When was the most recent government-sponsored human sacrifice carried out? The criteria: (1) must be by a state-level society - not a chiefdomship or tribe; (2) must be officially condoned; and (3) must be for religious purposes.
Most recent I have heard of was the sacrifice of two Cambodian POWs in 1870 to Me Sa (basically, Durga) in 1877. No doubt there are more recent ones … any candidates? I have no idea when, for example, the “annual customs of Dahomey” ended.
Thread inspired by a cite found in David Chandler’s History of Cambodia, where he cites an earlier paper “Royally Sponsored Human Sacrifices in Ninteenth Century Cambodia: the Cult of Me Sa”, in Facing the Cambodian Past
Nope - that’s not a religious human sacrifice. I’m thinking more along the lines of what the Aztecs did: a human sacrifice intended to obtain some sort of divine favour (or at least, avert disfavour or disaster).
The Holocaust was driven by economics and political propoganda, not religion.
This example probably doesn’t match either (failing the “government-sponsored” part of the OP) but the most recent example of religious human sacrifice I could find took place after the 1960 Chilean earthquake, when two men sacrificed a young boy as a direct attempt to appease the gods. Outrageously, both men received only a 2-year prison sentence, since the judge ruled they were “driven by an irresistible natural force of ancestral tradition.” Yeah, whatever. :mad:
:dubious: Killing someone because of their race is not much different than what the Aztecs did to prisoners from other tribes in Mesoamerica. While there probably was much more ceremony to how the Aztecs did it, I don’t think the true motivation was that much different.
Just for the sake of this thread, I’m looking for human sacrifices for ostensibly religious purposes, not for state killings of all types.
The reason: basically, human sacrifice is something that appears, to me at least, to be archaic and exotic - the thought of it happening in recent history, the stuff of Indiana Jones - type adventures (in fact, the Cambodian example above has a real “Temple of Doom” flavour too it: Me Sa = Durga = Kali).
In contrast, state sponsored killings for other reasons are depressingly familiar in the modern world.
Omar Little, let’s let the OP ask the question he wants to ask rather than redefing the question in your own terms. The question seems to be rather clear to me, and the Holocaust doesn’t fit.
Well, could you count examples of judicial execution in explicitly theocratic states, e.g. Iran? If the state claims a religious mandate for its laws, are those laws therefore executed “for religious purposes”? We kill sodomites 'cause God says we should.
Because, if you count that, then state-sponsored human sacrifices are happening today, no?
And, if you don’t count that, then what exactly do you mean by “for religious purposes”? If an execution carried out in reponse to (perceived) divine command is not done for religious purposes, what execution would be?
Not to speak for the OP, but in many cases of human sacrifice the victims had committed no crime, even by the laws of the state. I would think that those would be a prime example of executions for purely religious reasons.
Well, the victims of Aztec human sacrifices had been defeated in battle. (In battles arranged largely so that there would be a supply of victims for sacrifice, as I understand it.) But if you kill a defeated combatant in battle because you think god wants you to, on the one hand, and kill a man who has had gay sex or a man who has killed another because you think god wants you to on the other hand, I don’t see that one of these acts is religiously motivated and the other is not. In both cases you are killing somebody because you think god wants you to to kill such a person.
Wikipedia suggests that the distinction is not so much motivation as context; “human sacrifice” involves a religious ritual. If that’s the case, then state-sponsored human sacrifice must disappear as states and churches separate, and the rituals of the state cease to be classed as religious.
Is there really a diff between:
(a) We’re going to kill this person to appease the sun god, to be sure the sun comes up tomorrow; and
(b) We’re going to kill this person because the sun god hates homosexuals ?
There may be no difference at all - “we’re going to kill this person because the sun god hates homosexuals, and our killing him will please the sun god, who will reward us by continuing to come up on a regular basis”. (Or “. . . who will reward us in some more nebulous way, but basically by doing his will we earn his goodwill, and that’s gotta come in handy, right?”)
I accept that religiously-driven judical execution may be a special case of human sacrifice. But I don’t see that it’s something radically different from human sacrifice.
Maybe, though, we need to focus on the concept of “sacrifice”. What you sacrifice has to be something of value to you; if it’s worthless there is no sacrifice involved. So if you kill your children, whom you love, or your slaves, who are valuable property, that’s a sacrifice. But if you kill a criminal, because frankly you want him out of the way, or you hope to discourage others from becoming as worthless as he is, maybe that’s not a sacrifice.
On the other hand, if your view of capital punishment is that it’s a solemn and terrible thing, and it marks our disgust and disapprobation of the crime in strong terms precisely because every human being has intrinsic and irreplaceable value - yep, that’s a sacrifice. Add in a religous motivation, plus the hope that we will benefit by making our society a safer/better/more godly place/doing the will of god/whatever, then I don’t think you’re a million miles away from religiously-inspired human sacrifice.
In b), being a homosexual is presumably illegal. The law exists for religious purposes, but the execution is for breaking the law, not in itself part of a religious ceremony.
I think there is a rather fundamental difference. As has been said, the latter is not really a “sacrifice,” since the person killed is not seen to be of value.
But there are lots of historic examples, acknowledged today as human sacrifices, where the victims were selected on the basis that they had broken the law, and were convicts. I don’t see why there can’t be an overlap here.
We generally don’t regard capital punishment as carried out in the US as a human sacrifice mainly because the execution itself is not a religious ritual (the presence of a chaplain notwithstanding). And, secondarily, because the state doesn’t claim any religious mandate for its imposition of the sentence of death.
But in societies which don’t have a church/state separation, neither of these factors would apply, and the ritual execution of convicts in fulfilment of a divinely-mandated law, with the expectation of pleasing the divinity, is fairly clearly a human sacrifice.
And, presumably, Iran might be such a society even today. I don’t think we can say that they have a let-out because executions themselves are secular affairs; in the philosophy which underpins the Iranian republic there is no religious/secular distinction.
The whole idea behind state-sponsored human sacrifice is that the state sponsoring the sacrifice is to get something from the ritual, from its deity. The persons chosen for sacrifice may be criminals or POWs, or they may be valued slaves, or they may be the sacrificer’s own children and held in great honour - for example, the Inca.
Now, it may well be the case that this is only the ostensible reason and that the sacrifice serves a bunch of other purposes - for example, the Aztecs sacrificed literally thousands of POWs, and it is not hard to imagine that terrorizing their enemies was part of their plan, conciously or not; similarly, it may prove a handy way to get rid of criminals.
However, what specifically seperates out state-sponsored human sacrifice from “ethnic cleanisng”, “genocide”, “terrorism” or “criminal deterrence” is that the persons doing the sacrificing, at least ostensibly, intended to obtain an advantage for the state (or for the whole world) through the specific ritual of killing a person. The person so killed may be favoured or disfavored, it does not matter for the definition.
A theocratic state executing someone for a religious crime such as blasphemy doesn’t count, unless the religion proclaims that the killers will get merit specifically from the act of killing; perhaps in a general sense the state will be favoured by god for executing blasphemers, but it isn’t the ritual of killing that confers the favour - it is upholding the “godly” law generally. Presumably, they could get just as much favour by (say) imprisoning blasphemers.