101–110 of 255 posts
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Abandoning/exposing infants (especially girls) was very widespread in the ancient word. It’s possible that ‘sacrifice’ was just a way to justify it through some ritual. This didn’t really change untill the chirch started equating it with murder.
Disgust against child sacrifice and most human sacrifice was a Roman sensibility, long before there was any church or christianity.
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> Child sacrifice hooks into some very deep and dark aspects of human psychology that we have yet to unpack. Maybe not. Humans first do something practical, and then use rituals and tradition to justify it. Here's an alternative scenario: In an age where abortion had a higher chance of killing the woman than childbirth, this was the only practical abortion. It's only after the fact that it gets justified as a sacrifi…
Greeks and Romans had almost bo qualms about infanticide though. It was no less acceptable than abortion is nowadays. They only had issues with ritualizing the process or killing older children..
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Very strange to see US-style political discourse applied to the ancients. It really is true that as we do one thing we do all things.
The destruction of Cartagena is the first known example of purposeful destruction of the whole civilization. The USA and the annihilation of native american civilizations came many centuries later.
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> My growing distrust of soft sciences over the past few years means that this article did not move the needle in me to believe Carthage practiced child sacrifice, not one millimeter. There is a trove of independent historic stories and tales about child sacrifice in Carthage from Plutarch, Plato and even the Bible. In some sense I think it would more obvious than not to assume that child sacrifice did take place.
Couple of issues there; you’d have to question the independence (at the remove of time it’s impossible to know if there was a single source), and if you’re going to take attestation by multiple ancient writers as strong evidence of a thing, well, you’re going to end up believing some odd, and often contradictory, things. That sort of evidence isn’t nothing, but _in itself_ you probably need to be very careful with it…
"In some cases, however, the inscriptions make explicit reference to human victims, with expressions such as »zrm»ˇs(t), (a person who has not yet reached maturity) and mlk b–l (an offering of a citizen); in the Hellenistic period the phrase mlk »dm (human offering) is found. An interpretation of these construct phrases as ‘offering by a citizen/human’ rather than ‘offering of a citizen/human’ must be ruled out by the fact that the phrase mlk »mr is also found at both Cirta and Carthage: ‘offering of a sheep’ (Amadasi Guzzo 2007–2008: 350)."
Child sacrifice hooks into some very deep and dark aspects of human psychology that we have yet to unpack. There is a reason that this practice crops up in various civilizations seemingly independently, and it is not a pretty one - at least not by contemporary moral sensibilities. It is impossible to understand the biblical narrative of the binding of Isaac, for example, without addressing the context in which such a…
It's a good idea to disguise this as "child sacrifice" as in the "GOD" asked you to do this. Kind of make you at ease with the decision and execution since you'd not do it on your own.
But hey, that's just my guess and am a random dude on the Internet.
Child sacrifice hooks into some very deep and dark aspects of human psychology that we have yet to unpack. There is a reason that this practice crops up in various civilizations seemingly independently, and it is not a pretty one - at least not by contemporary moral sensibilities. It is impossible to understand the biblical narrative of the binding of Isaac, for example, without addressing the context in which such a…
Wikipedia provides some material on child sacrifice by the Incas in e.g. [2] and [3].
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-10-08-bk-201-st... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plomo_Mummy [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Llullaillaco
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Plenty of engineers, MDs, and other people with credentials from a 'hard' science don't know the scientific process. Just because two people you know also fall into that category doesn't mean we have some sort crisis in academia.
"the engineer's disease" and perception of domain transference & relevance
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Abandoning/exposing infants (especially girls) was very widespread in the ancient word. It’s possible that ‘sacrifice’ was just a way to justify it through some ritual. This didn’t really change untill the chirch started equating it with murder.
Disgust against child sacrifice and most human sacrifice was a Roman sensibility, long before there was any church or christianity.
On the whole, the Romans were quite enlightened compared to the other brutal civilizations of the ancient world, being governed more by law than superstition, but they still had these quirks that wouldn't be eradicated till Christianity replaced the state religion.