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Grand Fromage posted:Was the meat eaten afterwards? Generally, yeah. In all situations I'm aware of it was a free feast for all attending, not just the priests. Not super confident on this but my vague impression is the food used for ancestral rites, at least in Joseon, was in fact left there traditionally.
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May 9, 2024 04:50
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bob dobbs is dead posted:its projecting the current state of western christianity backwards. yeah, televangelists are absolutely cynical scammers, but that wasn't true even a millennium ago, let alone 3. hell, it was materially less true 2 centuries ago Reading about Anglo-Saxon Christianity and how they attempted (and frequently succeeded) to collect massive tracts of lands and enrich themselves is fairly well documented. I doubt humans have ever changed much in how they attempt to enrich themselves. That’s only 1300 years ago.
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May 9, 2024 04:53
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Crab Dad posted:Reading about Anglo-Saxon Christianity and how they attempted (and frequently succeeded) to collect massive tracts of lands and enrich themselves is fairly well documented. I doubt humans have ever changed much in how they attempt to enrich themselves. That’s only 1300 years ago. I think that construing capital punishment as some kind of oblique human ritual sacrifice requires a lot more contortion than "many people believe it to be morally important to execute criminals." I fundamentally disagree, but the question is: What would the capitally-punished individuals be sacrificed to? Most of these human sacrifice rituals make it incredibly clear what the intended purpose of the offering is. I do think you could make a case, given that capital punishment (at least in the West) is extremely slow, extremely complex, and extremely expensive as well as having no discernible deterrent effect, that it's a big sort of potlach or (ironically) virtue signal: "we're willing to pay this price to prove we do, in fact, hate criminals (as we have constituted them) so much we will kill a few of them at profound expense, rather than shoving them into the forced-labor machine to produce more friedman units. This is important to us as an expression of our cultural views." Otherwise, I imagine most capital punishment was in large part because if the guy's dead, he sure isn't going to steal anything any more. Of course, this has its own problems. I don't remember which one but I think at least one Chinese dynasty began when an official leading prisoners was delayed by a flood, and, realizing that the penalty for being late to an official event was in fact the death penalty, looked at his prisoners and said, "Nothing to lose, let's be bandits." Some time later: New dynasty.
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May 9, 2024 05:13
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liu bang, the han, convoluted with chen shang's story chen shang was the one who said "ah gently caress it lateness is death, rebellion is death, lets rebel against the qin" and started a rebellion with wu guang. liu bang was a completely separate rebel against the qin who decided to rebel because some prisoners escaped and letting prisoners escape was death. only liu bang actually won, lol bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 05:20 on May 9, 2024 |
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May 9, 2024 05:16
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I think there is a nugget of truth in the comparison of Shang or Aztec-style mass sacrifice and violent public executions or auto da fe. They're both public violence enacted for spiritual reasons, to strengthen in-group and out-group boundaries, and to reaffirm the rightful hierarchy of society. That isn't to say they're exactly the same, but I definitely think there is less ground between the Spanish Inquisition and the Flower Wars than the conquistadors would have us believe.
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May 9, 2024 05:21
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Koramei posted:Not super confident on this but my vague impression is the food used for ancestral rites, at least in Joseon, was in fact left there traditionally. zhu xi (juhwe in korean) had an excruciatingly detailed manual saying you eat it. from the 1991 ebrey translation: zhu xi, rituals posted:Eat the leftovers. this is like half a page from a 25-page instruction manual, basically, on how to do sacrifices to the ancestors. whole rest of the book is a boring-rear end instruction manual on how to do whatever rites. normative practice of confucian rites is not really unknown, it's documented excruciatingly you do have a waiting period where the ancestors have at it bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 05:40 on May 9, 2024 |
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May 9, 2024 05:28
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Huh, so I'm probably just wrong but I heard there used to be a problem with pests eating the ancestral food, so people started just eating it. Maybe it was just that people left it out for less time than they used to before eating it rather than there not being any eating at all.FishFood posted:I think there is a nugget of truth in the comparison of Shang or Aztec-style mass sacrifice and violent public executions or auto da fe. They're both public violence enacted for spiritual reasons, to strengthen in-group and out-group boundaries, and to reaffirm the rightful hierarchy of society. I think it's an interesting mental exercise that encourages us to reevaluate our priors about both subjects. I don't think it holds up all the way to the end of the line of argument though, yeah.
