Which sort of ignores that Chessman was signaling for several minutes… so cyanide causes sudden unconsciousness/death except when it doesn’t, at which point there is evidence it’s extremely painful.
While I in no way would ever want an Aztec style heart extraction, it would be considerably quicker and more merciful a death than some other Old World techniques, such as scaphism or impalement where death would take days or even weeks to occur with the victim in agony the whole time.
As horrifying as it is to contemplate, getting your heart ripped out is not the worst of all fates. Horrible, yes, but you are definitely dead very quickly, not in horrific pain for a week or two.
Of course there is a genetic component to such brutality - it is due to the genes that confer humanity. I doubt you can find a single racial group in the world that has not expressed levels of institutionalized violence and brutality towards other humans. You want to single out the mexicans for a bloody past and blame their race (a superficial collection of minor genetic characteristics) as opposed to their species. What about the asians - the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot were asians, and they killed millions of their own people in an orchestrated cleansing. Or africans, maybe, when you look at the killings and ritual maimings in Rwanda and the Congo. How about white europeans, do they have a genetic disposition to acts of brutal violence - if you look at european and white colonial history (it was Belgian colonialists that started the tradition of limb-chopping in Congo) you would have to say they did, with the mass extermination of religious, national and socioeconomic groups many times over the centuries.
However, with the deep capacity for violence there is also the capacity for compassion and understanding - the ability to learn from and pass on the lessons of the past, and the bravery and sacrifice to prevent the horrors of the past from returning to the present and the future. That is the flip side to humanity - just maybe with education and compassion we can weight the coin on that more hopeful side, and rise above our base instincts driven by fear and uncertainty.
There are several other theories on the underlying causes of why the practice developed to such extent.
Christianity obviously shares some aspects of this belief in the necessity of the sacrifice of a divine being, and the debt that humans owe for this, though the details are different.
Guinastasia, I fail to see how this is of any relevance in General Questions. If you are “just curious” about another poster’s posting habits you can ask them about it in a more appropriate forum.
Why a genetic component rather than cultural? And you have to show continuity between pre-colonial Mexico and modern Mexico - was it a particularly violent society in the intervening 500 years?
And even if the cause was genetic, why look to the Aztecs and Mayans for the source of the modern horrors, rather than the basically equal Spanish component in Mexican genetic makeup - the historic Spanish (both at home and in Mexico) were hardly models of a nonviolent society.
You keep ignoring the fact that many other cultures have institutionalized equally sadistic things (or even worse ones). As I’ve pointed out, at around the same time Europeans were burning thousands of people alive as a public spectacle, or executing them by disemboweling or dismemberment. The screams of the victims would have been equally heart-rending, but that didn’t stop Europeans from doing it. The Spanish Inquisition in particular was notorious for its brutality. Why blame present violent tendencies in Mexican society solely on their Aztec ancestry, while ignoring the fact that it may also have European roots?
Years back, I saw a Discovery or History show where they had a doc do just that. They had a realistic ballistic gel type torso complete with organs. He got two tries with an obsidian blade. By his second attempt, under the sternum, it was over in seconds. He said he’d only get better with practice, and it looked as if there was no reason he couldn’t immediately do a hundred more as it wasn’t particularly taxing. Placing the sacrificial person on a sort of rounded altar helped as it “opened up” the angel of attack under the sternum so the “priest” was working diagonally downward not horizontally.
So were the Spanish, long before they encountered the Aztec.
And you’ve failed to address the issue of continuity I raised. Genetic traits don’t just “go underground” for 500 years. So show us the history of flayings and decapitations in post-Conquest Mexico?
The problem is Ballistic gel is much softer than real human flesh and it dosen’t take into account things like ligaments, ribcage cartilage or the the ribcage itself. In real life it would take more like 45 seconds at least, maybe more. Those Discovery channel “reenactments” are more made for tv than made for realism.
Yeah, isn’t it meant to simulate meat at high speeds? It’s not meant to simulate friction, or electrical conductivity (I’m looking at you, Mythbusters), or cutting meat. Also, isn’t it translucent?