(I think I did a similar topic once long ago, but there are new people, and I think this is probably expressed better.)
Today, human sacrifice is held nearly universally to be to be evil at least if not Satanic, so what is human sacrifice to God doing in Bible? There are three examples.
Most people know about Abraham who was told to sacrifice his son, Isaac, but was stopped at the last minute. Why was he told to do it in the first place, giving the impression that such a thing was acceptable, and why didn’t Abraham tell God to take a hike. Not only was it ritual human sacrifice, but he was told to sacrifice his own son.
The least known example is Jephthah in Judges 11:29, who makes an oath to sacrifice (what turns out to be) his daughter if he wins a battle, which he does–and he did sacrifice her. Some people try to excuse this on the grounds that the event was not presented as neutral and/or not being what God wanted. We’re talking human sacrifice here. Is there room for neutrality? Why isn’t it presented as the great evil it is, not in matter-of-fact language? And why doesn’t God intervene as he did by aiding Jephthah in the first place.
But the real cultural, mass hypnotic blindness is to the human sacrifice of Jesus as a salvific exchange for our sins. Yes, this is almost surely a dogma adopted by Paul and back-filled into some of the gospels, but if the Bible is the Word of God, how can it be excused? How could it remain there for 2000 years? It couldn’t, especially when we consider that there is only one way for the remission of sin, through heart changing repentance. Ironically, this is what Jesus and his partner, John the Baptizer taught.
Today’s Christianity should actually be termed Paulism.
Next–Biblical Evil #2: Paul, the Beast of Revelation
Answer: Because sometimes human sacrifice is a necessary part of practical communion with the highest.
This can be literal, the sacrifice of the firstborn, of slaves, or war prisoners, as the ancients practiced. Or indeed it can be metaphorical, where the notion of human sacrifice plays a part in the priestly language of subtle analogy, the teaching of casting away, at exactly the right time, what is merely human in oneself.
But let us forget for a while the priests and their subtleties. Have you not ever wondered about that forbidden, yet strangely potent “special” mixture of sexuality, cruelty and violence? If your mind is accustomed to philosophical hyperbole, then even the modern world wars can be understood as gigantic mechanisms of human sacrifice. The geographical positions of major battles and the pecularities in insignia worn by soldiers on both sides are always somewhat revealing, and the main obstacle that keeps a nameless nobody from unveiling this situation is their own personal investment, an absolute attachment to right & wrong, and hence a lack of a comprehensive, lunar view over the proceedings.
Today we are content and accustomed to call persons lost to wars, disaster, and even accident “victims”. But that word means -literally - “human sacrifice”. And it is not for nothing that there are even full-size standing stone constructions, exactly replicating the Stone Henge (including the hypothetical central altar) in the United States, completely open to tourism and the general public, the helpful info plaque on which frankly says: “War Memorial”.
The Bible describes many evil and unlawful (to us) things. What conclusion would you draw from this fact?
Remember, this is the Bible - here everything is at stake, and niether you nor I can afford to be superficial wishful-thinkers who would have anything that offends their pampered (and therefore perverted) modern eyes simply vanish into forgetful obscurity forever.
I get analogy, but, as a form of communion, no way.
We’re sounding satanic again.
Not human sacrifice, but rather putting people at risk in an aggressive effort (immoral, ergo equivalent with random human sacrifice) or a defensive one (moral).
“Lunar view”?
If it is a narration of evil, and in the context of being contained in a supposed divinely inspired/dictated “holy scripture”, there should be some communication of judgement against it. Of course, if it weren’t divinely inspired/dictated, we would expect errors to be included intentionally or unintentionally by its human authors and editors–which is of course, the obvious case.
Not what I want, which would be impossible anyway. I just want instances like this to be revealed as the evil darkness they are, in order for people to be able to properly judge their investment of (blind) faith in it.
To whom do you reckon Christ Jesus himself was sacrificed?
These are not random and inconsequent “blemishes of evilness” on the surface of a perfect moral tale, but central features of a profound, comprehensive worldview which we moderns do not readily understand.
Thus, in the one case it’s a satanic ritual murder - the pinnacle of evil, and in the other, the same kind of ritualized murder is a sacrifice to God “for the people”, and is not just good, but patently evangelical. The authors of this made-up distinction are taking us for very naive people indeed.
