Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven
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| Sunny Days in Heaven Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven |
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Monday, July 15, 2002 Human Sacrifice and Magical Thinking Redux Human beings once practiced the rite of human sacrifice for one reason - they believed it was an effective form of prayer. That is, it caused answered prayers to happen for their benefit. People got this notion because they considered human life the most valuable of all possible offerings one or a group could make to God or the gods. The magical thinking was caused (in essence by God's impassability to a large extent) through the agency of Fortune or luck. Sometimes when people made petitions to a god and performed some ritual or sacrifice - good things happened. It rained and the ground was made fertile. It stopped raining and the ground was made solid enough for planting. And so on. When there was a crisis of truly monumental proportion, you pull out the heavy guns - kill a person for a god. Then, after awhile, you realize every occasion for prayer is rather serious and deserves the best ammunition. Thus Carthage regularly burned infants, and the Canaanites ritually murdered their firstborn and buried him under the threshold of the house. The Aztecs had the further motive of cannibalism to their ritual. Human flesh added protein to their diet. Even the Greeks had sacrifice of children as alluded to in the story of Agamemnon and his daughter, Iphigenia. If I recall correctly, in the Illiad, doesn't Achilles sacrifice a number of women on Patroclus' bier? Today we are so enlightened that contemporary Western Men and Women would never consider the use of human sacrifice as a means of self-improvement (petitionary prayer) would they? Yet even Hollywood's most enlightened celebrities have taken up the practice or encourage it to the highest degree. How so? Consider these forms of magical thinking. Once a woman's right to choose abortion is made legal society will be immeasurably improved. How? Poor people will not have to burden themselves and others with children they are ill-equipped to take care of. Deformed babies can be screened and eliminated. Sex of offspring can be chosen by process of elimination. Life will be made convenient, hopeful, and unburdened by "accidents" of nature and "mistakes" of desire. Yet, the magical thinking did not bring us to the Promised Land and so we need to wage war on other areas such as on the old and sick or miserable. Let's give them a good death. It's good for them and good for us, isn't it? Again, life magically improved by the careful administration of death to people. One of the benefits of human sacrifice of the unborn was going to be fetal stem cell research. That magic elixir of miracle cures right around the next bend. How could we refuse the future its brightest new hope? Did it work? No. Too bad. Now we can't further justify killing unborn children. We waste those little bodies on the garbage heap when we could certainly create some sort of new gourmet dish out of 'em if only we tried. Now, of course, the celebs and media are hot to trot on an even better, more therapeutic form of human sacrifice (so small it all takes place in a little petri dish). This tiny murder of a clump of cells promises to reward our most grandiose prayers because from cloning and killing even greater, more staggering goods will flow - cloned stem cell research is absolutely certain to cure everything you can imagine. Meanwhile, adult stem cell research is not just promising but showing many remarkable and various results to the good. Is this being held up as our answer to every prayer? No, of course not. Why not? It is not connected with death. What other conclusion can one draw except that among faithless people, there is an atavistic, unconscious drive that insists that human sacrifice is always efficacious when done as ritual and prayer toward a worthy end. It is truly a Culture of Death among the heathens as JPII described in his book, The Gospel of Life. It is a pagan response to crisis and suffering only in this age it's called the great god SCIENCE. But it is religous and magical practice of human sacrifice no less, and no matter how many obscuring incantations of relativity the pagan code requires to be said in conjunction with such sacrifices. posted by Mark Butterworth | 9:03 PM | |
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