Primitive religions have routinely thought sacrificed humans paid a debt demanded by the gods, Christianity included (but Rod Dreher doesn't think so)

 

How Science Is Helping Us Understand Human Sacrifice

Ancient DNA reveals mysteries surrounding once-widespread practice

By Aylin Woodward

July 3, 2024

Death by strangulation, decapitation, exsanguination. Buried alive, burned on pyres, crushed by stones, thrown off cliffs. 

Homo sapiens in nearly every part of the world has practiced human sacrifice at some point over at least five millennia, often killing females in fertility rites or for burial alongside powerful males.  

But new research enabled by DNA analysis and other scientific advances has challenged assumptions about the identity of sacrificial victims, at least among the Maya of Central America. 

Between 900 and 1,400 years ago, the Maya regularly sacrificed boys—particularly twins or close male relatives—according to a study published in June in the journal Nature. 

The findings are based on the ancient DNA of 64 children who had been deposited in an underground cistern at the site of Chichén Itzá, a city built on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.

For the ancient Maya, being sacrificed was considered a privilege, so these boys—most of whom were between the ages of 3 and 6—were likely given up willingly by their families, according to Rodrigo Barquera, an immunogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and co-author of the recent study. 

A possible explanation for the sacrifices lies in Maya lore. According to the culture’s written traditions, “Hero Twins”—both male—traveled to the underworld to avenge their father, a twin himself, who was killed by the lords of the underworld. Sacrifices of two male children were likely part of a ritual that helped the Maya honor this part of their mythology and belief system. 

At the distance of millennia, these and other ritual killings appear barbaric. But to the cultures that carried them out, human sacrifices served myriad purposes, including fulfilling a universal desire to manage the uncontrollable world in which they lived.

“We think of this as such a bizarre practice, something very unusual and unexplainable, but three-quarters of societies did it,” according to Peter Turchin, an evolutionary scientist at the Complexity Science Hub, a Vienna-based research organization, who wasn’t involved in the research.

For the most part, ritual killings fell into one of two categories. 

The first was what anthropologists called a retainer sacrifice, when servants or consorts, for example, were killed to accompany someone who had died—usually a member of the elite—into the great beyond.

It was particularly prevalent among members of the African Kingdom of Dahomey, which persisted until roughly the beginning of the 20th century; during the Shang Dynasty of China some three millennia ago; and in Egypt between about 3100 and 2900 B.C. King Djer, a pharaoh who ruled during ancient Egypt’s first dynasty, had more than 500 retainer sacrifices surrounding his tomb in Abydos.

The other form was the sacrifice of captives or community members to placate, please or ask favors of gods and ancestors. “You’re supplying the divine world with something valuable in order to get something in return,” said Glenn Schwartz, a professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s often discussed in the literature as a gift-giving enterprise.”

The Aztec, who mostly postdated the Maya and were famous for cutting out the hearts of prisoners atop pyramids as an offering to their gods, didn’t even have a word for human sacrifice.

“The word they always used for these ceremonies was debt payment,” said Davíd Carrasco, a historian of religions at Harvard University.

Children were believed to be among the best emissaries to the gods because in many cultures they were considered purer than adults, and thus better able to communicate with the spirit world.

The ancient Carthaginians sacrificed their infants and buried the ashes in urns at special seaside burial grounds, perhaps to engender safe voyages across the Mediterranean. 

Centuries ago, the Inca drugged and sacrificed their children in a ritual known as capacocha to appease the gods during times of crisis, such as a drought or disease, according to Angelique Corthals, a forensic anthropologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

“The Inca were trying to control that event by offering the most precious thing that they had,” she said. Some of these children were brought high atop a dormant volcano in the Andes, where their bodies ended up mummified and exceptionally preserved because of the cold atop the peak.

In one of the largest known examples of child sacrifice, the Chimú killed more than 100 boys and girls in prehispanic Peru some 500 years ago. Hundreds of baby llamas were killed too.