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May 9, 2024 06:01
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Gaius Marius posted:If God wanted us to swim he'd have given us fins. That's why He put so many lakes in Finland.
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May 9, 2024 09:24
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Why don’t we consider crucifixion to be a form of human sacrifice. Because the victim is not ostensibly given to a god ?
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May 9, 2024 12:37
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euphronius posted:Why don’t we consider crucifixion to be a form of human sacrifice.
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May 9, 2024 12:44
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Yea but that seems like an arbitrary distinction to justify or criticize state execution . Also gods may have been invoked by the magistrate during the crucifixion process anyway
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May 9, 2024 12:48
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euphronius posted:Why don’t we consider crucifixion to be a form of human sacrifice. People are raised to think of justice and the state/body politic as“abstractions” or “values” rather than gods. Pay no attention to that woman behind the blindfold
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May 9, 2024 12:50
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euphronius posted:Yea but that seems like an arbitrary distinction to justify or criticize state execution . This seems to be mostly starting from the premise of "state executions are a form of human sacrifice" and working back from there to justify that view. This may have rhetorical or persuasive value, but I do not think that it is literally true. We have a pretty good idea why, for instance, the Aztecs were doing human sacrifice. You can understand it as a system of power relations that reinforced the prestige and supremacy of the central Aztec group, and I imagine that some Aztec leadership was aware of that, if perhaps not in so many words: but the immediate reason was due to their suite of religious beliefs.
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May 9, 2024 13:03
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Nessus posted:I am definitely not in favor of state execution of anyone ever, lol, just to be clear. “Religious beliefs” being something clearly distinct from the state is not a given. It is a very characteristic modern-liberal-democracy way of looking at the situation to say “religion is over here, and the power relations of the political elite are over there.”
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May 9, 2024 13:08
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euphronius posted:Why don’t we consider crucifixion to be a form of human sacrifice. Yes. Taking the biblical story at face value, Jesus was executed for crimes (fomenting rebellion or whatever), with a pair of thieves being executed by the same means alongside him at the same time. Romans were big believers in capital punishment and carried it out in a variety of horrifying forms, with part of the intent being to shock and frighten people and keep them from commiting crimes. They also, under much rarer circumstances, practiced human sacrifice, notably when Hannibal was at his most threatening, as described above. They explictly viewed this as a different act than execution for crimes.
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May 9, 2024 13:12
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Kylaer posted:. They explictly viewed this as a different act than execution for crimes. That is my point. I know some Romans did but is that meaningful and is it enough evidence to support the broader conclusion “Romans were against human sacrifice” To make my position clear: I don’t think Roman’s general stance on human sacrifice is knowable . To the extent it is, it seems contradictory. In addition criticism of say Carthage for engaging in the act do not seem credible due to their political motivation. The claims about Carthage seem to come from a very very small and specific group of people anyway (Senator class) euphronius fucked around with this message at 13:17 on May 9, 2024 |
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May 9, 2024 13:15
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skasion posted:“Religious beliefs” being something clearly distinct from the state is not a given. It is a very characteristic modern-liberal-democracy way of looking at the situation to say “religion is over here, and the power relations of the political elite are over there.”
