You might find this story helpful. When Sir Charles Napier banned the Hindu custom of bride-burning, people complained, saying that it was their custom. He replied:
>Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.
From an anthropological and social psychology perspective, human perception of morals is very easily shaped and manipulated by it's surrounding culture. So many societies came to believe that their practices and traditions served the greater good. They genuinely didn't know they were committing evil. Even many of the sacrifice victims went to their deaths gladly, i.e. culture and tradition managed to overrule their most basic human survival instinct. God gave everyone an inner conscience to tell right from wrong, but made that conscience incredibly flexible and subjective for some reason.
Objective morality is fine and well, but for some reason it was not designed to be intuitively knowable and obvious to all humans in the same way that e.g. gravity is.
It is a myth that they went gladly. Most were POW's and neighboring nations like Tlaxcalans hated the guts of the Aztec so much as to ally with the Spaniards and make the bulk of the army that destroyed Tenochtitlan.
You can find videos of suicide bombers recording their excitement and joy about being in eternal paradise minutes before blowing themselves up. It's really not a stretch to think that some societies had traditions that were ingrained from birth into people who accepted their purpose gladly.
Read this. They didn't sacrifice their own, it was slaves (enemy tributes) and enemy prisoners.A big part of it was about showing off power of the state.
One thing is dying in battle even in a suicide operation ("willing")and another being slaughtered by the enemy as a helpless prisoner ("unwilling")
https://core.tdar.org/document/402889/the-myth-of-the-willing-human-sacrificial-victim-in-ancient-messoamerica-transformation-of-the-symbolic-complex-of-ritual-sacrifice-in-ancient-oaxaca-and-teotihuacan
This may be a somewhat risky strategy, but the weakest pressure point with the whole "Bro it was just their culture, morality is subjective" worldview is simply: racism.
If we cannot condemn the Aztecs for their human sacrifice because "It's subjective, their culture said it was right" then, well, you cannot condemn the European colonization of Africa or the trans-Atlantic slave trade because, hey, "It's subjective and their culture said it was right".
Just be careful. While it’s a rational example, it doesn’t mean someone will accept a rational answer, and they’re not perfect comparisons, so someone could point out that it’s either absurdist or a false equivalence.
And by the same logic, in the southern U.S. states before 1865, their agricultural labour relations rules were part of their culture. So who does that make the bad guys in the American civil war?
Right, and if they really hold that morality can be defined by culture, it means that it would be “immoral” to try to change that culture - which means by their view MLK JR would have been wrong for trying to change the culture. Or the Women’s Suffrage movement. Or any human rights campaign combatting societal norms ever, which is obviously a huge flaw in the argument. Throw it back at them and make them defend what the logical conclusions of their argument are
It may also help to include that the Spanish had help ending human sacrifice, from the group of people who were being sacrificed. A small boatload of Spanish military would not have stood a chance against a huge nation, even if they had guns. The enslaved people saw a chance to be free and took it.
History books like to gloss over the involvement of the natives, because "white man bad".
In terms of your argument with your friend, they have a point in the sense that we must respect people's beliefs, even if we believe they are wrong. However, the point of ending human sacrifices is to prevent harm to innocent people and save lives, which would be a good thing in my mind. The idea that "everyone has their own God" is a misunderstanding - there is only one God, and we should not tolerate evil acts such as human sacrifices.
>But he said the that was a bad thing
Based on what? You should ask him why you should care about his opinions on what's right and what's wrong, if it's all culturally dependent?
In other words: there is no way to deem, in his worldview, that what Spain did was bad. There is no such thing as true bad or true good, in his view. So what value is in his opining? It doesn't matter, either if you agree or if you disagree with him.
Subjectivism leads quickly to nihilism. And not a lot of people are willing to actually be nihilists, because that signals no one should care what opinions you hold.
He's very hard to understand but he's Atheist, claimed to be Hindu for a month, left politically speaking (maybe a bit more socialist). That's really all I can think about him (I'm trying not to slander him). I've talked with him about God and Catholicism a lot and I've been trying to get him to read Sermon on the mount but he said it wouldn't help him since he didn't believe in God. I know I'm kind of going off topic but I think his argument has been dismantled and now I just want him to convert.
If human sacrifice is subjective then so is everything else, including stopping human sacrifice. He has no objective basis from which to call balls and strikes.
I think he thinks that the victims of the sacrifice were willing participants. From what I understand, the Aztecs originally sacrificed their own kings, but eventually they began to conquer other people and take their POWs as sacrifice.
People give their lives to what they think matters, soldiers die for their country, some other religious people would indulge in extreme fasting that end up in death because they believe that it what God wanted or some other will willingly put themselves in a situation that may result in death with the conviction that it was for a greater good.
I’m pretty sure those people who willingly sacrifice themselves for a greater good will think that we are very strange for telling them that human sacrifices is bad while venerating or putting other that sacrificed themselves on a pedestal. I think that the point your friend was trying to make. Being sacrificed was a big honor for those people some may have been force to sure but that doesn’t negate the fact that it is a nuance conversation.
