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Comment by azeotropic | Hacker News Reader

They dismiss Cortez and his men as exaggerating the number of skulls when they claimed 130,000, but if you start calculating how many are in the image of the reconstruction in the article, it's easily close to 100,000.

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.

View on HN

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

That they had to repeat it over and over again gives me the impression that this practice was disturbingly widespread in the ancient world.

I'm imagining numerous editorials "I don't know how to tell you to stop sacrificing children...."

Speaking 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

[1] She has conveniently omitted from her article any mention of the American natives' widespread and well-documented cannibalism.

The 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.

>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.

The Aztec culture was exterminated 100s of years ago why politicize it?

You 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.

the 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.

No child (or adult..) on this planet has ever willing blown their self up and that is exactly why we as an “evolved” society have various consent laws.

That's... simply untrue.

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".

Kids aren't martyrs blowing theirselves up to commit murder for some to them imcomphrehisble “greater good” but kids do do what they’re told by sick fuck adults.

Your own refusal to address the primary assertion of my post concedes your agreement.

Kids don't always do what they're told, but they're inclined to believe what they're told. Acting out on a false belief nevertheless can be done willingly.

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".

Agreed! Am currently reading Charles McCann's '1491' and '1493' which are about the "discovery" and colonisation of the Americas.

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.

People 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.

I'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.

in 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.

If 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.

Western Civilization considers it a human right to be able kill the most vulnerable humans under the pretext that they aren't ready yet to have human rights.

As njarboe wrote, only recently, and it is by no means restricted to the West (see China or Soviet Russia). The only reason why it is shocking vis-a-vis the West is because it is a radical break with the ethical principles the West has acknowledged (and yes, often practiced poorly) for almost the last two millennia.

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!

Though I don't agree, I acknowledge this as likely the best counterargument to my point above.

Only very recently in Western Civilization has this been enshrined in law in most countries and is still a very highly contested issue in many.

> 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.

Good old western civilization, no blood on our hands.

Well, you know, they were either "not human" (or 3/5 in some cases) or "terrorists" or "reds" (those millions in Laos and Cambodia must have fell in that category, one would hope) or something like that. Not sure how they categorized those 200,000 or so peasants in Guatemala, but hey, out of sight, out mind, eh?

In recent US history as well as ancient history, "them" vs "us" has been enough justification to satisfy the public in any time period. It's not that few in the US cared about bombing "commies" in Laos and Cambodia, it's that being "red" made much less difference than being "them". This is tribalism at its finest (or worst, take your pick).

The genocide of native americans, Stalin, Hitler, Churchill starving million in India because he thought them to be less human, the transatlantic slave trade....all just minor blemishes in an otherwise great culture.

Perhaps the whole idea of "culture/ideology" is flawed and progress happens not within a culture but by specifically rejecting cultural and ideological norms.

That itself is a culture/ideology though. That is sort of the culture of the west in fact, to move forward, and whatever isn't helping move forward gets left behind.

for people who are dying of starvation versus people who are being explicitly human-sacrificed, from their perspective do you think it particularly matters if they are dying from the neglect and sheer indifference of others, or from direct intentional malice?

i would argue that for those on the receiving end, the difference matters very little.

Depends. If it's the Aztecs we're talking about, I'm sure they'd prefer to die of starvation in at least some cases - Aztec deities were fairly inventive as far as their sacrifices went, and at least one of them required the victim to be flayed alive, for example.

point taken. if we keep at this long enough we can end up with some utilitarian equations to trade-off the relative costs of different forms of human misery.

Yes, active involvement in situation to make it worse and lack of involvement in situation to make it better are valued in a drastically different ways in most moral systems.

Oddly enough, the people who are actually dying of starvation always seem to be located in Marxist countries rather than the evil capitalist Western countries. Just bad luck, I guess.

It's useful to your argument that you excluded the famines in Ireland and India under the British. Let alone slavery, etc.

Marx was literally a part of western civilisation.

i totally agree that there have been avoidable and horrific famines in marxist countries due to inept attempts at central management of agriculture. these days, there's also a bit of ugly conflict popping up along ethnic lines in some countries where populations are under stress for access to enough farmland for subsistence agriculture vs grazing (environmental pressure will be part of this).

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.

What? Care to give examples? And where is a place you would define as Marxist in 2018?

>Care to give examples?

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.

You forgot the Great Bengali famine of 1943 (3 million) under British rule in India.

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.

> Note that I'm not counting food shortages caused by active or recent warfare in either case,

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.