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May 9, 2024 13:17
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Nessus posted:I am definitely not in favor of state execution of anyone ever, lol, just to be clear. It is a view I like to make in my class when we talk about it in a big debate about human sacrifice every year. and then all the kids get mad at me
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May 9, 2024 13:18
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Even today we see people in the political class make baseless and hypocritical distinctions and criticisms of other countries actions. Looks at American ruling class criticisms of China for example. I don’t think it would be proper to base your understanding of Americans or China based on what American politicians say about China but we seem to (not all the time) base a lot or out understanding of Rome and Carthage (for example ) based on what roman politicians say
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May 9, 2024 13:20
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GoutPatrol posted:It is a view I like to make in my class when we talk about it in a big debate about human sacrifice every year. euphronius posted:Even today we see people in the political class make baseless and hypocritical distinctions and criticisms of other countries actions. Looks at American ruling class criticisms of China for example. I don’t think it would be proper to base your understanding of Americans or China based on what American politicians say about China but we seem to (not all the time) base a lot or out understanding of Rome and Carthage (for example ) based on what roman politicians say
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May 9, 2024 13:27
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I don’t think there is any strong physical evidence of Carthage human sacrifice. They found the bodies of children but I don’t know what that shows. I have not looked into it for awhile maybe there is new finds
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May 9, 2024 13:31
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euphronius posted:I don’t think there is any strong physical evidence of Carthage human sacrifice. You might want to track down the journals referenced in this 2014 article https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/21/carthaginians-sacrificed-own-children-study
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May 9, 2024 13:37
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I’m not clicking on a British tabloid link but if it is what I suspect, that is a erroneously confident conclusion from definitively ambiguous evidence
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May 9, 2024 13:43
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euphronius posted:
There is substantial evidence of the Romans' general stance, and it is "In case of dire emergency, break glass and start sacrificing people." This is not contradictory to their belief that the Carthaginians' alleged widespread human sacrifices were unacceptable. It is very similar to holding the viewpoint "The executions that followed the Nuremberg trials were morally acceptable, but widespread use of capital punishment as the Romans practiced it is horrifying."
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May 9, 2024 13:46
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Nuremberg is an excellent example. If your conclusion from Nuremberg is that the west has a taboo against war crimes and genocide, you would be 100% wrong.
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May 9, 2024 13:50
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euphronius posted:Nuremberg is an excellent example. If your conclusion from Nuremberg is that the west has a taboo against war crimes and genocide, you would be 100% wrong. 
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May 9, 2024 13:52
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euphronius posted:I’m not clicking on a British tabloid link but if it is what I suspect, that is a erroneously confident conclusion from definitively ambiguous evidence I appreciate your commitment towards not learning anything. https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...391B766C95ECBE1
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May 9, 2024 13:54
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ulmont posted:I appreciate your commitment towards not learning anything. https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...391B766C95ECBE1 I don’t agree with the conclusions .
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May 9, 2024 13:55
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Nessus posted:Surely 100% is underselling it. Go for at least 300% or you’re just excusing them. Please this is a serious topic .
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May 9, 2024 13:56
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euphronius posted:Nuremberg is an excellent example. If your conclusion from Nuremberg is that the west has a taboo against war crimes and genocide, you would be 100% wrong. Are you even reading what people are replying to you or are you just trolling?
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May 9, 2024 14:02
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euphronius, child sacrifice was obviously a part of Phoenician culture, there’s loads of sources from antiquity that say so and also there’s cemeteries full of dead baby urns with “sacrificed to the gods” stamped on em. CmonNessus posted:Sure, it all blurs together. We can even see this right now in the modern day. But to me it just comes back to: the simpler way of looking at it, is to assume that they mean what they say. As the other guy just said, the Romans considered these separate categories of action. Were the Romans wrong, or lying to themselves, or what? They do mean what they say, but we have to examine what they meant. I don’t doubt that the record of Roman feelings about human sacrifice involves some element of self-deception or plain error, these are human beings we’re talking about here, but the reason why I try to look at the primary sources here is to see, so far as I can, what exactly the Roman moralists are trying to convey about human sacrifice. And what I see is that it’s an effort, by no means wholeheartedly convincing even to the Romans in question, to distinguish our ways from their ways. They are constructing a worldview in which other nations can be reviled for unreasonable barbaric practices which we, lawful, civilized and rational in our relationship with the gods, would never do…would we? Of course it doesn’t occur to elite authors of the high empire to take this further and pick at the foundations of the games, or of justice. Later Romans who had a different relationship to the culture of the empire transformed this question to construct a new worldview. Paul writes of Christ as “our Passover lamb, sacrificed for us”. In Latin “immolatus”, literally “sprinkled with meal” the way an animal is before it is sacrificed in traditional religion. People who had not previously accepted the rationale of Roman justice came to see the hand of God moving the state to kill once again. Does that mean we can start sacrificing humans? No, definitely not! In fact, we ought to take it a step further and ban gladiatorial shows and sacrificial temples altogether, since they promulgate wickedness and threaten public order. And if anyone doesn’t like it, let him be stricken with the avenging sword.
