Actually, I can accept your point about capital punishment, especially when it was a public spectacle, or even now when it is witnessed by families of the victim and criminal and is used to an extent as a "lesson". I was reacting to your general use of the term "law and order", which I interpreted to be a much broader inclusion of any police action that results in the death of offenders. In fact, I had the excessive use of deadly force by police officers in mind, not capital punishment, when responding. Whatever else Ferguson was it was not "human sacrifice".
Was institutionalized human sacrifice doomed to extinction?
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Actually, I can accept your point about capital punishment, especially when it was a public spectacle, or even now when it is witnessed by families of the victim and criminal and is used to an extent as a "lesson". I was reacting to your general use of the term "law and order", which I interpreted to be a much broader inclusion of any police action that results in the death of offenders. In fact, I had the excessive use of deadly force by police officers in mind, not capital punishment, when responding. Whatever else Ferguson was it was not "human sacrifice".
If you believe in Transubstantiation or any other Bread/Wine -> Body/Blood theologies, then the Eucharist could be viewed as human sacrifice. If you stretch a point. More reasonably, it can be called cannibalism (as Jubal Harshaw points out in Stranger in a Strange Land).
That includes all of Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism and chunks of Lutheranism and Anglicanism. (Edit: including me)
iirc, part of the reason that early Christians were persecuted by Rome was because the Romans had completely misinterpreted the whole "this is My body, this is My blood" thing--they thought that the Christians were a cannibal cult
Artaxerxes
Banned
Ehhhh... you have the Romans resorting to Sacrifice on a good few occasions and then you have the Gladiatorial fights so thats a little iffy.
I'd say there came a point where it was not the done thing in any society, especially as Rome came more under the influence of the Greeks and the East (did the Eastern provinces/kingdoms rely on human sacrifice?)
The Roman sources on sacrifice for the Gauls and Carthage really cannot be trusted to any great extent
I'm inclined to say yes because of often when a culture practiced it, neighboring cultures found it abhorrent and something to go to war about. Carthage was already mentioned. However, this is also one of the major reasons of the conquest of Mexico.
The Mexica's ritual human sacrifice is notorious, and was done with a supply of victims from vassal states. It wasn't much of a decision for the Tlaxcalans to back the Spanish when they came from a distant king and would stop having them send their children to be ritually slaughtered.
The Mexica's ritual human sacrifice is notorious, and was done with a supply of victims from vassal states. It wasn't much of a decision for the Tlaxcalans to back the Spanish when they came from a distant king and would stop having them send their children to be ritually slaughtered.
Well there's varying theories on the tophets.
It does raise a question, does this thread require live sacrifices to count? Or you can do it the (theorized) Carthaginian way with sacrifices that prematurely died naturally?
Does the killing of people as heretics, witches, or deserters from a social/religious/spiritual norm count as a sacrifice? It is the act of killing an individual due to the perceived desire of a supernatural force or universal truth. If that is the case than witch burnings, the lynching of African Americans, murder of homosexuals, and more may be considered human sacrifice.
i'd say no. that's execution or straight up murder as punishment for a perceived crime--human sacrifice was almost always as a means to get a god or some other divinity or spirit to do something (iirc, the Aztecs performed their mass human sacrifices because they believed that if they didn't the sun wouldn't rise the next day--they genuinely believed that the preservation of teh world DEPENDED on the gods being given human lives in exchange. as a note, Quetzalcoatl refused human sacrifice.)
jahenders
Banned
I don't think it can be called human sacrifice since you're not participating in the sacrifice. However, you're getting the ancillary (though targeted) benefits of a sacrifice from 2000 years ago.
jahenders
Banned
I, too, would say no. They were executed for a crime (at the time), not too appease a deity (though sometimes people might have argued that with heretics).
And, no, lynchings or killing homosexuals is certainly not human sacrifice. In many cases it's simply murder, in others it could be considered a small scale genocide, in others it might be done out of someone's perception. However, few (if any) were actually done as a human sacrifice, with ritual and trappings to ensure a deity recognized and rewarded it.
And, no, lynchings or killing homosexuals is certainly not human sacrifice. In many cases it's simply murder, in others it could be considered a small scale genocide, in others it might be done out of someone's perception. However, few (if any) were actually done as a human sacrifice, with ritual and trappings to ensure a deity recognized and rewarded it.
No. A sacrifice is something valuable you give up. That means it consist of sacrificing people who are either valuable to your own society or to the societies with which you wage war for captives (as in MesoAmerica). Slaves also have value in monetary/work roles so sacrificing slaves can also count. By definition, however, most of the situations you describe involve murders of people who are not considered valuable by the people killing them. This may be murder, repression, or even genocide, but it is not a sacrificial act.