Many pre-Christian religions conducted blood sacrifices in one form or another. Christianity changed that by making Jesus the ultimate sacrifice that made further sacrifices unnecessary. Personally, I find the notion that you can atone for your sins by shedding innocent blood to be preposterous, but people in Biblical times were comfortable with the concept, probably because it had been around for so long.
The word "sacrifice" implies that you are giving up something of value. In the days when wealth mostly consisted of livestock, it was a way of giving something back to the god who had provided it to you in the first place. Some cultures sacrificed prisoners of war, and some even sacrificed their own children, both of which had intrinsic value at a time when the Earth was more sparsely populated than it is today. At some point, however, people began to believe that blood itself had magical properties. Blood represents life itself. All animals have it and, when they lose it, they cease to be alive.
The fact that the blood sacrifice was practiced in so many cultures for such a long time suggests that it appeals to some facet of human nature, a facet that has been pretty much bred out of us by now. Because so few people practice it today, we may deduce that it is a recessive trait. You can minimize a recessive trait in a population, but you can never completely get rid of it. You might think it's gone, but it comes back like a bad penny every so often. The mass murderers of today may represent such a throwback, although I'm pretty sure that they don't consciously know that. They feel compelled to do what they do by some force that they don't understand. People originally sacrificed animals because they believed it would appease their gods, but they really were doing it to make themselves feel good. I mean, "What does God want with a dead sheep?" Those gods are now long forgotten. but the good feeling that people got from appeasing them lingers on in our genetic heritage.
Well, it's just a theory. What do you guys think?
No comments:
Post a Comment