Thomas_More
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I read that the Aztecs nearly captured Cortes at one point. I wish they had done so.
Among some Celtic peoples a king would be chosen to rule for a year and then be killed and eaten. (Should be implemented now😀). He would be eaten raw by the priestesses.
The Tigris and Euphrates area was always flooding and the farmers there are well used to this. They of course take their goats and other livestock with them on their boats, from which the Ark legend grew.
” Would you like to examine Matthew Henry’s specific commentary on Elijah and the prophets of Baal, or look into how he compares Baal worship to Molech?”
I believe it. It was reported by the Romans about Carthage, and the Carthaginians were Phoenicians, and Phoenicia was what is now Lebanon.
Bizarre though, don’t you think? Children are a society’s future.
” However, ritual animal sacrifice persisted in some regional Iranian traditions well into the Islamic era before largely fading out.”
Aren’t goats still sacrificed in Islam for Eid?
” However, ritual animal sacrifice persisted in some regional Iranian traditions well into the Islamic era before largely fading out.”
Yes. The conquest of India by the Aryan (Iranian) speaking peoples in about 1200 BCE subjected the vegetarian natives (the Dravidians) to the caste system as “Untouchables.” The Dravidian scriptures are the Upanishads and they are the reason for most of India being vegetarian or vegan. But the scriptures of the Aryans are the Vedas, and they were huge animal sacrificers and meat eaters.
I know animal sacrifice was the main ritual in Hellenic and other religions, and among the Hebrews. The Jewish Temple was daily awash with blood, and this only stopped publicly with the Temple’s destruction in 70 CE. There has been talk of rebuilding the Temple by Israel’s Zionist government today, and this would re-institute animal sacrifices. But it is only talk for now.
Human sacrifice was banned by the Romans because it was still common among the Gauls and the Britons. Mithraism nearly won over Christianity, but, had its sacrifices been human ones, Rome would have intervened to proscribe it.
Stavrakopoulou quotes in God: An Anatomy a scripture where Yahweh bewails the death of Baal and goes down to the underworld to rescue him. He then expresses his relief that the magnificent Baal is alive again.
Where did you read that Paul had syphilis and took hashish and opium? Isn’t he unknown for the most part and just a pseudonym used by the authors of the epistles?
Do we know for certain that children were sacrificed to Baal, as in Carthage, or could that be Roman propaganda? Why would a society kill its children in large numbers?
Thank you. I will take a closer look.
I think the kind of police state Constantine required, and even more so, Theodosius (who finally banned Hellenism, and ruthlessly enforced Christian Orthodoxy), required the type of ecclesiastical authority that only Christianity could provide. This would establish the dual Byzantine rule of Emperor and Bishops which survived even after 1453 in Tsarist Russia. The Western Church never achieved this, as Popes and the German emperors (Holy Roman) were always locked in conflicts. The west’s feudal system wasn’t suited to Byzantium’s autocracy. Feudal Europe was bound to go its own way, with the Pope too becoming a feudal prince, vying for land.
Meanwhile, Byzantium’s autocracy was very different from the old, Hellenist, Roman Empire, which was a melange of mutually accepting cults, with no monopoly. Constantine’s totally new edifice needed something totally different, and needed the suppression of diversity and a rigid conformity to one tyrannical ideology.Pauline antinomianism would coalesce in the 17th century personality of the Dutch psychopath Jeronimus Cornelisz, for whom it became a personal philosophy. He organised the mass murder of his fellow travellers on the ship Batavia. Bodies are even now still being found.
Porphyry, the Pythagorean writer who wrote Against the Christians did not take part in blood sacrifices, only Pythagorean fruit offerings to the gods. Against the Christians was burned on order of Constantine, but fragments have been saved and are now available in a handsome English edition.
In this, Porphry quotes Paul’s contempt for our fellow animals by saying in one of his epistles, “What does God care for oxen?” For Porphyry, for whom all beings were God-created, this phrase of Paul’s sums up Christian arrogance. Celsus too mocks Christians’ selfish anthropocentrism, which has God only caring for Christians, and only for his “chosen people”, even among all other humans, who will be damned. Celsus says that for the Christians all is made for man, including all other beings. He counters with the challenge that if a lion eats a man, then it is evident that man was made for the lions!Both books are in print in English, and also Porphyry’s On Avoiding Killing Animals.
Julian’s own Against the Galileans is complete in vol.3 of his works in the Loeb Classical Library.
