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

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

#301

Post by bodi »

horseLOGIC wrote: post #286
bodi wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#302

Post by roel_v »

coding123 wrote: post #23
roel_v wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a 'soul'? What animals have one?

Apologies for that terminology, I personally believe in that, so for anyone else, scratch that note and replace with (start seeing animals that have the same right to live here as humans) and being more pedantic, if you believe humans being animals, scratch the distinction, and replace with animals of the species of human. I'm sure I'm offending more people in trying to fix this comment lol.

Oh I'm not offended, I just don't understand the concept, and as it seems that you have an at least somewhat defined understanding (or maybe as you call it 'belief'), I thought maybe you could explain. Of course I realize that there are many people who see some sort of relation between 'living creatures' and 'souls', but I rarely find someone who wants to explain in any depth (well, organized religions have large bodies of dogma that explain the details, but I tend to find them unsatisfying as at some point they rely on 'because we say so'; and apart from that, I don't think your argument comes from any mainstream religion's theology anyway).

What I mean is - why do some living creatures have 'souls' (and, I think I can conclude from your argument, should not be killed by others? Maybe only not by others with souls? Not sure if there are living beings without souls?) Like, insects - do they have souls? And micro-organisms, say, fungi?

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

#303

Post by dalbasal »

ars wrote: post #270
dalbasal wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#304

Post by michaelmrose »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #300
michaelmrose wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reason to believe anything that would be described as a soul exists. Logically everything is an emergent property of complex systems including plants, animals, and us. Not being able to distinguish eating an orange, a chicken, a human, a human in a vegetative state etc is just a failure of analysis. There is no moral dimension to eating an orange and we don't eat people even when their brain is irretrieva…

" Logically everything is an emergent property of complex systems including plants, animals, and us." I'm sorry, but I fully disagree, please see my note above. This is a materialist view that presupposes that there is only matter/energy and laws that govern it - and only with that (unproven) presupposition first in place, can anything such as you have described be 'logically inferred'. For example - you mention 'mor…

Although we have been thinking about the matter for at least 12000 years we have no reasonable theory for things that aren't matter or energy that isn't hand waving and nonsense. The most prevalent current theories are extrapolations from what goat herds who believed illnesses and earthquakes were caused by evil spirits.

As an example most people would agree that chemistry is just applied physics but most people don't do substantial chemistry by simulating all the particles involved not because they believe that chemicals are somehow magical in a way that isn't capturable by physics but because its challenging and intractable.

Further if we did arrive at some theory that described qualities and entities not presently qualified by physics those things including souls would become part of the universe because the term universe grows to encompass everything we presently understand.

The logical conclusion is that a soul if it did exist would be made of matter/energy/information like everything else that can possibly exist.

It would of course be truly shocking if a heretofore incompressible aspect of the universe just happened to mirror thousands of years of superstition.

It would be like if we travelled to another star system and found its denizens were the cast of Harry Potter complete with billions of years of history culminating with a multipart war against Voldemorte.

If you want to posit things out of scope of present understanding you ought to provide some support for them which is notably absent from the above hand waving.

I await an interesting reply but fear it will merely be a critique of my small minded instance that debates consist of facts and arguments.

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

#305

Post by zaarn »

caf wrote: post #234
golergka wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#306

Post by JustFinishedBSG »

zawerf wrote: post #46

Are we sure it's really all human sacrifice and not just an ossuary? For example a major tourist attraction underneath Paris is the The Catacombs where you can walk through tunnels paved with the skulls of over 6 million people. It's an amazing sight but would be extremely creepy without the context of a huge modern city above. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacombs_of_Paris

> not just an ossuary?

And Mexicas just happened to all die between 25 and 35 and be men ?

They very clearly were killed.

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

#307

Post by tptacek »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #296
tptacek wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think you've lost the plot of this subthread. I'm not making a comparative argument about which civilization is better. I'm saying that Cortes didn't rescue Central America so much as perpetrate a genocide on it. We're talking about a movie, for what it's worth.

No, we're talking about historical (i.e. real) Cortez, which is evident from your very own reference to his 'rape' which has nothing to do with the film 'Apocalypto'. The reference to 'rape' I interpreted metaphorically, and you indicated you meant it literally - which I don't think applies given the historical facts of Aztecs, Cortez et. al. in real history ... whereas one could arguably use the 'rape' in the metaph…

You see the cliff your argument is falling off of, right? "The most common type of geopolitical activity in history by far". My argument doesn't require me to somehow justify human sacrifice, but yours has taken you to the brink of rationalizing the genocide perpetrated by Cortés.

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

#308

Post by tptacek »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #297
Turing_Machine wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being enslaved and raped is bad, but not quite as bad as being enslaved, raped, and also being used as a source of meat. I think it was one of Neal Stephenson's characters who observed that it really brought into perspective what assholes the Aztecs were when you consider that bringing in the Spanish Inquisition was actually an improvement , vis-a-vis the cruelty of the dominant religion. The Inquisitors tortured the…

In addition to the 'not even comparable' level of atrocity, the scale of the direct victims of the Inquisition also paled in comparison to the full and complete systematic mass murder of the Aztec rituals. At very least the eradication of the craziest death cult in history was a bonus for everyone.

They didn't eradicate the "death cult" so much as they eradicated most of the people in Central America.

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

#309

Post by int_19h »

PurpleBoxDragon wrote: post #257
int_19h wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 misj…

>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 exis…

> 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.

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

#310

Post by horseLOGIC »

bodi wrote: post #301
horseLOGIC wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

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