Saturday - November 16, 2002
Christianity and Child Sacrifice
One of the most baffling parts of Christianity,
beyond the entire concept of a deity, is why do Christians think it's a good
thing that their deity had to be tortured and killed so brutally? Sure, once
he's a martyr for his ideas then he can be admired and respected -- if they
agree with his ideas -- but if their god is so powerful, why was it necessary?
Theologians have come up with all sorts of reasons, none of which make much
sense to me, so I won't even bother repeating them. What is eerie about this
sacrifice is the parallel to other sacrifices common in the ancient
world.
Of course, this was the intended
parallel, and Christ is often compared to a sacrificial lamb, but I submit that
there is an even stronger parallel to the legacy of human sacrifice in many
Semitic religions.
We don't know a lot of the details of Phoenecian
religions, but it is believed that their religions have the common thread of
human sacrifice, specifically of children. One tradition of Judaism is in fact
an implicit rejection of this child sacrifice and is related in the story of
Abraham and Isaac. The story goes like this: God told Abraham to sacrifice his
son Isaac, which he prepared to do, but at the last minute god stopped the
murder and explained that Abraham was simply being tested to see to what lengths
he would obey the deity. Abraham is then told that child sacrifice is no longer
permitted.
Of course, no one bothers to
ask why Isaac ever trusted his father
again!
But here it is in the bible that
god tells his people that sacrificing children is no longer to be tolerated. I
suspect this is the main reason for the creation of Judaism: Some of the Semitic
people finally got fed up with the logic of sacrificing their children, so they
invented this story and this version of god to avoid the
requirement.
Of course, we can look
even more fundamentally at the issue and ask why is any type of animal or human
sacrifice thought of as some way of appeasing or gaining favor from a deity?
There were many, in fact most, religions in the known world of the
Mediterranean, Anatolia, the Levant, the Tigris and Euphrates River Valleys, the
Nile Delta, etc. that did not allow human sacrifice, yet took it for granted
that killing other animals was required for some sort of divine blessing, or as
implied in the Bible a test of obedience. It is so ingrained in their and our
culture that no one ever really explains why that is so.
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