aztecs and they aren't writing a paper. To take issue with their description because they are not either of those things seems silly....or just a sort of academic trolling for attention.
- mirimir 8y agoI don't have any problem with them calling it horrific, horrible, or whatever. People are entitled to their opinions, and have the right to state them. Although Twitter also has the right to delete them. But anyway, what I'm taking issue with is the argument that archaeologists et alia don't have the right to be nonjudgmental. Also that being nonjudgmental isn't the norm for archaeology as a profession. I don't expect your average Twitter user to know that. But at least, they should understand the concept, if explained well enough. After all, it's also the norm for physicians, attorneys, and psychologists. Even judges, who are supposed to interpret law objectively. Edit: Oops. Forgot key "don't" and "isn't".
- shoo 8y agoin modern western society, we tend to have a regard for the lives of [certain] individuals in the short term, at the expense of lives of others in the longer term, not to mention relatively little regard for the environment, or other species. other societies may have been held together as engines that required the input of thousands of human lives to be sacrificed to appease the gods, our society functionally appears to require the sacrifice of the future of the planet for the appeasement of quarterly targets. i'm editorialising a bit, but you get the idea, particularly if you've read a few papers discussing "business as usual" economic-environmental modelling scenarios projecting out to the end of the century. i'm not arguing that either mode of operating a society is laudable, but much of modern western society's focus on short term materialist and individualist goals may produce misery for our species and other species on a truly obscene scale never before experienced in human history.
- avn2109 8y agoIf your cultural relativism/multiculturalism/whatever-you-want-to-call-it leads you to equate/compare "institutionalized torture killing of children" with "pollution," that's a hint that you've made some drastic reasoning errors. It's such a silly, unreasonable ideology that it basically refutes itself when you get anywhere near a corner case like this. Some cultures/ideologies really are better than others. If you need me, I'll be right here in my Western Civilization, happily not vivisecting anyone.
- jacobr 8y agoRegarding Civilization or savagery, which is this: Then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright calmly asserting that U.S. policy objectives were worth the sacrifice of half a million Iraqi children: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RM0uvgHKZe8# https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RM0uvgHKZe8#
- sonnyblarney 8y agoThe term 'sacrifice' is used in different contexts. A 'sacrifice' to a god for whatever reason is a literal sacrifice, talking about the 'cost of war' in terms of 'sacrifice' is a metaphor.
- XalvinX 8y agoSince the American invasion of Iraq doesn't remotely fit the definition of "a war" I think they were, in fact, sacrifices...
- Cpoll 8y agoOnly because we now know that human sacrifices don't please the gods and improve our fortunes. Otherwise, it breaks down in exactly the same way: We kill some children, but we're okay with that, because it will benefit us. If it's a metaphor, it can only be because there's no sacrifice at all, the death of non-citizens don't factor into the cost-benefit analysis.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago"the death of non-citizens don't factor into the cost-benefit analysis" This is absolutely false.
- horseLOGIC 8y agoIt can easily be "worth it" if by sacrificing half a million children you get to save half a million and one child. Despite what you might want to believe, Mrs. Albright is neither stupid nor evil. It's also really an unfair question because you don't get to see the result of your policy before enacting it. Moreover, those deaths probably never happened, at least not in those numbers, and they were used as an argument for war: https://psmag.com/news/the-iraq-sanctions-myth-56433 https://psmag.com/news/the-iraq-sanctions-myth-56433 Like the supposed 1 million deaths from the Second Iraq War, those numbers are based on surveys which are highly flawed. Further, the poor perception of the Second Iraq War supported the lack of action in Syria under the Obama administration. Nobody knows how many lives could've saved (and how many sacrificed) if there had been an early intervention in Syria.
- golergka 8y agoThis seems like an excellent example of postmodernist notion of moral relativism getting too far. Of course Aztecs didn't see this practice as evil - but why would we care? We have our own moral system, and I don't see any reason not to use it in this case.
- caf 8y agoIt's an unprovable, but I'd bet a considerable sum that there were more than a few Aztecs who had some serious doubts about the whole human sacrifice thing. Voicing those doubts, of course, seems like it would have been an excellent way to find yourself next at the sharp end of the priest's knife.
- zaarn 8y agoAnd I'm sure you'll find a non-zero number of Americans who think we should do human sacrifice again but think that voicing those doubts about not doing human sacrifice would have them at the sharp end of a twitter shitstorm, resulting in eternal unemployability for jobs paying above minimum wage.
- spamizbad 8y ago> This seems like an excellent example of postmodernist notion of moral relativism getting too far. I mean, if we want to be morally objective... what does the war on terror's body count say about the United States relative to the Aztecs? We're 10x as evil?