Attributing starvation in Leningrad and Eastern Germany to Marxism is a little odd too.

The op said ‘dying’ and I was referring to the use of the current tense.

> If you need me, I'll be right here in my Western Civilization, happily not vivisecting anyone.

How about your government? Those hands are a smidge less than clean.

Pollution including that of the sort which causes birth defects among children at a mass scale?

Future societies will look at our treatment of animals the same way.

Regarding 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#

The 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.

Only 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.

"the death of non-citizens don't factor into the cost-benefit analysis"

This is absolutely false.

It 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

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.

I 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?

Because 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.

That's non-controversial, but it's not the argument that the linked Twitter feed makes. It says that not only that culture didn't see it as horrific, but that we can't morally judge what they did "through our Western colonial lens" by saying that it was horrific.

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".

>but that we can't morally judge what they did "through our Western colonial lens" by saying that it was horrific.

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).

> We can, but it is pointless (the culture is now dead and gone)

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.

Because all those things are very, very different? Its common to blur things and make 'everything ok' by ignoring how different things really are.

Sure, FGM and MGM are very different. I consider FGM (and all the associated misogynistic crap) to be utterly horrible. However, there's a range of FGM practices. And at the least-extreme end, it's not that different from MGM. Neither prevents orgasm, and both interfere with victims' sexuality.

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.

>Because all those things are very, very different?

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.

I don't believe that Lizzie Wade is arguing that "we can't morally judge what they did". Rather, she's arguing that being judgmental is not very useful for archeologists. Because it blocks understanding. As she says:

> But the Mexica would not have seen death when they looked at the tzompantli. They would have seen life.

OK, here's another example. For about 40 years, the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a global game of nuclear chicken. The winning strategy was Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). And it was only luck that an exchange wasn't triggered by accident.

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?

I don't think cockroaches will evolve their own archeologists as soon as 2600...

More likely is radiation-resistant machines. As in Spielberg's AI.

I don't think anyone describing the practice intended to be role playing / speaking as an Aztecs....

It's not that they're role playing. It's that they're professionally neutral.

I'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.

I 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".

This 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.

It'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.

And 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.

> 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?

It 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) merely two days ago and I don't expect to anything deeper than typical cliches anymore.

You're just replacing moral relativism with counterfactual thinking. Just because you can imagine an alternate scenario where things might have been worse, that doesn't provide moral justification for an action. This is especially true since we know what the original justification for the invasion of Iraq and I can't imagine it being aligned with any counterfactual thinking on the subject.

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..."

No, I'm imagining the whole space of the alternatives not just "it could've been worse". You clearly are constructing a strawman out of my argument and it doesn't feel that well-constructed, because my argument is not about giving a judgement to a particular situation (especially Iraq) but about the whole method you use for such judgements.

Again, what you’re describing is counterfactual thinking. It doesn’t stop being counterfactual just because you considered lots of stuff.

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.

> 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

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

If 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=th...

> 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?

That'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.

Darryl 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-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.)

The 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.

Also, the story of Isaac.

That is quite literally a story about a custom of child sacrifice, with a later minute change of heart.

Abraham 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".

I'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.

I 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.

It 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.”

Sorry 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.

This 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

The Bible may be many things, but consistent it is not.

Yeah, 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.

It's almost as if God was helping Abraham understand what He felt like sacrificing His own son (Jesus) to the world.

Uh, that hadn't happened yet. This was over a thousand years earlier.

Infanticide 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.

Yes. 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.

That Genesis 22 bit (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.

His 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.

That is true.

There is certain smugness emanating from judo-christian corner in this thread, I was responding to that.

If 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.

If God in Genesis really wanted the sacrifice to happen, he wouldn't have stopped Abraham before it happened

Maybe it really wanted to, but then changed its mind :-)

Perhaps. It's a logical option to consider in a vacuum. It's not logical with context.

Correct me if I am wrong - it looks like you rely for context on a new testament book written by an unknown author over a thousand years latter.

No, Hebrews 11 only provides an interpretation for what happened in Genesis 22. Coincidentally, it's also the interpretation that's the most logical in light of the context; one can come to a similar conclusion without ever reading Hebrews 11. The context is provided by Genesis chapters 15 to 24, as well as all criticism on child sacrifice for the purpose of worship in Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, etc. Now infanticide does happen in the Bible, and some of it is condoned by God, while some of it isn't. The times it is condoned by God, there are interesting situations and reasonable explanations. The times it isn't condoned by God, there is consistent logic as to why it was OK one time but not OK another time.

