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So all the talk about religion has got me thinking. I should be very very very glad that I am living now in the 2000s and not a few hundred years, or even thousand years ago when the practice of human sacrifice was wide spread.
How terrible would it be to have all of the religious zealots condoning such a practice, while me, one of the dissenters voiced my opinion and ended up killed as well?
In reading up on human sacrifice I came across this which I found interesting. Another case where the Bible makes up its own stories to serve its own ends.
The ancient Greeks sacrificed humans to the goddess Artemis, including the famous sacrifice by Agamemnon of his favored daughter. This tale was later likely plagiarized by the Jews as the story of Abraham, who is ordered by Yahweh to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac. In the Hebrew version, however, the whole gig is just a trick to see if Abraham would really go through with it. God has a good laugh at Abraham's expense, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Sacrifices are perhaps the most ancient method to honor deities, going right back to the earliest ancestor-worship religions of Egypt and Mesopotamia.
The original theory was "everyone needs to eat," including the ancestor-gods. So priests would dutifully leave food sitting out for the gods, who would never actually eat the food.
It was embarrassing to have all this food sitting around, so the priests eventually began burning, cutting or bleeding the sacrifices instead of just leaving them out to rot.
As time went on, the original theory of feeding the gods was forgotten and the practice became a ritual which was essentially meaningless to its participants (like the use of chrism in a Christian baptism, just for example).
The first sacrifices consisted of food and meat, but the emphasis slowly shifted to animal sacrifice and from there to blood sacrifice. Once you've moved past the notion that you're actually feeding the gods, an animal hierarchy kicks in, so a goat is a better sacrifice than a chicken, and a cow is better than a goat.
So what would be the bestest sacrifice of all? Eureka! People.
How terrible would it be to have all of the religious zealots condoning such a practice, while me, one of the dissenters voiced my opinion and ended up killed as well?
In reading up on human sacrifice I came across this which I found interesting. Another case where the Bible makes up its own stories to serve its own ends.
The ancient Greeks sacrificed humans to the goddess Artemis, including the famous sacrifice by Agamemnon of his favored daughter. This tale was later likely plagiarized by the Jews as the story of Abraham, who is ordered by Yahweh to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac. In the Hebrew version, however, the whole gig is just a trick to see if Abraham would really go through with it. God has a good laugh at Abraham's expense, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Sacrifices are perhaps the most ancient method to honor deities, going right back to the earliest ancestor-worship religions of Egypt and Mesopotamia.
The original theory was "everyone needs to eat," including the ancestor-gods. So priests would dutifully leave food sitting out for the gods, who would never actually eat the food.
It was embarrassing to have all this food sitting around, so the priests eventually began burning, cutting or bleeding the sacrifices instead of just leaving them out to rot.
As time went on, the original theory of feeding the gods was forgotten and the practice became a ritual which was essentially meaningless to its participants (like the use of chrism in a Christian baptism, just for example).
The first sacrifices consisted of food and meat, but the emphasis slowly shifted to animal sacrifice and from there to blood sacrifice. Once you've moved past the notion that you're actually feeding the gods, an animal hierarchy kicks in, so a goat is a better sacrifice than a chicken, and a cow is better than a goat.
So what would be the bestest sacrifice of all? Eureka! People.