- golergka 8y agoIt says nothing, because this variable is not enough to make any kind of moral judgement. In fact, I just had almost exactly the same discussion here on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17367827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17367827) merely two days ago and I don't expect to anything deeper than typical cliches anymore.
- spamizbad 8y ago
- nmca 8y agoIf you dwell on these things, I strongly suggest reading "The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe" https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=the+possibility+of+an+ongoing+moral+catastrophe&oq=the+possibility+of+an+ongoing+moral+cata https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=th...
- tomrod 8y ago> defend her article's reverent/respectful tone and (nowadays-common) unspoken premise that all cultures and ideologies are equally good and valid. The "Dogma of Otherness"[0] is important for humanity, but needs to be carefully applied to resist Popper's paradox of tolerance.[1] [0] http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/dogmaofotherness.html http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/dogmaofotherness.html [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
- adamsea 8y ago> You'd think it'd be easy to use ritual vivisection, human sacrifice at scale, organized child murder, and cannibalism [1] as an absolutely unambiguous black-and-white line by which to demarcate civilization from barbarian savagery. We might as well add to that list treating humans like property, the mass murder, mass rape, and mass killing of civilians by invading armies, child labor, genocide, things like pogroms and lynchings, separating children from parents at scale, etc ... So, who is exactly left on the “civilized” side of the line now?
- Malarkey73 8y agoThe article uses the same "tone" that we regularly use to write about the Romans - who crucified people, ritually strangled prisoners during their triumphs, kept slaves, and made people fight to death for their fun. That said I'm not sure the Gauls or Parthians or Carthaginians were saintly. I don't think the author is implying that the Aztecs were better or the same or worse than Tlaxcala or Cortez conquistador. The neutral tone is adopted for European and Native American ancestors alike because of the separation of time not cultural sensitivity. And so we adopt this historical voice because we realise that the past was bloody and awful and the same society that had Cicero also had Crassus crucifying 6000 slaves along the Via Appia during the same lifetime. And the same people who built towers of skulls were enslaved and wiped out by Cortes. But honestly it's not a competition. You adopt the neutral tone to avoid endless whataboutery.
- nyolfen 8y ago>You adopt the neutral tone to avoid endless whataboutery. >It's hard for me to imagine that people wanted to be sacrificed, but that's my own biases and cultural conditioning talking.
- horseLOGIC 8y agoYou presumably quote that as if there was a contradiction there, but there isn't. We have fairly recent cases of children willingly blowing themselves up in Syria. All it really takes is the promise of a glorious afterlife, possibly combined with a life of deprivation in the here and now. Being sacrificed to the Aztec gods was a great honor, it was probably voluntary in the majority of cases. As a rule of thumb, you don't want to sacrifice the unwilling, it kinda ruins the show.
- nyolfen 8y agothe children sacrificed by the aztecs were captives, prisoners of war, etc. there is zero evidence suggesting anyone voluntarily sacrificed themselves. it was a demonstration of power and terror by the state dressed up in religious garb.
- 8y ago
- mariodiana 8y agoPeople have completely confused the technique of disinterestedness in the service of scientific inquiry with the legitimacy—and necessity—of moral judgment. When a person puts on his or her "scientist's hat," the thing to do is to set aside moral judgment in order to get a clearer and more complete look at the culture one is investigating. That's because bias is blindness. Preconceived notions cause people to jump to conclusions and miss important details of the culture (or history) they're studying. The mistake is that far too many people fail to realize that at some point you take the hat off. You stop being a scientist and start being a civilized human being. Radical cultural relativism is monstrous.
- horseLOGIC 8y agoI'm not sure I get your point. When I research human sacrifice, I must tacitly condemn it, because that's the civilized thing to do? Human sacrifice is really just obsolete technology. It just doesn't really work, as the Aztecs had to figure out. It's not like they did it for fun, that would be far more objectionable. We "civilized" people use different technology, but we still sacrifice people to it - just think of how many people die in traffic.
- DanAndersen 8y agoDarryl Cooper's MartyrMade podcast does some interesting analysis of the history and common heritage just about every human culture has with human sacrifice and/or cannibalism sometime in our respective pasts: http://www.martyrmade.com/8-how-to-serve-man-sacrifice-cannibalism-pt-1/ http://www.martyrmade.com/8-how-to-serve-man-sacrifice-canni... One reason why there was so much repetition against human sacrifice in the Old Testament may be related to the fact that the Carthaginians, as a Phoenician civilization, were part of the Semitic language group, and so there may be more tendency for those cultures in that time to have those practices. It's easier to avoid falling into particular practices if those who do them are separated geographically, culturally, or linguistically from you. (For example, there probably aren't many people in Western countries looking to adopt sky burial traditions of far-off Tibetan groups.)