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. :)

Imagine that in the modern civilization, we still throw bombs at civilian and children or sentence people to death

Romans very rarely practiced ritual human sacrifice (outside of gladiator games). The specific case of burying two Gauls and a Greek alive was an exception done by consulting the Sibylline books, a collection of prophetic instructions only to be used during extreme crisis like after the battle of Cannae during the second Punic War.

Disagree completely. Capital punishment has always been little more than ritual sacrifice. War itself may be little more than ritual sacrifice.

Contextually conflating capital punishment with ritual is I think wrong.

It's fundamentally a philosophical question. I think it's a surprisingly insightful observation.

I disagree. What god is capital punishment meant to appease? It's supposedly there for people who are too dangerous to keep alive right? Human sacrifice seems to me like it was meant to bring better harvests or otherwise give the illusion of controlling a chaotic/random natural process.

I don't think so. I think it's current justification is typically framed in the form of 'punishment', and its historical justification was purely religious. And, coincidentally, was at least partially about giving the punished person a fair shot at redemption by punishing them while they were still on earth - which is literal god-appeasement.

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.

I consider all distinguishing characteristics between people or groups of people to be projections utilized by human minds to motivate and bring forth highly-ritualized purifying violence, which ranges in intensity from inconsequential name-calling to full-scale genocide. My best historical example of this from pre-modernity was the 13th Century Cathar Purge, where the War refrain "Kill them all and let God sort them out" originates, and continues forth until this day. Records point to a similar practice within the Aztec regime, with self-sacrifice a common action to sustain the empire.

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.

It's dismaying that user 5DFractalTetris' comments here are so heavily downvoted, since they're clearly civil, literate, grammatical, and made in good faith.

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."

it wouldnt make for a good interface, but I wonder if there is any value to having up/down vote for karma and i agree / disagree to allow users to express their level agreement with the comment.

"What god is capital punishment meant to appease?"

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.

"Civic religion" is a concept that some people subscribe to. It doesn't have gods per se, but it has abstract concepts (like e.g. justice) that can be similarly worshiped.

Framed like that, there are a mass of specific issues that spring to mind. Not that they shall be spoken of however...

Isn't that just polytheism?

One is to appease "the gods". The other is to protect society (and punish the evil) {as they saw it}. Quite different.

How are they different? (I don't mean this sarcastically)

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!"

> One is to appease "the gods". The other is to protect society

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.

When the state structure is considered to be the status quo endorsed by the gods is capital punishment not a ritual sacrifice?

Not sure why this was downvoted, but I support your question.

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

Perhaps divine retribution is a better explanation than ritual sacrifice in theocratic regimes, in the case that a god or a group of gods require the death of the mortal body so the soul can face metaphysical justice for Earthly sin.

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.

Perhaps in a modern context. I know that the ancient Chinese were big into sacrificing prisoners and captives of war. And the end result is eerily similar even when couched in terms of law and order. Sacrifice has both been used to appease or ask favor of the gods, and to assert ones rightness and an other’s wrongness. Capital punishment fits the second criterion to a tee.

The big difference between human sacrifice and capital punishment is that the person sacrificed hasn’t done anything “wrong.”

The big difference between war and human sacrifice is that the target of human sacrifice is not a threat or a random bystander.

Based on this premise 56 million abortions a year is also ritual sacrifice, on a greater scale than any form of human sacrifice in the past.

Wikipedia cities a number of sources for between 130K and 60K:

> 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzompantli#Aztec

> They dismiss Cortez and his men as exaggerating the number of skulls when they claimed 130,000, but if you start calculating how many are in the image of the reconstruction in the article, it's easily close to 100,000.

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.

As a student of history, the amount of hate that pre-Israel civilizations get is really astounding.

> This reminds me of how the academic consensus was that child sacrifice in Carthage was merely Roman propaganda,

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.

While this is still debated by a few hold outs, This is one where Wikipedia is out of date. Oxford and others released a paper in 2014 and it is now generally held by historians and archeologists that it did in fact happen. Archeoloists questioned Plutarch, and Plutarch won.

Check out Antiquity 2012, 2014, and 2017.

> Oxford and others released a paper in 2014

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.

It was only moderate sensible levels of child sacrifice!

Does this kind of question depend on what you consider to be the baseline of normal human behaviour? That defines what side of an argument evidence is required. Surely it is possible that human sacrifice was common throughout human history, and that the last couple of thousand years were the exception. How can you know?

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