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> Ask the druids for example. Also infamous for practicing human sacrifice, but go on.
by philwelch 3y ago
> Ask the druids for example.
Also infamous for practicing human sacrifice, but go on.
- AlecSchueler 3y agoIs human sacrifice the only practice that means a culture deserves to be eradicated or are there others?
- xyzelement 3y agoI do think if there’s an objective thing that can condemn a culture, it’s willingness to sacrifice its children is that thing And I do think this extrapolates to modern cultures, from slapping a suicide vest on a toddler, to “one child” policies to “children are bad for the environment” type movements.
- AlecSchueler 3y agoMaybe Spanish culture should have been "condemed" long before they set sail for America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_the_ancient_Iberian_Peninsula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_the_ancient...
- philwelch 3y agoThey were. The Iberian Celts were conquered and repressed by the Roman Empire, and the Roman culture was in turn reformed by the early Christians.
- AlecSchueler 3y agoAnd we lost a lot every time. I don't believe it was needed to crush the cultures of America and elsewhere because of disagreeable religious practice. The argument could be made that we should wipe out Islamic culture because of their opression of women. And it would be an abbhorent argument.
- AlecSchueler 3y agoJust wanted to add that this reads like the Romans condemned the Celts for practicing sacrifice, and that the Christians did the same for the Romans. This is not true. I'm curious as well on that topic: what do we think of legal sacrifice in Rome? Should we condem their entire culture because they crucified people?
- philwelch 3y agoI don’t see any Romans around anymore, do you?
- AlecSchueler 3y agoDefine Roman. I see a strong and continous cultural and political link from Rome to the Church of Rome to Charlemagne and on through the various duchies and unified provinces to get to the modern European state that I live in today, in and old Roman settlement just below the Rhine delta. I live by customs and laws rooted in Roman practice. Much more so than I do live in any way resembling the ways of the people who lived here before their arrival, or the ways of the people who lived in my native land before the arrival of the Catholics of Rome.
- philwelch 3y agoI think everyone agrees that certain cultures deserve to be eradicated, not in the sense of killing everyone who practices that culture (of course the Spanish didn’t exterminate the Mexica either) but in the sense of converting or reprogramming them into a different culture. This is what was done to Germany and Japan after the Second World War for instance. Literal human sacrifice is a sufficient but not necessary condition. Though I suppose in a broader and more metaphorical sense, Germany and Japan also practiced human sacrifice.
- AlecSchueler 3y ago> I think everyone agrees that certain cultures deserve to be eradicated I can assure you that's far from the case.
- philwelch 3y agoNo, when it really comes down to it, it isn't the case, aside from a few fringe pacifists. Some cultures, like the Germans and Japanese, engaged in repeated aggressive military expansion until the rest of the world was forced to conquer them and reprogram them into pacifists. Other cultures engage in practices that are outside of what even tolerant liberals are willing to tolerate, like female genital mutilation or not letting girls go to school or not tolerating homosexual behavior or having traditional gender roles, and so we use human rights NGO's and Western mass media to attempt to assimilate them into our culture. If you look at what the Spanish actually did to the Aztec Empire, they basically organized a coalition of other indigenous tribes who were tired of living under Mexica domination (and having their people intermittently sacrificed), overthrew the Mexica, and installed themselves as the new suzerain. This isn't far off from what the Western countries were trying to do during the Arab Spring or Syrian Civil War, except the Western countries tried to either install a local client or pushed for elections, and neither of those plans tended to work out for the countries involved.
- AlecSchueler 3y agoI understand there are extreme cases like the Nazis. I'll say something about that below. But I'm not sure we can group the Aztecs in with them, certainly not to the point that so much of their culture was destroyed as it was. Also worth nothing they weren't sailing around the world conquering peoples. Yes, maybe they were doing it at home, but Spanish culture is the one that survives, even though they also behaved abbhorently. And I love Spanish culture even though they did. I wish Ï could enjoy Aztec culture in a similar way. I disagree that Japan and Germany had their cultures eradicated. Both nations maintain rich cultural traditions and express them within the safe bounds of their nation states. What happend in meso-America was much closer to the kind of eradication of cultures the Nazis wanted to see, which was the reason they are so reviled. And just to say I don't think it's fair to say pacifism is a fringe idea. Many of our world's states are officially pacifistic, many of our greatest philosophers have subscribed to it and there have been mass movements for peace which in some cases have resulted in decolonisation or have bolstered democratic opposition in war time.
- helpfulContrib 3y ago[dead]
- lukan 3y agoA) likely, but not really confirmed to be a regular thing by my knowledge. What we know, we know mostly from the romans. B) The romans practiced ritual murder (among other things). Which is not that different to human sacrifice to me. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20726130/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20726130/ And yes, I can go on, but why? The point was not, that the druids were saints. (Btw. many of the christian "saints" were pretty bloody as well)
- philwelch 3y ago> The romans practiced ritual murder (among other things). Which is not that different to human sacrifice to me. Yes, this is also how the early Christians felt, which is why they eradicated Roman paganism once they became the dominant religion within the empire.
- lukan 3y agoAnd what was the motivation, to eradicate other christian branches, like the arians? Did they also practice human sacrifice?
- krapp 3y agoTheological disagreements, such as the nature of Jesus' divinity, the proper relationship between Christianity and Judaism, what even is the Trinity, etc.