Experts have interpreted the Chimú sacrifice as “a very desperate act to communicate with the gods during a period of extreme climate change,” said Brenna Hassett, a biological anthropologist and lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire in the U.K. It followed a time of heavy rainfall and flooding from an El Niño event, concurrent with an invasion threat from the nearby Inca.

But inferring motives, or even distinguishing ritual killings from executions with nothing more than visual examinations of bones or burials is challenging. 

The contents of a tomb can offer hints—such as the presence of objects for use in the afterlife called grave goods or the positioning of bodies in relation to one another—but now a new wave of studies is using genetic analysis to shed light on archaeological mysteries. 

DNA analysis and other tools enable anthropologists to discern where a person was from, the quality of their diet and health and their sex—something previously impossible for children and a key to the discovery of the Maya boys. 

“While you can determine sex from adult bones, the result of hormone changes during puberty, these changes are lacking in children,” said Barquera’s co-author, Christina Warinner, a biomolecular archaeologist at Harvard. 

Barquera and his group analyzed the petrous bone—a dense part of the skull’s temporal bone that preserves DNA well—from 64 children found in the Maya cistern. 

In addition to learning that the children were male, they found identical genomes in the different bones, revealing the pairs of identical twins. The DNA also revealed genetic continuity between these boys and the modern-day Maya living in the area today, underscoring that those being sacrificed had been chosen from within the local community near Chichén Itzá, rather than being outsiders. The findings run counter to historical narratives passed down by Spanish officials and priests that Mesoamerican cultures tended to sacrifice enslaved captives.

Radiocarbon dating of the bones showed the boys weren’t all killed at once, hinting, Warinner said, that the sacrifices might have been related to a cyclic ritual ceremony. Isotopic analysis showed that most of the boys shared the same diet, suggesting they were raised together and deliberately prepared for sacrifice, Barquera added.

“It’s such an exciting time to be doing archaeology,” said Nawa Sugiyama, an anthropologist from the University of California, Riverside, who wasn’t involved in the Maya work. “The level of detail with which we’re able to reconstruct these rituals has really opened up our ability to be there and relate to these families and communities.”

Write to Aylin Woodward at aylin.woodward@wsj.com 

 

Primitive Christianity reflects, rather than repudiates, this ancient human barbarism by insisting on the salvific meaning of the man Jesus' death as a pure sacrifice which paid a debt owed to the one God.

That is another milestone in the long trend of regressive thinking in Judaism (as was apocalyptic in particular, which the historical Jesus eschewed, and eschatology in general, which he did not; the establishment of human kingship over Israel; the building of a box for God called the temple; et cetera), which putatively from the time of Moses had repudiated human sacrifice as an abomination (Deuteronomy 12:31; 18:9ff.), or even earlier as foreshadowed in the halted sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22), aka the temptation of Abraham.

But in the New Testament the Jewish God himself, completely out of character, is actively nailing his own son to the cross as a sacrifice for sins.

And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. 

-- Hebrews 10:10 

For I testify again to every man that is circumcised, that he is a debtor to do the whole law. 

-- Galatians 5:3

And you, who were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, having canceled the bond which stood against us with its legal demands; this he set aside, nailing it to the cross.  

-- Colossians 2:13f.

For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. 

-- II Corinthians 5:21 

Yet God, with undeserved kindness, declares that we are righteous. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty for our sins. For God presented Jesus as the sacrifice for sin. People are made right with God when they believe that Jesus sacrificed his life, shedding his blood.

-- Romans 3:24f.

Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers; But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot:  

-- I Peter 1:18f.

And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? 

-- Matthew 27:46

And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? 

-- Mark 15:34

  

Good riddance, phony demon UFO, Good riddance, infernal Pentagon!

 

 I felt him strike, and now I see him fly:

Curs'd demon! O for ever broken lie

Those fatal shafts, by which I inward bleed!