- toadworrier 8y agoThe Jews weren't merely fellow Semitic speakers, they were neigubours to the Phoenecians. And rivals. In fact this is a point in favour of the Jews, in that even if such practices were not common among them; they would still have a strong reason to bother condemning them because there hated neighbours did it.
- Pica_soO 8y agoInfanticide was really really common- it was basically late stage abortion. The unfair price for this practice was ostracizing those who did the deed. Whores and Priests where the "wicked" ones, while the rest of humanity just closed its eyes and pretended to not see whats was going on.
- toadworrier 8y agoYes. The Romans they accepted as inevitable that vast numbers of infants would be killed all the time. The Carthagians would have also had to deal with this reality. Perhaps they did so by framing it as a sacrifice to Moloch -- a practice which the Romans found nearly as abhorrent as we do. But then, given that the killings were happening anyway, the existence of an infant necropolis does not prove that sacrificing was going on.
- sorokod 8y agoThat Genesis 22 bit (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+22%3A1-24&version=ESV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+22%3A1-...) provides a more nuanced view on the god of the old testament than you make it out to be.
- jpmoral 8y agoHis point wasn't about how to view the 'god of the old testament'. It was that child sacrifice was so widespread that it had to be mentioned several times.
- sorokod 8y agoThat is true. There is certain smugness emanating from judo-christian corner in this thread, I was responding to that.
- PakG1 8y agoIf God in Genesis really wanted the sacrifice to happen, he wouldn't have stopped Abraham before it happened. Hebrews chapter 11 has a more detailed explanation of what was happening there in Genesis 22. You can't understand the story until you understand the whole context of what and who Isaac was supposed to be. It was never about child sacrifice, and it's countered by many comments by the same that child sacrifice is bad. Besides that, this is getting off-topic as to the point that it was likely a widespread thing in the world.
- simonsarris 8y agoThat's a good point. There are similar laws in the Bible, like the law that you should definitely not shave your head to mourn a death, which seems silly without the context that its something Egyptians did.
- stevenwoo 8y agoI don't know if this is off topic, but when God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to prove something to God, that seems to be a mixed message alongside what you are posting.
- thedailymail 8y agoThe Bible may be many things, but consistent it is not.
- thedevil 8y agoYeah, it uh turns out God was was suffering from bipolar disorder. The official diagnosis was originally mentioned in a chapter in revelations. But his PR consultants thought that he probably better pull those verses out before it got published. But the good news is that Jesus got him to seek some good medical advice, and he's been on some great meds and things have been a bit better since, despite occasional lapses, most recently in the early-to-mid-20th century.
- booleandilemma 8y agoIt ends up being just a test though: God says, a few lines later, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”
- stevenwoo 8y agoSorry if I was not clear, I do know the whole story, Abraham had to be committed to the act and visualize what would happen and had to take several steps along the way to fulfil God's command. The fact that it was revealed to be a test is not important in my evaluation of the command, which of course is just my opinion.
- tomrod 8y agoThis is pretty far from what I normally see on HN, but since we are here, I highly recommend Fear and Trembling by Kierkegaard.[0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Trembling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Trembling
- dalbasal 8y agoAlso, the story of Isaac. That is quite literally a story about a custom of child sacrifice, with a later minute change of heart.
- ars 8y agoAbraham was very very high profile in his area. So everyone around him would have watched this whole story take place. It wasn't a later minute change of hearth, it was basically a dramatic way to drive home the message DO NOT SACRIFICE humans! It's got the "hook" "Abraham is going to sacrifice", to get everyone's attention. And then the powerful message "don't do that".
- dalbasal 8y agoI've heard different interpretations, and we have multiple versions of the story. In the Quran, the boy is Abraham's other son, Ishmael. I've always like the interpretations of Genesis (and other old ME epics) as folk memory. Myth as a way of telling history allegorically. For example, people named in genesis often represent tribes, ethnicities and nationalities. Their names were literal personifications of contemporary peoples. The binding of Isaac represents a transition from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice, as a symbolic substitute continuing the same tradition. I've even heard interpretations of the fall from eden where eden represents a hunter gatherer lifestyle in the fertile crescent, and the fall represents settled, agricultural life.
- IloveHN84 8y agoImagine that in the modern civilization, we still throw bombs at civilian and children or sentence people to death