Of Human Sacrifices

Spanish Inquisitor wrote a post recently on which one of my comments ended up igniting a lengthy debate with CL. Our exchange at SI’s grew exasperating, as our exchanges frequently do, but that doesn’t detract from the value of having interacted with him. Since I had much more to say about the matter than it was appropriate to share in someone else’s comment thread, I decided to do my own post on the subject.

I’ll begin by posting the pertinent section of my comment here:

The same misdirection applies to Jesus’ sacrificial death. Sinners are so busy thanking God that he found a way to forgive their sins that they fail to realize that YHWH could only be appeased by a human sacrifice. You know, the same kind of sacrifice that Christians rail against in other, primitive, religions. Or, they refer to Jesus’ death as deicide, the killing of a god, rather than a homicide; this removes empathy for the murder of a fellow human (let’s face it, only the delusional can identify in any way with a deity.) The effect is still the same – Christians don’t grasp that YHWH’s demand for human sacrifice is no different than a similar demand from any of the other deities that they despise and reject.

It wasn’t long before CL questioned me:

I realize the comparison you’re attempting to draw – that God sending Jesus to die on the cross was “the same kind of sacrifice that Christians rail against in other, primitive, religions.” I disagree.

Where does YHWH issue a “demand for human sacrifice”? I think your comparison was more rhetorically successful than historically or scripturally accurate. There are virtually zero points of similarity between Jesus’ crucifixion and the primitive human sacrifices of the Aztecs, or Maya, or any of Israel’s neighbors in the Old Testament, for example. First of all, Roman crucifixion was punishment for crime against the empire, not religious ceremony. Second, Jesus’ crucifixion was a one-time event, not something employed ritualistically to gain favor with warring tribes or to bless crops and livestock. Further, nobody that was present for Jesus’ crucifixion was offering Jesus up to the supernatural realm, nor did anyone present imagine that Jesus’ death was an atonement for their sin. At Golgotha, the disciples still had no clue. Their conclusions and their final realizations of Christ’s nature as the Messiah purportedly came from the resurrection, after Pentecost, and not during or before the crucifixion.

Hence, we cannot accurately say that Christ’s crucifixion was “the same kind of sacrifice that Christians rail against in other, primitive, religions.”

Did God Demand Human Sacrifice?
The long and short of it is that CL and I went through several rounds of comments over at SI’s place. His initial question to me was, “Where does YHWH issue a demand for human sacrifice?” Since the first sentence of CL’s comment refers to “God sending Jesus to die on the cross” (an implicit acknowledgment of the traditional Christian view that God required Jesus’ sacrificial death to fulfill his redemptive purposes), I find his request for a citation confirming that God ever demanded human sacrifice ironic. Nevertheless, John Evo provided a link to a YouTube video that describes several biblical accounts depicting as YHWH either commanding or accepting human sacrifices.

Are All Human Sacrifices the Same?
Moving on, since CL repeated one particular objection several times, I will address that next. His objection:

we cannot accurately say that Christ’s crucifixion was “the same kind of sacrifice that Christians rail against in other, primitive, religions.”

I want to offer a two-part response to that objection here.

First, even though the form of Jesus’ sacrifice was not the same as other human sacrifices, it was the same in principle. According to CL, Jesus’ death was a “one-time event” and there were “virtually zero points of similarity between Jesus’ crucifixion and the primitive human sacrifices of the Aztecs, or Maya, or any of Israel’s neighbors in the Old Testament, for example.” The religious sacrificial systems that CL cited – Aztec, Mayan and Middle Eastern – relied on repeated, ritualistic slaughters of humans to curry favor with or appease their gods. Obviously, Jesus could only be killed once, so, yes, his sacrificial death was certainly a one-time event as opposed to a repetitive occurrence. Moreover, unlike the sacrifices offered in the religions CL cited, Jesus was not killed according to a prescribed ritual. These are the formal difference between his sacrificial death and other human sacrifices. The similarity that all of these sacrifices share is that humans were killed to curry favor with or appease deities. This shared characteristic warrants grouping all of these sacrifices under the heading of “human sacrifices” and viewing them all as similarly barbaric. The forms are different, but the principle applies in all of the cases noted.

Second, this is why I view the the sacrificial death of Jesus as even more heinous than the sacrifices offered to other deities:

The fact that people played unwitting roles in YHWH’s monstrous drama actually makes the Christian atonement more heinous than other religious rituals. At least the participants in other rituals knew what they were doing. In the Christian scheme of things, most of the people fulfilling YHWH’s plan didn’t have a clue what they were doing. YHWH is nothing more than a Grand Puppetmaster who uses people, including his own flesh and blood, as means to his own ends.

In response to this, CL asked, “So, is relative awareness of the penultimate finality the arbiter of heinousness?”