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May 9, 2024 14:10
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euphronius posted:Nuremberg is an excellent example. If your conclusion from Nuremberg is that the west has a taboo against war crimes and genocide, you would be 100% wrong. What does this mean? "The West" at present definitely has a strong taboo against war crimes and genocide. We don't always agree on what constitutes war crimes and genocide and we have clearly broken that taboo on many occasions but that does not mean the taboo does not exist.
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May 9, 2024 14:16
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Any expansion on the idea that Romans considered human sacrifice to be a thing they did to appease cthonic gods, not heavenly ones? Because that does seem like an interesting nuance given Greco-Roman religion iirc tended more towards treating Hades and co. as facts of life but not beings to be invoked casually, to the point where they would very rarely call them directly by name because a living mortal rarely has any good reason to invoke the attention of the god of the dead. Kinda funny given I absolutely get the comparisons given how many examples past and present we have of states executing people for effectively symbolic and superstitious reasons, but I think there definitely is a difference from flat out religious human sacrifice as practiced- as with the Shang dynasty example above, the difference is that a human sacrifice assigns value to the life of the victim, typically, and involves an elaborate process of selecting and obtaining the captive, even in cases like the Aztecs where they're captives of war, wars waged specifically to obtain them no less. I don't know if you see many 'any body will do' human sacrifices where a criminal already condemned by the state authority is used for a sacrifice, though I'm sure it's happened. (the Discworld joke of how failing to volunteer for sacrifice is a capital offense comes to mind) And I can also see how, like in that example, it becomes very unsustainable to do regularly, because people might accept it as a response to dire times- hell, you might even get volunteers- but if it's every year then it makes more and more enemies every time, and they'll look for any excuse to get rid of the people who insist on doing it. Christianity is a fun one given the crucifixion is seen as an importantly unique example of the Son of God effectively offering himself as a sacrifice in the name of men, flipping the script in a game-changing act, and creating new symbolic rituals to practice that evoke sacrifice. Effectively co-opting a state execution in one of those fun metaphor-mixing ways. Ghost Leviathan fucked around with this message at 14:31 on May 9, 2024 |
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May 9, 2024 14:28
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euphronius posted:Nuremberg is an excellent example. If your conclusion from Nuremberg is that the west has a taboo against war crimes and genocide, you would be 100% wrong. are you gonna go off about i/p or sudan or xinjiang or something now
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May 9, 2024 14:29
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bob dobbs is dead posted:are you gonna go off about i/p or sudan or xinjiang or something now Hey now, there's The Jakarta Method.
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May 9, 2024 14:32
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Hey now, there's The Jakarta Method. everyone should read The Jakarta Method
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May 9, 2024 14:36
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Hey now, there's The Jakarta Method. ooh, could be going off about the cia, yeah
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May 9, 2024 14:42
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Sorry, I'm still hung up on the Forum Boarium, this is why you have to say things outloud before you name them
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May 9, 2024 15:23
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zoux posted:Sorry, I'm still hung up on the Forum Boarium, this is why you have to say things outloud before you name them It’ll always be “forium borium” to me
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May 9, 2024 15:28
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Didn't the Romans - presumably Jules C - write down that the Gauls or the Celts or the Druids or whoever it was they wanted to feel better than sacrifice criminals to their gods? I feel weird about that, like, wouldn't you want to give the Gods something you see as valuable?
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May 9, 2024 15:59
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