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.
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
[1] She has conveniently omitted from her article any mention of the American natives' widespread and well-documented cannibalism.
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.
>It's hard for me to imagine that people wanted to be sacrificed, but that's my own biases and cultural conditioning talking.
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.
First of all, people kill themselves for all kinds of reasons, all the time. Secondly, people are willing to sacrifice their lives for a perceived greater good. Martyrs are revered in many cultures around the world, including Christian culture.
The fact that some martyrs use modern explosives is just an "implementation detail".
Your own refusal to address the primary assertion of my post concedes your agreement.
Similarly, the parent telling their child to do such a thing also believes that their child is getting a ticket to paradise, along with themselves and the whole family. Isn't an eternity in paradise worth it? From that perspective, there's nothing sick or evil about it, it's just a very different perception of how the world works. If you were born in a different time and place, you may share those same beliefs.
> Your own refusal to address the primary assertion of my post concedes your agreement.
I don't disagree that these things are abhorrent, but that's because we happen to share a different system of beliefs. I don't agree with your simplistic explanation that these people are just "sick fucks".
A major point he makes is that the Spanish Inquisition and the European religion wars were underway at the same time, and that both American and European societies were horrifically violent, in comparison to modern day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The most demented part of it is that as horrific as the practice was historically, as the article here shows, the reasons, as crazy as they were, were at least centered around existential and cosmic concerns. Today, we sacrifice out of inconvenience, or because we "made a mistake", and someone has to pay, but not the guilt party, of course. But because we are still influenced by those "old principles", most of us cannot even consciously face what we are doing. We dehumanize the victims through piss-poor pseudo-intellectual gymnastics so that it all computes in our psychotic calculus of moral purity.
Now compare the possibly hundreds of thousands the Aztecs sacrifices to the 60+ million sacrificed in the US alone since 1973.
So not only do we sacrifice at a far grander scale than ever before, we deny that we do so because we're too cowardly to look the truth in the face. We're not the Aztecs! We have the decency of performing our sacrifices discreetly, out of sight, by other names, and with a _sophisticated_ detachment. We're civilized, damn it!
Good old western civilization, no blood on our hands.
Perhaps the whole idea of "culture/ideology" is flawed and progress happens not within a culture but by specifically rejecting cultural and ideological norms.
i would argue that for those on the receiving end, the difference matters very little.
i dont think there's much distinction between marxist countries and capitalist western countries when it comes towards climate change, we all love nice cheap coal and oil now.
Sure. Soviet Famine of 1921 (5 million). Soviet Famine of 1932-33 (7-10 million minimum, perhaps many more). Soviet Famine of 1947 (1 million or so). Chinese Famine of 1959-1961 (15-43 million). Cambodian Famine of 1974-79 (2 million). Ethiopian Famine of 1984-85 (400,000). North Korean Famine of 1996 (3.5 million).
Number of famines in the capitalist west over the same time period: zero.
Note that I'm not counting food shortages caused by active or recent warfare in either case, thus neither the German "Hunger Winter" of 1946-47 (several hundred thousand) nor the Siege of Leningrad Famine of 1941-44 (about a million) are included.
> And where is a place you would define as Marxist in 2018?
Venezuela will do until something closer comes along. And sure enough, they're on the brink of famine.
The British had the habit of ducking responsibility for all the famines that killed millions in India under their rule by blaming it on overpopulation. That there were no major famines after Indian independence is conveniently ignored.
Surely the Ethiopian famine and the Cambodian famine could be disregarded if you applied this rule consistently.
And the Bengal famine is arguably something caused by a Western democracy that wasn't directly a result of the wartime conditions.
How about your government? Those hands are a smidge less than clean.
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.
This is absolutely false.
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
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.
Last time I've seen similar reasoning, it was when a person was attacking the term FGM (female genital mutilation) on the basis that it is "colonialist misjudgment of a different culture".
We can, but it is pointless (the culture is now dead and gone) and it does raise questions about objective and absolute morality, of which many people disagree.
It also can easily lead into very messy discussion about modern day actions which in some sub cultures (and other cultures that may one day exist) would look equally horrendous. For example, we often are fine with abortion because of our standard as to at what point a human counts as a human. How can one objectively say our standard is okay, but someone whose standard is to not start counting til a year old isn't?
Or to bring up another hot button issue, look at MGM and the differences in how it is treated compared to FGM. You can barely even mention these concepts without risking a flame war (that is still a term, isn't it... feels like I never hear anyone use it anymore).