There’s nothing inherently evil in it at all.
If there was, then there’s something inherently evil is in me putting my life on the line for the protection of my family.
Stumps,
Protection of my family??? From what? If your a man of great biblical faith than you should desire to have yourself or any of your loved ones sent to heaven. So if someone is willing to send you to the ultimate in paradise. Like Jesus being sent to his death(and resurrection to heaven) by his father, he and you should have been or be excited to go. So I don’t understand your desire to stop yourself, or your loved ones from going to heaven. Why would you want to protect them from their trip to paradise? I have learned that god has said we can’t send ourselves but if someone else wants to send us and we are strong in faith we should be happy they are sending us. This reminds me of one of my favorite country songs. “Everyone Wants to Go to Heaven Just Nobody Wants to Go Now”. Or something like that. Which I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to go. It would be like my neighbor asking to take your kids to the candy store/playland and you get to be with them again when you get there but you say no to protect them from what. Ye of little faith I think. Help me understand the concept of Jesus fearing the trip to everlasting paradise. Not only that but he asked his father not to let this pass himself. And Jesus being god he already knew of what the paradise was like he should have been happy to have someone put the stamp on his head and send him away to be at the right hand of his wonderfull great perfect daddy. yes?
Well first, I’ve always made a distinction in that regard. We don’t sacrifice or lay down our lives for our country, but we do risk our lives defending it. Big difference.
Even so, human sacrifice for the sole intent of pleasing God, or the gods, is abhorrent and evil beyond comprehension. And it’s impossible for anyone else, even Jesus, to feel remorse for another’s sins–only the sinner can feel the necessary remorse needed for repentance. Otherwise it’s just divine welfare for the less fortunate afterlife “victims” of the cosmic moral fiber lottery.
You misunderstand. In the Bible, we don’t go up to heaven, but rather heaven comes down to us on earth. The clearest vision of this is Revelation, when the new Jerusalem descends from heaven to earth. It is the same for Jesus. In the resurrection, he descends from heaven to earth.
But don’t feel bad. Most people understand it the way you do, for whatever reason.
Paineful Truth, have you read Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling? He discusses primarily Abraham, but Jephthah too, and he distinguishes these cases and explains this phenomona. Kierkegaard’s point (or rather Climacus’, since he writes under pseudonym) is that being faithful sometimes means transgressing the ethical, viz., the universal law. Singularity trumps universality (pace Kant, Hegel, etc, whom Kierkegaard was reacting to). Abraham understood this (Jephthah did not), and was willing to transgress the law and sacrifice his son in order to be faithful to God. We know that Abraham understood because he gave no reason (universal justification). Jephthah, on the other hand, gave a reason, namely saving his kingdom, for why he sacrificed his daughter.
Another interesting take I have heard is basically that “for those who live in a fallen world, the word of life can often sound like the word of death”. Hence Abraham, or better yet we readers, hear God’s word in this story (which is always the word of life) as the word of death. We take God’s command to sacrifice Isaac as the word of death because we bring our context to bear on God’s word, and our context is that of a fallen world. We see this at play elsewhere in scripture as well, such as when Joshua eradicates the Canaanites. God wants Israel to drive out the Canaanites, but, living in a fallen world, Joshua understands this command as kill them all.
This principle makes good hermeneutical sense. We understand things based upon our context, so if our context is a fallen world, we will construe things in fallen terms. Hence, in a fallen world the word of life sounds to us like the word of death.
Ok, first question: What is the Bible? If we consider the Bible to be an anthology of religious experience written in differing literary styles, describing the movement from idolatry to enlightened spirituality, then what human sacrifice is doing in the Bible is clear: It is a religious experience! The question should be: What is the conclusion that is drawn from that sacrifice and you have stated it at the beginning: “human sacrifice is held nearly universally to be to be evil.”
So if God told you to sacrifice your child (or any child)…(or anybody), you’d do it. What you just wrote would (supposedly) justify doing so.