My answer is that awareness of the purposes and consequences of one’s actions is a significant consideration in evaluating the moral status of behavior. That is why, for example, many Western judicial systems have different standards of judgment and punishment for juveniles and adults, as well as for people with diminished mental capacities. In the case of Jesus’ death, as CL noted, the people who accused, tried, condemned and executed him did not see themselves as participating in a sacrificial ritual. The Romans were executing a man they regarded as a threat to political stability. The Jews were, via the Romans, ridding themselves of a prophet whom they believed was undermining their religious traditions. The fact that all of them were completely clueless about the role they allegedly were playing in God’s divine plan of redemption strikes me as a callous and cowardly use of people, by God, as means to his own ends, and it raises another substantive issue.

Is a Sacrifice Valid if it is Offered Unwittingly and Doesn’t Adhere to the Prescribed Ritual?
CL noted, in the comment cited above, that

a) “Roman crucifixion was punishment for crime against the empire, not religious ceremony”
b) “Jesus’ crucifixion was a one-time event, not something employed ritualistically to gain favor with warring tribes or to bless crops and livestock.”
c) “nobody that was present for Jesus’ crucifixion was offering Jesus up to the supernatural realm, nor did anyone present imagine that Jesus’ death was an atonement for their sin,” and
d) “Their conclusions and their final realizations of Christ’s nature as the Messiah purportedly came from the resurrection, after Pentecost, and not during or before the crucifixion.”

I agree with all of these points. Therefore, it’s difficult to see how Christians can sustain the claim that Jesus’ death can (let alone should) be interpreted as being connected in any way with the Jewish sacrificial system, and, more importantly, as being sufficient to serve as the ultimate, completely satisfactory sacrifice that perfectly fulfilled the Jewish sacrificial requirements and rendered the entire system obsolete in one master stroke. Yet, that’s what they claim: Jesus’ death was the sacrifice that effected atonement for all humankind, for all time. The Christian eisegesis (reading a meaning into a text, or, in this case, an event, rather than deriving or extracting the meaning from the text/event) regarding Jesus’ crucifixion was allegedly warranted, as CL noted, by Jesus’ resurrection appearances, his subsequent ascension (my addition to CL’s notation), and the disciples’ Pentecost experience – all events for which Christian scriptures provide the only evidence.  There are at least two difficulties with the apostles’ ex post facto interpretation of Jesus’ death.

1. One can fabricate connections between any number of arbitrary events after the fact. This is the same problem that arises with claims that numerous Biblical prophecies have been fulfilled. It’s easy to read prophecies that were made in the past and interpret or describe subsequent events as their realization. It may be the case the Jesus’ disciples wanted to find some way of making sense of his death, of making it count for something more than just another hideous execution. Their ex post facto explanation accomplished that.

(Before anyone jumps in with the objection that my scenario is merely unsubstantiated opinion, I will state that my scenario is a reasoned plausible hypothesis about how the earliest Christians started formulating the belief that Jesus’ death had been sacrificial (and, therefore, significant) rather than senseless. Far from being unsubstantiated, my scenario is inferred from what is commonly known about human psychology, specifically, our need to make sense of seemingly senseless events. My scenario is only one of an infinite number of plausible explanations that could be inferred on any number of psychological and sociological grounds.)

2. The fact that crucifixion was not the means of slaughter prescribed by God is a significant impediment to viewing a death by crucifixion as a sacrifice that would appease him. The Jewish God, like other deities, required that sacred rituals be performed in specific ways, which were carefully explicated in the Jewish scriptures. Crucifixion doesn’t bear any resemblance to any Jewish rituals.

Who Offered Jesus as a Human Sacrifice?
Of course, one may argue that Jesus’ death still counts as a sacrifice because it was God, not the Jews or Romans, who offered the sacrifice. The notion of “God sending Jesus to die on the cross” fits this view. From that perspective, the sacrifice is valid because God knew what was going on all the time, even if nobody else did. I have two objections to this argument.

1. If God wanted to offer Jesus as a sacrifice, he should have done the deed himself, rather than shifting the responsibility of carrying out the task to the Romans and Jews. Shifting the responsibility in this manner was cowardly, to say the least.

2. God veered so far away from his own prescribed methods of sacrifice that it’s easy to understand why many people had, and continue to have, difficulty viewing Jesus’ death as fulfilling his divine purposes. Even if God had the right to change things anytime he wanted to do so, people can hardly be blamed for not recognizing that he had done so in this case. One also has to wonder why a god who is purportedly perfect and unchanging would alter procedures so radically and without warning, especially on a matter as important as this one. Again, one can’t blame people for not understanding what God was supposedly doing.

In short, if God wanted or needed to perform a grand act of redemption, one would think that

a) he could (and should) have devised a means of doing so that would have been clearly apprehended as such from the start, and
b) he could (and should) have had the courage and integrity to do the deed himself.

Are those two things too much to ask of an omnimax deity?

In conclusion, I will note three things. First, I want to thank CL for engaging in the dialog at SI’s blog. His questions helped me think through my position more carefully than I might have done otherwise. Second, having given more thought to my position, I still stand by my comments at SI’s blog. Nothing in our exchange gave me any reason to abandon them. Third and finally, in addition to finding the notion of human sacrifice repulsive, I am more firmly convinced than ever that Jesus’ death was not divinely ordained and that it did not serve any redemptive purpose. Whatever else Jesus may have been, I don’t believe he was either God’s son or the world’s savior.

– the chaplain

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