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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.
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Do you believe all other forms of life have souls? I'm curious because you made the vegetarian and vegan argument which I always find interesting. I was raised Hindu (now atheist) and the religion has a belief that all forms of life have a soul and have consciousness. As a consequence of this you accept that in order to live, your life relies on extinguishing other forms of life. I always find it weird that when peop…
Because I don't want to be eaten if I become mentally disabled in an accident, but I want to eat things that could perform equivalently on some tests.
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Watching Mel Gibson's Apocalypto gave me chills. I don't know if there are any other movies that depict the times so realisticly (atleast from a movie watcher's perspective though not from a historian's one). The last scene showing Hernan Cortez's ship is the bridge between the old world and the "new world". The start of the decline of the Aztecs.
It's worth keeping in mind that whatever else Cortez's ship represented, it certainly wasn't the welfare of the next 10 generations of Native Americans in Mexico.
Human sacrifice occurred in the Americas, that is well established. But similar things did happen elsewhere. In Europe, Asia and Asia... at massive scale. What is the Roman Catholic Inquisition exactly? It can be oversimplified to burning people so God is happy. It is a form of human sacrifice. Up to 300,000 people died that way. So if we are going to talk about human sacrifice let's apply the term consistently.
Human sacrifice occurred in the Americas, that is well established. But similar things did happen elsewhere. In Europe, Asia and Asia... at massive scale. What is the Roman Catholic Inquisition exactly? It can be oversimplified to burning people so God is happy. It is a form of human sacrifice. Up to 300,000 people died that way. So if we are going to talk about human sacrifice let's apply the term consistently.
Are you saying we shouldn’t discuss an archaeological find because it makes a part of one civilization look bad? That kind of anti-science thinking is dangerous.
You can use the term all you want, try to not use it in a biased manner.
Often depictions of human sacrifice in the Americas are used to justify the exploitation of the native people of the Americas.
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Because I don't want to be eaten if I become mentally disabled in an accident, but I want to eat things that could perform equivalently on some tests.
I don't understand your comment. Can you explain further?
I really enjoyed your above comment. I sometimes give push back to the vegan moral superiority stance where they act like eating animals is evil, but eating plants is totally fine. I tend to view all organisms as "having a soul" so to speak and I don't think there is anything inherently morally superior from that perspective in eating only plants, not animals. (I think there are some other bases for arguing that it is morally superior wrt to preventing war, etc.)
But when you see these arguments in public (among "westerners," for lack of a better word), they are almost always based on the idea that plants don't have brains, thus they don't have awareness, so this somehow makes it not a problem to kill them that we might live, where killing animals is posited to be a bad thing.
If you take that argument to its logical conclusion, than perhaps it is morally acceptable to eat other people if they are in a vegetative state. It is one of my objections to such framing.
Human sacrifice occurred in the Americas, that is well established. But similar things did happen elsewhere. In Europe, Asia and Asia... at massive scale. What is the Roman Catholic Inquisition exactly? It can be oversimplified to burning people so God is happy. It is a form of human sacrifice. Up to 300,000 people died that way. So if we are going to talk about human sacrifice let's apply the term consistently.
Are you saying we shouldn’t discuss an archaeological find because it makes a part of one civilization look bad? That kind of anti-science thinking is dangerous.
Despite the many issues, I'd still suggest anyone interested in the Aztec empire at the time of the Spanish conquest to read The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Díaz was present not only on the Cortés expedition, but on the earlier expeditions led by Córdoba and Grijalva. The article mentions, plausibly so, that the issue of human sacrifice was often exaggerated by the Spaniards. Nevertheless, it i…
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 the usage of chemical weapons in the Rif war.
Just an example: http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/1898/reconcentrado-2.jpg Going back to your post: maybe their portrayal is accurate, but Spain was not any better.
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Are you saying we shouldn’t discuss an archaeological find because it makes a part of one civilization look bad? That kind of anti-science thinking is dangerous.
I am saying that the term "human sacrifice" is rarely applied to European rituals of sacrifice involving humans. You can use the term all you want, try to not use it in a biased manner. Often depictions of human sacrifice in the Americas are used to justify the exploitation of the native people of the Americas.
They dismiss Cortez and his men as exaggerating the number of skulls when they claimed 130,000, but if you start calculating how many are in the image of the reconstruction in the article, it's easily close to 100,000. This reminds me of how the academic consensus was that child sacrifice in Carthage was merely Roman propaganda, until they dug up the massive infant necropolis near the temple to Moloch (yes, that Molo…
