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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   21998 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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Maybe I should try reading the Bible at some point. Is it good literature? :P

There's some novelty in that particular human sacrifice: instead of the victim being labeled evil, he gets labeled god. Which kinda puts a finishing touch to the whole tradition instead of having to find a new scapegoat at each turning. In theory, at least.

Edit: typo

There are (roughly) two kinds of religiously motivated murders.

One is the sacrifice, where you want to send your god a juicy piece of meat or some virgin pussy or kid as a bribe or tribute. Generally, the sacrifice is a mean to an end, the process is really a transaction between the one sponsoring the sacrifice and god. Sure, you might get extra virtue points for sacrificing your favorite daughter, but if she happens to have her period on the set date you can just sacrifice another daughter. Generally, you want your sacrifices to be pure and hale. Sacrificing a lame goat or a disobeyant child might be seen as an insult, after all.

The other type of murder is a punishment for a religious transgression, real or imagined, such as witchcraft, blasphemy, heresy. This is primarily a matter between the accused and the community, just like a secular crime.

This is well illustrated by the concept of the scapegoat. You start out with two goats. One stays pure and is sacrificed to god, the other gets the sins transferred to it and is then abandoned in the desert, for god to punish it as he wants. Full of sins, it would not make a good sacrifice for god, after all.

While punishments are widespread, pure sacrifices of humans are very much optional for religions. In the religions of the book it only appears (to my knowledge) in YHWH's fucked up little mind games he plays with Abraham, with the sacrifice being stopped. The Romans -- themselves not shy about infanticide -- likewise stamped it out where they could.

Of course, there are also mixed forms. For example, the Christian tradition of burning someone at the stake for religious transgressions is very much reminiscent of burnt sacrifices by earlier religions. I think that sometimes, it is explicitly stated that the purpose of this form of death penalty is to purify the victim so that they can get into heaven despite their crime. This is more seen as a 'favor' to the victim than as a favor to god, but parsing it as "souls for the soul lord!" does not seem entirely wrong.

It depends on what parts of the Bible. Some, absolutely. My very-atheist hometown of Portland, OR (suburbs but still) had a "Bible as Literature" English elective class in high school! No, I didn't take it, sadly.

Not all chapters are equal, and it also depends on the translation. KJV has a pretty famous poetic style, though the NRSV keeps a good bit of the charm while updating the language somewhat. Read some famous passages in the ESV though and you might feel like a toddler, it's pretty bad. There's some of the Psalms, of course, parts of Isaiah with nice imagery, the start of Genesis is a bit of a classic. In the New Testament, it's a little more parceled out into particular chapters, though John and Luke are definitely more literary than the other Gospels.

Afaik aztek human sacrifice tradition also held many of the victims in high regard.

That's part of the buy-in for effect, isn't it? You don't get much favor from the gods for sacrificing a rat. The more you invest, the more ROI. I think that's how it goes.

Maybe I should try reading the Bible at some point. Is it good literature? :P

It's kind of cliched.

I've never heard of people claiming that the Bible is good literature make similar claims about the Koran or other scriptures. So I'm inclined to think that claims that the Bible is good literature are mostly halo effect (with some addition of 'everyone uses it so you need to read it to know the references').

Yeah basically God sacrificing his son patched out the sacrifice dependency.

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