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Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

sciencemag.org

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Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#201

Post by golergka »

watwut wrote: post #58
patrickg_zill wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is whataboutism, I think.

Then again, it makes sense to put things into historical perspective. When we are about to talk about how one group was murderous and cruel, and how odd it makes us feel, it makes sense to point out what was going on elsewhere. Especially when the exact group reporting on those things is involved in cruelties of their own and uses these reports to excuse their own cruelties. Cortez him self was quite cruel, fond of t…

It seems that you're more concerned with giving value judgements to Aztecs and Spanish, and their comparison – but why is it relevant, or even interesting, at all? Just like in a case where article's author took to Twitter to announce that "human sacrifice wasn't horrific" (which it of course was), I just don't understand why people can't discuss history without fixating on moral value judgements. Do you have a horse in this race, or something?

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#202

Post by JumpCrisscross »

natecavanaugh wrote: post #193
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best theory I’ve seen goes as follows. Humans the world over have domesticated like a dozen beasts of burden [1]. Ever. Most of those animals are in the Old World. (The New World just had llamas.) Domesticated beasts of burden mean (a) higher productivity, i.e. cities i.e. proximity between people and (b) proximity between people and animals. The latter provides a vector for novel diseases to form. The former pro…

I can definitely see how those innate technological advantages can stack up, and it's definitely a good theory. I can't think of anything that couldn't be explained by it, though I still believe there were a number of other factors working in tandem with the domestication of animals (I am generally curious as to why horses became extinct in North America as well as the general lack of native domesticated mammals, if…

> I am generally curious as to why horses became extinct in North America

“The causes of [North American horses’] extinction have been debated. Given the suddenness of the event and because these mammals had been flourishing for millions of years previously, something quite unusual must have happened. The first main hypothesis attributes extinction to climate change. For example, in Alaska, beginning approximately 12,500 years ago, the grasses characteristic of a steppe ecosystem gave way to shrub tundra, which was covered with unpalatable plants. However, it has been proposed that the steppe-tundra vegetation transition in Beringia may have been a consequence, rather than a cause, of the extinction of megafaunal grazers.

The other hypothesis suggests extinction was linked to overexploitation of native prey by newly arrived humans. The extinctions were roughly simultaneous with the end of the most recent glacial advance and the appearance of the big game-hunting Clovis culture. Several studies have indicated humans probably arrived in Alaska at the same time or shortly before the local extinction of horses” [1].

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

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#203

Post by sorokod »

jpmoral wrote: post #130
sorokod wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#205

Post by sorokod »

PakG1 wrote: post #143
sorokod wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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 :-)

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#206

Post by mmjaa »

scarecrowbob wrote: post #81
jcims wrote: post #63

When I see a bunch of skulls in one place like this, or in the catacombs, it makes me think of the accumulated experience of people. Not because of the brains in the skulls or whatever, but just that each skull represents a single human life. Most of the time these are adult skulls, guessing 30+ years each. That's a lot of living. I just asked google to solve a couple of problems for me. What is the current populatio…

This is kind of a neat idea. Especially, it feels like fertile ground for speculative fiction about what would happen if it were collectivizable...

Speculative fiction .. or religion? Because if there were some way we could access the sum total of all human experience, wouldn't that method be as close to "God" as it was ever described?

One wonders if this is, indeed, the concept being described, over and over again in every religion (and science) ever ..

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#207

Post by toadworrier »

DanAndersen wrote: post #62
narrator wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 P…

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.

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#208

Post by toadworrier »

Pica_soO wrote: post #98
narrator wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#209

Post by toadworrier »

patrickg_zill wrote: post #52
badminton1 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Spanish themselves conducted many religion-motivated rituals of human sacrifice in Europe and in the Americas. In Europe, there was the Inquisition, with ritualistic torture using medieval torture devices, burning people to death, etc. Motivated by religious beliefs, just like the ones in the Americas. The Spanish also conducted campaigns of extermination. Some recent ones: the Reconcentrado policy in Cuba, and t…

This is whataboutism, I think.

I expect so. But there is still an interesting point: witch and heretic-burning likely tap into much the same psychology as ancient human sacrifice. Even the rationales overlap:

"Devine will demands these deaths; we will ensure the safety of our community by ritually killing these people."

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#210

Post by vinceguidry »

avn2109 wrote: post #166
shoo wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 n…

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