What the Aztecs can teach us about happiness and the good life (2016)

Re:What the Aztecs can teach us about happiness and the good... by crooked-v on Saturday June 05, 2021 @06:37PM (#27408979)

There's something many people find uniquely, particularly offensive about using the machinery of war to perform human sacrifice as its own end (and not as the means to some variety of conquest or resource extraction), and there aren't many cultures that have actually historically engaged in that sort of thing.

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Re:What the Aztecs can teach us about happiness and the good... by krapp on Saturday June 05, 2021 @06:56PM (#27409108)

They weren't performing human sacrifice as its own end, they were performing literal human sacrifice to honor their God... which is essentially what the Crusades were, an act of figurative ritual human sacrifice to honor the Christian God.

One is just more alien to Western culture than the other, so it seems more viscerally evil, and their means differ but their nature is the same.

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Re:What the Aztecs can teach us about happiness and the good... by requin246 on Sunday June 06, 2021 @03:41AM (#27411479)

That’s not at all what the crusades were.

The crusades were armies raised in response to the Muslim invasions of Christian countries. Motivations varied between religious (defense of the Christians being oppressed) to political (I want a kingdom to rule over) [1].

[1]: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/7915/are-there-a...

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Re:What the Aztecs can teach us about happiness and the good... by bpodgursky on Saturday June 05, 2021 @07:17PM (#27409227)

This is a wild misunderstanding of what the Crusades actually were.

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