 

-- Matthew Prior 

 

 

Poor Rod Dreher: Evidence is emerging that government efforts to propagate UFO mythology date back all the way to the 1950s

The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America’s UFO Mythology: U.S. military fabricated evidence of alien technology and allowed rumors to fester to cover up real secret-weapons programs

... At times, as with the deception around Area 51, military officers spread false documents to create a smokescreen for real secret-weapons programs. In other cases, officials allowed UFO myths to take root in the interest of national security—for instance, to prevent the Soviet Union from detecting vulnerabilities in the systems protecting nuclear installations. Stories tended to take on a life of their own, such as the three-decade journey of a purported piece of space metal that turned out to be nothing of the sort. And one long-running practice was more like a fraternity hazing ritual that spun wildly out of control. ...

The many in America who have been gulled by the disinformation should take heart. Hundreds upon hundreds of military men have been taken in by the stories too, and some of them believe them to this day.

Unintended consequences of Lutheranism: An unhinged band of female lunatics decorates the tree year round, but for things other than Christmas

Go Ahead, Leave Christmas Tree Up -- Decor Turns Year-Round...

 

 

Um, hello, America was made by Christians who gave up on Europe, and would FLEE this America on the first flight out

This guy teaches at . . . Hillsdale College.

Christians Err if They Give Up on America

D.G. Hart, Wall Street Journal:

 

The U.S. was conceived as a nation that relied on civic associations, private organizations and virtuous citizens who learned morality at church, in the home and in school. ... the desire to thank God for the U.S.A. by marching in a parade with the Boy Scouts or the Rotary Club is a noble one. 

 

 

Faithful Anglicans in Africa and global South fire shot across the bow of deviant Archbishop of Canterbury over same-sex marriage

Conservative Anglicans Call for Break With Archbishop of Canterbury Over Same-Sex Blessings

Conservative Anglican leaders said that their church, riven by disagreements over homosexuality, could no longer recognize England’s Archbishop of Canterbury as first among equals and called for an overhaul of how the global denomination is led. 

Friday’s statement reflects a growing consensus among conservative Anglicans, most of them in Africa and elsewhere in the global South, that Archbishop Justin Welby should forfeit his world leadership role because of his support for the Church of England’s decision in February to allow the blessings of same-sex relationships. 

“This renders his leadership role in the Anglican Communion entirely indefensible,” said the statement by the Global Anglican Future Conference, known as Gafcon, which met this week in Rwanda.

More.

American United Methodists scramble to exit the denomination over same sex marriage by the December 2023 deadline

The United Methodist Church—America’s third-largest religious body, with over 6.2 million members—is in the thick of its own [schism] over its teachings on sexuality. Hundreds of congregations have voted to leave the denomination, which had 13 million members world-wide as of 2020, and thousands more likely will. On Aug. 7, United Methodism’s second- and seventh-largest churches by attendance, both in the Houston area, voted to quit the denomination. 

What brought United Methodism to this divide was its decision-making body’s 2019 “Traditional Plan”—a document that affirmed its ban on same-sex marriage and mandated that all clergy be celibate if single and monogamous if married. That sets the church apart from nearly every other mainline Protestant denomination. The traditionalists won thanks to votes from conservative African delegates, whose churches have grown by millions even as the U.S. has declined by nearly the same magnitude.

... United Methodism has lost five million members in the U.S. since 1968 and will lose millions more. Mainline Protestantism has been sidelined—and it will take years for United Methodism’s schism to resolve.

More.

Catholic parochial education, now more secular and costly, reaches 64% fewer students in 2021 than it did in 1970

Catholic Schools Are Losing Students at Record Rates, and Hundreds Are Closing :

Even before the pandemic hit, about 100 Catholic schools were closing each year, according to the NCEA. In 1970, some 4.4 million students attended Catholic elementary and secondary schools, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, a Catholic social-science research institute based at Georgetown University. At the time, almost all students were Catholics, and classes were often taught by priests, nuns or members of male religious orders, who earned salaries far lower than their public-school counterparts.