You know what they say: those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. This necessitates the moral judgments, as well.
> It also can easily lead into very messy discussion about modern day actions
All discussions about ethical philosophy end up that way. But, again, such discussions kinda need to be had for us to evolve. I understand that it's simply out of scope for, say, archaeologists, and I don't expect to find moral assessments in their work. But I also don't see why it's wrong for the rest of us to apply them in a completely different context.
So what disturbs me is how accepted MGM is. And how those who criticize it are dismissed as crazies. That's exactly the situation for FGM in societies where it's the norm.
And again, FGM is undoubtedly a far^N more serious issue. And I support efforts to pressure and educate societies that practice it. Just as I supported efforts to end apartheid in South Africa. Or slavery in northern Africa, India, etc.
For a comparison, murdering someone is very very different than punching them, but we still making punching your toddler illegal even though we agree it isn't nearly as bad as murdering your toddler.
So things that are very very different can still be quite illegal if they are horrible enough, so why doesn't that apply to those cases? It all comes down to subjective and often illogical judgments made by a society.
> But the Mexica would not have seen death when they looked at the tzompantli. They would have seen life.
So imagine how people in 2600 (if there are any) will see that. If anthropologists discover some artifact that brings it to general attention, anyway. "Horrific" is pretty likely, no?
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.
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".
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.
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.
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?
The type of thinking you espouse can be used to justify virtually any military action, including war crimes. All you'd have to say is "it could have been worse..."
And if you want to make the extraordinary claim of “Imagining the whole space of the alternatives” you should provide some evidence of such. Because right now, most experts who have attempted that have come to the conclusion that Operation Iraqi Freedom was a mistake: not merely one of bad planning or execution, but rather it never should have been attempted to begin with. This includes some of its biggest architects and boosters.
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
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=th...
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?
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.)
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.
That is quite literally a story about a custom of child sacrifice, with a later minute change of heart.
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".
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.
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.”
But then, given that the killings were happening anyway, the existence of an infant necropolis does not prove that sacrificing was going on.
There is certain smugness emanating from judo-christian corner in this thread, I was responding to that.
Besides that, this is getting off-topic as to the point that it was likely a widespread thing in the world.
Maybe it really wanted to, but then changed its mind :-)
Now of course, all of this understanding by people of faith could be completely wrong. But there is often difficulty having dialogue on the matter because when skeptics criticize what they find to be odd behaviour or odd contradictions in the Bible, they often lack comprehensive knowledge of the Bible needed to come to logically valid conclusions (note I said logically valid, not logically sound). Bertrand Russell did it when he criticized Jesus for making the fig tree wither, he didn't understand what was happening there. He lacked Biblical context of certain passages about fig trees in the Old Testament, and he also lacked botanical context of how fig trees grew in Palestine.
When people make conclusions without getting the full picture, it is natural to come to strange conclusions. This applies to any area or body of knowledge and analysis from the study of physics to language acquisition. We wouldn't say that Bilbo was an evil character because his true colours were revealed when he saw the One Ring in Frodo's possession in Fellowship of the Ring. No, we'd understand what Bilbo went through with the ring and what kind of person he really is because we read The Hobbit first. And there are aspects of the One Ring and The Hobbit that we cannot fully understand without reading The Silmarillion first.
I believe I shouldn't try to have these types of discussions on HN. Sorry if it is too much. If you're interested in taking this discussion offline to really dig into it, let me know. :)
Regardless, I think equating capital punishment with ritual sacrifice is a fair judgement. No matter how rational our rituals and systems for killing people seem, there's no reason to suggest that the Aztecs did not feel similarly about their rituals and systems. Law is not supposed to be a science, so it's also not free from cultural relativism, even if you're not a cultural relativist generally.
Given the advanced bureaucratic practices common to empires in precolonial America, it seems the Aztecs simply required regular sacrificial deaths (via suicide or homicide) to maintain their office, in addition to regularly liquifying prisoners or the enslaved. Like a death camp which ran on self-motivated suicide, for reasons of cosmic accounting.
Personally I find 5DFractalTetris' claims to be preposterous and wrong, but IMHO downvotes should be reserved for something other than "I disagree with this comment."
I have to agree just a shade with the premise.
A lot of punishment is morally oriented, and it's derived from our value system which is headed by 'God', or at least an interpretation of that.
Murderers are executed not just to keep them off the streets, but as a matter of punishment which is fundamentally pleasing to our moral code ... headed by God.
