It is not a very long time ago, prior to the age of reason as some would have it, that the practice of offering human sacrifices to gods believed to be the incarnation of, or possess the power to control natural phenomenon, for example rain, volcanic eruptions, was ugly reality in almost all world cultures At the time, individuals, sometimes a good number of people, or even entire communities, were sacrificed, or, more precisely expressed, murdered by their shamans, or anybody considered to be an intermediary between humans and gods, in oder to propitiate or appease a god.
The dominant belief today where this practice is concerned is that, thanks in large part to relevant cultural advances made in especially developed countries, and the efforts of the colonizing missions that spread the blessings of civilization to the rest of the world, the practice has all but disappeared, and is now regarded as a throwback to primitive climes and mentalities, the resurgence of which is considered near impossible.
What I intend to prove in this article is the truth that, unlike most people are led to believe, the practice didn't disappear as people got more informed but simply changed guise. It evolved with the times, adjusting to and taking advantage of beliefs that follow and control imaginations as they move on through time. The method changed with evolution, and the practice remained unrecognizable as a wrong.
It became unthinkable to throw people alive into molten larva, but something similar was being done that, when looked at objectively, is just as horrendous.
In our modern era, people are ostracised, bombed, turned into pariahs, made so despicable they are rejected by society, sometimes to the extent people begin to think life would be better if those people died, better still if they killed them themselves considering the favours they would get for the "service", and so on. Society plays along, just like previous people would all have walked to the river-side to pay homage to a god, watch, sing and dance, as a select few were weighed down and thrown to the depths.
Society at the time believed it was necesary, all in their best interests, as they do now when, with society or powerful people replacing the incarnations of or gods lording over natural phenomenon, people in fact sacrifice somebody in order to escape the wrath or gain the favour of these powerful social entities that have replaced the gods of old.
The fact the real existence of one cannot be proven, while it is easy to see that there are powers-that-be that are doing quite a lot to prove their existence (rewards or penalties: the carrot and stick approach) does not change matters inasmuch as we are all supposed to be born with a free conscious. Power is never taken by force, never held by a few by accident, but granted by the multitudes who believe, however unconsciously, that it is in their best intersts to do so. This is to say that the ruled themselves conspire to be ruled, whether they have just been conquered and have capitulated and accepted the process of subjugaton to commence, or citizens who wake up one day to find their fellow citizens are their gods.
I also want to show that, beliefs notwithstanding, in the past as well as the present, some of those unfortunate enough to end up on the list of sacrifices got there for reasons other than the majority suspected. They were intentionally entered into the list by those who were more informed, usually people in positions of power. In the present as well as the past, they took advantage of the superstition that controlled the majority's mentalities in oder to eliminate perceived threats, sometimes in order to rid society of a type or gene.
The crucial thing to keep in mind here, in order not to miss the point, is the truth beliefs issue forth from a source with the power to instill the normative in the populace at large. People do not just sing and dance their way to a sacrifice, they do not just treat others as leppers and aid and assist in their destruction. They are told, and made to believe that this is what they should do lest the misseries they are going through continue, lest they be visited by horrors unimagined. It may have been the failure of the rains in the past for which shamans convinced people they had to throw a few among them to their deaths, in order to appease the angry god who had witheld water from the heavens. It is the false flag operation that signals impedingforeign invasion, tribal survival, the terrible disease projected as a crisis, the one blaspheming against an order and threatening its demise, the terrorists who make a lifestyle out of instilling terror, and such, that are the means by which people are rallied behind causes in our day.
For clarity's sake, I will make the point I have made before in a different manner.
We live in times more complicated than our ancestors, but then, considering our capacity to cope, times are always complicated to those who live in the epoch. This considered, we can know, in hindsight, that the one thing that differentiates us from our predecessors is sophistication, a by-product of the abundance and ready availability of advanced knowledge and methods of its effective transmission. Our ancestors were not held back by a general, advanced rationality that made them conscious of such things as "human rights", and the fact the defense of these in general fosters one's own. They could commit horrid acts, oblivious of the consequences, in the most overt of manners, and in cases where it was a deliberate method of getting rid of an undesirable element, they could do this with impunity. The "primitive" beliefs and prelogical modes of defining reality that reigned supreme in the abscence of enlightenment (that comes both from being suficiently informed and developing a broader conscious as a result) controlled the minds of a critical number of the populace at large. The impoverished critical senses became the veil that prevented those who controlled the masses from recognizing the error of their ways, as well as made the populace at large gullible.
In today's world, we are wont to dismiss this past's ugly practices as an act by beings at an evolutionary stage we surpassed, considering ourselves lucky to be born today. Indeed, the mentality of our ancestors was prelogical.But then this truth also holds true for a lot of today's cultrues that nontheless regard their ancestors in the same negative light. It can be argued the fact they are not as advanced may be the reason they are making an error in judgement in so thinking, a failure to see the truth that may be a product of a mentality, but then the fact specimens of humankind exist whose mental state is little more developed than dwellers of this past to whom the practice of offering sacrifices would be anathema suggests that mentality has little to do with it. Rather, it is the fact people are always going to be products of their times. What this means is that people's actions are guided by the nurturing environment. They will do what is considered the normal and the right thing to do in a given situation because they are brought up in a mileau where doing otherwise is alien and frowned upon.
We are as much products of our times as our ancestors were of theirs, and as subject to this reality as our ancestors were. We, like them, have a veil in front of our eyes preventing us from seeing how we are being manipulated, preventing those doing the manipulation from realizing they are their own harbingers of doom, our broadened range of consciousness notwithstanding.
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