Today, about 1.6 million students attend Catholic schools, according to the NCEA. About 80% of students are Catholic, and lay teachers have almost completely replaced priests and nuns, which has driven up the cost. Though religious instruction remains a core piece of Catholic education, mass is no longer a daily part of most schools. ...

Other factors have contributed to the decline as well: Enrollment fell sharply in the early 2000s, during the church’s sex-abuse scandal, and fell again after the financial crash in 2008. Some secular families are turned off by the church’s opposition to abortion or same-sex marriage, said Carol Ann MacGregor, vice provost of Loyola University New Orleans. Meanwhile, more the most devout Catholics are home-schooling their children, in some cases because they don’t believe Catholic schools are focused enough on the faith.

Near-religious fervor among climate activists recalls troubling traits of extreme religious cults

Yes indeedy, but the balance of this op-ed in The Wall Street Journal goes much too easy on the fanatics, and is much too accepting of the current climate orthodoxy, paying no attention whatsoever to the outright fraud being committed by politically-motivated anti-capitalists in the scientific community.

St. Greta Spreads the Climate Gospel:

A movement that believes in sin, penance and salvation doesn’t sound very scientific

It’s been noted before that the cause of addressing climate change has become something like the modern world’s version of a secular religion. In much of Europe especially, but in sections of American society too, a kind of climate theology has replaced traditional Christianity as the ultimate source of authority over human behavior, comprising both an all-embracing teleology of our existence and a prescriptive moral code. 

The High Church of Environmentalism has acquired many of the characteristics of its ecclesiastical predecessor. An apocalyptic eschatology warns that we will all be consumed by fire if we don’t follow the ordained rules. The notion that it is our sinful nature that has brought us to mortal peril—from the Original Sin of a carbon-unleashing industrial revolution to daily transgressions with plastic bottles and long-haul flights—is as central to its message as it was to the Catholic Church’s. But repentance is near. A gospel of redemption emphasizes that salvation lies in reducing our carbon footprint, with reusable shopping bags and bike-sharing. The secular authorities preach the virtues of abstinence. Meatless Fridays are no longer just for Lenten observance. ...

[T]here is something about this near-religious fervor among the climate change activists—a growing fanaticism—that recalls some of the more troubling traits of extreme religious cults.

The Old Order Amish have made simplicity a way of life in America since its inception, but today people shell out big bucks to flirt with it "on vacation"

Guess which one is the example of terrible simplification.

The Ultimate Luxury Vacation: Doing Nothing in the Middle of Nowhere:

Simplicity is the ultimate luxury as travelers search for new ways to unplug this summer. The promise of escaping everyday life has always lured vacationers. But now people whose daily routines are consumed by digital demands and distractions are going to ever-greater lengths to do nothing in the middle of nowhere.

Evangelical women swallow the communist bait, will help elect an open borders, partial birth abortion fanatic president of the US

Gleefully showcased here in The Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Trump’s support among white evangelical women stood at 58% in mid-October, down from the nearly 77% who voted for Mitt Romney four years ago, according to a poll from the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonprofit organization, conducted after the video. More than 70% of white evangelical men still support Mr. Trump. ... After voting Republican for her entire life, Ms. Dingle, [a Christian blogger] 34, declared her intention to vote for Mrs. Clinton. Being pro-life, she said, was about more than abortion—it also meant sticking up for immigrants, refugees and other groups.

Too bad Trump did not touch or kiss a man, then he would be celebrated for his courage in coming out of the closet

Seen here in the comments to "Donald Trump Denounced by Liberty University Students".

Once again the communists succeed by getting the true believers to live up to their own book of rules while they break all of them.

Calvinism kills as surely as apocalyptic, or Mao.

Stephen Prothero doesn't know the meaning of pluralism, but teaches at a "university"

Here in The Wall Street Journal of all places:

"No doubt Christians should strive to understand the Islamic faith fully, and vice versa. But pretend pluralism, feigning that all or most religious traditions hinge on the same truth, is no solution for the squabble at Wheaton or anywhere else."