I think old-school capital punishment is at least distantly related to the concept of sacrifice.
Though I wouldn't want to equate the two.
In one world, we believe that a crime committed causes harm against a social construction. In the other...
To me, it seems like the crucial difference is whether the person responsible for the act is the one punished. It is not clear that is the objective of the modern (American) justice system. It is even less certain that was an issue with pre-Enlightenment justice systems.
Human nature seems to be more "someone has to pay!!" more than "the person responsible has to pay!"
Defining 2 things then calling the definition different is not compelling.
The thinking that makes them less different is that they both serve "a greater good" (a just society or secular society) or "specific good" (of a community or divine favor). How you perceive the original intent or what terms you use are not relevant to the association.
As modernists, we believe that it's important to punish the person who is responsible for a crime. It is not clear that is
1/ "Justice",
2/ shared by our ancestors,
3/ any more clear or moral than other belief systems.
It boils down to the purpose of the modern justice system. I've heard all the following reasons, each with deficiencies:
1) because doing wrong must be met with punishment (tautology)
2) because it keeps dangerous people off the street (not structurally optimized for)
3) because it makes our society safer (abstract/generic)
4) because it makes it clear that each individual is responsible for their actions (most believable to me)
I guess my question is this: why do we put people in jail (or kill them)? Personally, I don't think our justice system exists to make "good society" safer[0]; I think it's to control people so they behave in the same way those in charge want people to behave. (I.e., the initial motivation is amoral.)
[0] if so, victimless crimes wouldn't be so heavily regulated
However, regardless of the metaphysical beliefs of a state, any entity of sufficient size & organization will often be recognized by an individual as possibly having godlike power over the individual's body. Whether or not that truth actually ritualizes state-sanctioned violence, or the diffused psychological impact of that violence can be called a sacrifice, is a matter of opinion; however, being that it is state-sanctioned it is obviously distinct from murder, and because these punishments often have no deterrent effect on the populace, their true nature is in camera obscura.
The big difference between war and human sacrifice is that the target of human sacrifice is not a threat or a random bystander.
> One conquistador, Andrés de Tapia, was given the task of counting the skulls on the "tzompantli" at Tenochtitlan and estimated that there were 136,000 skulls on it.[17] However, based on numbers given by Taipa and Fray Diego Durán, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano[18] has calculated that there were at most 60,000 skulls on the "Hueyi Tzompantli" (Great Skullrack) of Tenochtitlan. The "Hueyi Tzompantli" consisted of a massive masonry platform composed of “thirty long steps” measuring fully 60 meters in length by 30 meters wide at its summit. Atop of the aforementioned platform was erected an equally formidable wooden palisade and scaffolding consisting of between 60 and 70 massive uprights or timbers woven together with an impressive constellation of horizontal cross beams upon which were suspended the tens of thousands of decapitated human heads once impaled thereon.[19] There were at least five more skull racks in Tenochtitlan but by all accounts they were much smaller.
The sources of that image indicate "several thousand" in the article. Not 100k.
> Combining the two historically documented towers and the rack, INAH archaeologists now estimate that several thousand skulls must have been displayed at a time.
There is really no evidence of child sacrifice at Carthage. Not sure why this myth persists but the much more plausible explanation is that (wealthy) children who died of natural causes were cremated, a very common practice in the ancient world that goes back literally 10,000 years.
> Human sacrifice was alarmingly common.
Not so much.
And in fact what the Aztecs did was very unique: human sacrifice was institutionalized and carried out on an industrial scale. This is very different from servants/wives being forced to follow a warrior or the occasional prisoner of war being tossed into a pit. There's really nothing else like it in all of history until the modern Europeans invented death camps.
Check out Antiquity 2012, 2014, and 2017.
I'm familiar with the Oxford research. It's not conclusive and I don't think most archaeologists have signed on. We'll see how it holds up over time. Even if you accept Oxford, it's still the case that child sacrifice, if it did take place, was rare and reserved only for the very wealthy. The idea of Carthaginians all gathering in a stadium and hurling children into a pit of fire for Moloch is pure (Roman) myth.
This reminds me of how the academic consensus was that child sacrifice in Carthage was merely Roman propaganda, until they dug up the massive infant necropolis near the temple to Moloch (yes, that Moloch -- the Carthaginians were Canaanites).
Even the Romans made human sacrifices (not just gladiators, or feeding Christians to the lions). When things got particularly grim in the Punic wars, they sacrificed two Gauls and a Greek in the forum.
Human sacrifice was alarmingly common.