I’m really having a hard time believing what I’m reading. If the purpose was to teach a lesson or send a message, Genesis should have gone something like this:
“Abraham, what is the HELL are you doing? I gave you free will for a reason. For what possible reason would I want ANYONE to sacrifice their child? Think man, only an evil God would have had you do such an evil thing and you should have spit in my eye before even touching that knife.”
And if Jephtheh still happened, God should have struck him dead before he could lay a hand on his innocent daughter and offered him up as an eternal burnt offering to the god of such evil, Satan.
If the purpose of those passages was to put forth such a message, apparently they didn’t even convince God because He ends up sacrificing his own “son” for those who don’t even have to be remorseful their sins, since they are forgiven as long as they believe that Jesus is the savior. And then He twists the knife in our disbelief when He initiates the rite of eating Jesus’ symbolic flesh and drinking his blood.
If at one time, human sacrifice wasn’t evil, and if God imparted revelations to men, the very first revelation should have been “Thou shall not commit human sacrifices for any reason under Heaven or Earth”. He should have nailed it to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil at the very beginning–as if it was ever even necessary that it needed to be said.
The God you’re trying to justify, and rationalize and rewrite history for just doesn’t exist, and never did, except in the minds of those men who needed a fearful tool for control.
But you’re saying if you’d been Abraham, you’d have done it? And what if God had told you to do it today?
That isn’t the question. The courage of the daughter in facing her death where she had no choice is commendable. This is no different that Muslim honor killings of their children, it’s murder to “honor” God. It is an evil for which there is no excuse or forgiveness, a most certain cause for being relegated to the lowest levels of eternal damnation (along with pedophiles and those who preach or practice genocide) if such were to exist.
If a Christian from today was Abraham, would he still attempt to kill Isaac? Would he still kill Jephthah’s daughter? If he were Pilate, would he still have Jesus executed (sacrificed) for the remission of sins, or would he pardon him? If God told a Christian today to kill their own child, should they? Your statement dodges the question and implies that they should. How can Christianity then be called a religion of love? If God exists, I’m sure He is distraught and disgusted by any such beliefs, much less actions, by those who do these things to worship Him.
It is the inevitable result of blind faith no matter what religion its cause.
It’s what the Bible is about, though. To approach a work on one’s own terms, rather that its own, is not a recipe for understanding it. The work’s premises are that there is an existence beyond this one; and that it is a permanent one. Moreover, the condition experienced in the permanent one is contingent upon decisions taken in this one, and may be welcome, or the reverse. It therefore makes sense to stimulate the realisation of this situation, and if people have suffered and indeed died to that end, it should cause no surprise.
Hi TPT,
I must be honest with you: You can’t help making the assumptions you make, because you are depending a great deal upon the religion you witness around you. However, if we could move a little out of the confines of empirical experience and move towards a more metaphysical level, you could see at a distance what the Bible is.
The problem for me is that although I tell you what the Bible is, you still carry on and ask me the following question, seemingly driven by your need to prove a point:
I have already told you that the Bible is an anthology of religious experience written in differing literary styles, so the chances of me dashing off to do the same are quite remote. Rather, I read the story contemplatively and ask myself what the message is. I read a magister of theology, Helmuth Frey, some years ago (the Book was published 1950), who spoke about the whole legend of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as written in the style of an interactive spiritual adventure. The story wants you to experience in your mind and emotions that which Abraham experiences, because Abraham is an archetype that the faithful are following.
The story of Abraham has, in the story of Hagar and Ishmael, already made it clear, that the faithful are also accountable, and must learn to give what they have taken for themselves. Abraham still has the attitude that what he has taken is his own, but “the Lord giveth and taketh away” – as a matter of fact and not something we can discuss. He has a lesson to learn – for us – on the way from idolatry to enlightened spirituality. We all have to go down this path, Jesus makes that very clear, and it is a path which is definitely not popular, which is why the gate to life is narrow, just as the path is too.
Therefore, Abraham is called to struggle with the claim of God on his son and overcome his own. The story is a dramaturgical masterpiece that awakens all of the emotions you spoke of and asks, “Where are you on the journey?” You obviously are not able to accept what Abraham accepted, but this story doesn’t immediately demand such a sacrifice, but rather the understanding that, “the Lord giveth and taketh away.”