Religious pluralism has nothing to do with hinging "on the same truth", but rather with competing religions coexisting in a society, as in a pluralistic society where competing ideas coexist, such as for example at a university, where the main idea is that a whole universe of competing ideas is supposed to be available to the student.

Presumably Boston University pays its professors to understand the meaning of that word, evocative as it is of the very mission of universities, but in this case it may wish to ask for its money back before the students do.

William McGurn Must Be A Shill For The Homosexual Lobby

To William McGurn for The Wall Street Journal, Christian evangelical objections to the heretical theology of Mitt Romney's Mormonism are equivalent to incidents of homosexual intimidation and violence against Mormonism, except McGurn never mentions the words "homosexual" or "gay" when referencing these attacks, all of which were committed against Mormons by queers, and queer lovers, not Christians, here:

[F]ar more alarming for Mormons are the attacks on Mormon property and Mormon livelihoods just three years ago that registered barely a peep among the same media now so obsessed with Mr. Jeffress. These attacks happened during the 2008 campaign in California over Proposition 8, a state referendum to ban same-sex marriage. When opponents of the measure found that Mormons had contributed heavily to its passage, ugly attacks followed.

LDS temples in Los Angeles and Salt Lake City received envelopes filled with white powder, provoking an anthrax scare. A Book of Mormon was burned outside an LDS chapel in Denver. Other Mormon chapels were vandalized.

Individuals fared even worse. The head of the Los Angeles Film Festival was forced to resign after his contribution was made public. Ditto for a fellow Mormon who ran the California Musical Theater. A former gold medalist who served as U.S. chef de mission for the 2012 Olympic Games in London likewise stepped down. A 67-year-old woman who had donated just $100 stopped working at the restaurant her mother owned to spare it further protest.

If William McGurn had any integrity, he'd admit that Republicans are giving Mormon candidates more than a fair hearing, while Christians welcome Mormon support against the real enemies of America, like homosexuals, but stake their claim against Mormon candidates on the political issues and especially on their propensity to flip-flop on them, which looks like a feature of their religion, as was the case historically both with respect to polygamy and to the status of black people.

What leaves readers wondering is why William McGurn works so hard to hide the homosexuals' attacks on Mormonism, and conflate those attacks with the First Amendment speech of evangelical Christians and Republicans.

We notice there is no Mormon running for president in the Democrat Party. But there might be a Muslim secular humanist.

James Q. Wilson: Testosterone Minus Self Restraint Equaled Crime

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. for The Wall Street Journal has the interview, here:

We know that, in good times and bad, and in all countries, the majority of crime is committed by a small minority of young men. A landmark study by Marvin Wolfgang, for instance, showed that 6% of 18-year-olds were responsible for 52% of the crime committed by the cohort.

In the 1960s, the baby boom obviously enlarged the number of male teenagers, but what also changed conspicuously was the type of crimes they committed, from petty theft and the like to more serious crimes, such as armed robbery, grand larceny and homicide.

"So there was cultural change as well as a numerical change, and what caused the culture change? Whatever it was, it was powerful. I think it's best summarized by saying people abandoned the idea that self-control was the standard by which life should be led. That's my rough summary of what the '60s meant. . . .."

It all seems so obvious now, but so elusive when we were living it.

HATRED AS SELF-ESTEEM

Shelby Steele cuts to the heart of the failure of nerve which now animates the post-Christian West, the cultural self-doubt which first spelled the end for our society when our parents could no longer bring themselves to say No to their children:

[T]he entire Western world has suffered from a deficit of moral authority for decades now. Today we in the West are reluctant to use our full military might in war lest we seem imperialistic; we hesitate to enforce our borders lest we seem racist; we are reluctant to ask for assimilation from new immigrants lest we seem xenophobic; and we are pained to give Western Civilization primacy in our educational curricula lest we seem supremacist. Today the West lives on the defensive, the very legitimacy of our modern societies requiring constant dissociation from the sins of the Western past—racism, economic exploitation, imperialism and so on.

Read the rest here.