Do you see how primitive your story is in comparison? How unable you are to help people learn the lesson for themselves? You have to go outright and tell them what they are doing wrong and that is well proven to be less effective. The legends of the OT are masterpieces, our weak criticism misses the point completely.
And what if the story of Jephtheh is a dramatisation of a story, rewritten to make the point that you are making?
Again, just like your religious contemporaries, you take the words literally but not seriously, because the point again is to use the tragedy of the crucifixion to press a point home that Jesus was expressing in a different way himself. His path led to the cross, and he was wiling to accept that as the final stage of a devotion that showed the reliability of his message to his followers. The point is that Jesus shows us what faith is and how such faith, even in defeat, is creative, promotes life and changes the world.
Was there a tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? Who is doing the human sacrifice really? Here we have a literary rendering of a religious experience, written “that you might have faith” as John ends the 20th chapter of his Gospel, and you are taking it literally and missing the point – just like the people you criticise. What do we make of that?
My only terms are an insistence on rationality and a rational means by which I can lead my life. If you don’t insist on rationality, how can you expect to be able to reason with yourself, much less anyone else.
Again, what would you do if God told you to sacrifice your child to Him?
So being forthright is primitive? But it doesn’t appear that using subtlety caused the lesson take, at least judging by Jephthah, and the parallels between Jephthah’s daughter and Jesus are striking. By that standard, there is no room left to look at the Ten Commandments (most of which I agree with btw) as anything but primitive. I suspect it would be a foolish consistency to insist that the 6th Commandment should have said, “Thou shalt not commit murder except when performing a human sacrifice”?
What I’ve learned here is that believers won’t answer the question of what they would do, because it is indeed a trap no matter which way you answer. If you say you would, you would come face to face with that you would do what could only be described as an evil task. You’d see yourself in the company of insane mothers who have murdered their own children because God told them too. Insanity indeed. And if you would not, you’d deny God’s authority over you, in your opinion anyway. The third option is the most problematic, and that’s to claim that God wouldn’t ask you to do that. But to take that irrational position would mean to deny that God would do to someone else what He would not do to you, leaving only one rational out, that God does not interfere. The only right answer, the only rational answer, and the only possible answer.
The Bible is full of contradictions and irrationalities, the biggest of which is to demand the belief that it is the Word of God, without God telling you it is, and you must accept that “fact” on completely blind faith.
I did say, “in comparison”, but yes, you are as primitive in this respect as it goes. We are talking about Art and masters of that Art writing to captivate an audience and stir some change in them.
As though you wanted to prove my point you take another character that has been used for the same purpose of stirring a reaction in readers. You can’t solve this that way.
Yes, victims do generally have similarities. You are missing the fact that by the paradox of the NT, Jesus’ crucifixion is an execution by men which is transformed by God into an act of redemption. The theologians of Christianity should fall silent in wonder, but they have their bills to pay, so they spout off some clever explanation. There is no explanation, there is just forgiveness and a new beginning, or we remain in the darkness of the obfuscatory accuser. The enlightened, asked to explain enlightenment, smile.
The commandment is OK as it is. Again I’ll ask WHO is sacrificing? But thank you for being so thoughtful about “our” ten commandments.
Nowhere in the Bible is human sacrifice seen as anything but horrific, unless you take legends and allegories to be commands to do the same. Nobody is required to make such a sacrifice, in fact, God is portrayed as the ONLY one who has lost anyone to such sacrifices, but it isn’t just one, but millions. The message is that God gives and takes without us understanding why. There probably isn’t even an answer to why, because the question is wrong. Maybe the question should be put as to why mankind continues to sacrifice human beings to their idols, and there you would receive an answer much like the Bible already provides.
The problem is when people want excuses for what they do, like when the inquisition needed a justification for their abominable acts of violence. They take scripture out of context, just like psychopaths do, only the psychopaths actually hear voices in their brain.
You’re quite a fundamentalist aren’t you! There is only one right answer? You don’t even know what the question is! You are so befuddled by your fundamentalism that you don’t even realise what you’re saying.
Come to your senses; take a step back, like I advised you at the beginning, and get things into perspective. Perhaps you’ll then see what I am showing you.