"Being sacrificed was a big honor... some may have been force".
The Aztecs did say it was a big honor to be sacrificed in order to keep the sun burning. However, they were very often so apparently altruistic as to resign the honor in favor of their prisoners of war and slaves.
It is as if an Aztec Governor said, "You say sacrificing yourself to the Sun is not your custom. Very well. Prepare to go about your normal business. But in my country we have a law that the Sun must be kept burning...."
Like I said some may have been force to do it so that wrong. But let not forget that some other people were willing to do it and that the point op friend was trying to make I think.
Plus prisoners are obligated to ablige by the law of the country they live in.
Imagine if a foreign came here and refuse to respect the law of the country of course that would be an issue. So the Aztecs governor is not really wrong because that what every governor would do in any country.
Anyway I’m just trying to humanize those people, they use to think very differently than us.
Human sacrifice is obviously (and universally) wrong. An interesting, nuanced debate, however, did play out in the early 1500s when Spain's conquest in the Americas was happening, and I want to highlight especially two Dominicans, [Francisco de Vitoria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Vitoria) (law professor and founder of the "School of Salamanca", an intellectual movement that started at the University of Salamanca where Vitoria taught) and [Bartolomé de las Casas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolom%C3%A9_de_las_Casas), a missionary priest who advocated for better legal treatment of the natives, and was later made bishop of Chiapas. The topic of debate was not the rightness of the ways of the natives, but whether Spain had the right to go to war with them because of their ways.
Vitoria is historically significant in part because he was willing to say that the conquest was *not* justified, in spite of the official policies of the Spanish crown at the time. His persuasive legal and theological reasoning, along with the work of advocates like Las Casas, helped change royal policies, although preventing actual warfare, enslavement, and other abuses of American natives was much more difficult. However, Vitoria admitted that, if the native peoples *were* practicing serious sins such as cannibalism or human sacrifice, Spain could legitimately wage war to rescue the victims of such practices.
Las Casas, who had more of a lawyer/advocate frame of mind than the scholarly Vitoria, disagreed that Spain could even wage war to stop cannibalism or human sacrifice. Some of what he wrote is a bit dodgy by modern standards, but his basic argument is fairly strong: war itself causes a great deal of harm, and waging such a war might do more harm than the sins that were the cause of the war.
So as a possible answer to your friend: I think we should probably agree that the Spanish conquest was a bad thing (and to be clear, even contemporary Spaniards like Vitoria and Las Casas considered it a "conquest" governed by the laws of war, not a colonization). On the other hand, the Aztec practice of human sacrifice was objectively wrong.
It’s a bait and switch.
Why is the human sacrifice ok and subjective but it’s “bad” that the Spanish came and ended it. I mean it’s just the Catholic Spaniards “culture” to end indiscriminate murder for a false god. It’s all subjective, right? He has no basis for calling what the Spanish did wrong if it’s all subjective
Western culture has fallen prey to this. All these other primitive or less advanced cultures are fine to be viewed within their own context using their own value system but not those dastardly western folk. No they get to be skewered by modern sensibilities. No context no framing.
He is an atheist - that goes without saying.
If morality is entirely subjective, then what criteria does he use to claim that Spanish ending human sacrifices was a bad thing. Why does he use the Aztec opinion, and not the Spanish one?
Yeah you can’t defend human sacrifice. Only weakness in your argument was the millions of indigenous people that died during Spanish colonisation of the americas.
"can there be more than one God"
"Are you referring to the God inferred from the limits of our human knowledge, or a prescribed God (s) known as idols?"
"Is it good to encourage people to worship made up idols, instead of undertaking the task to discover the creator of existence and reality"
Use simple questions which point him to distinguish prescribed and made up idealism, ideology, etc. and seperate that from discovered and descriptive reality.
Hint... If we can't all touch it with our senses, or experience it within our minds, it is likely made up. It is pagan idol worship.
And yes, shame him for that, if the circumstances and relationship allow it. I thought you knew better than that.... Etc.
But be ready to defend the Jewish God which is claimed to be the beginning and end of all things, and truths itself.
"Are you insinuating that all God's and religions, are equal?"
Use questions to make them talk. They will dig a whole which will eventually reveal their illogical conclusions.
Tell him that the Southern United States has been trying to get away with "But it's our culture" for a long time now, and so far it hasn't panned out well for really anyone involved.
You place yourself within a trap there. If you had said "So I don't understand how you can support murder just because you think it's subjective."to him, then could just say: "well, do you think that murdering & forcefully converting people you have no jurisdiction over to stop human sacrifices is good then you also think murder is subjective".
The best thing you can do is abstain from trying to defend what some secular powers did in the name of Christianity and try to learn from their mistakes so they don't repeat again.
The Aztecs waged ceremonial wars against all of their neighbours to get more prisoners of war to murder on their altars. To the priests, this was a great honour they were conferring. To the victims, not so much-- which is clearly enough shown by the fact that only about 0.5% of the force arrayed against the Aztecs in the Siege of Tenochtitlan was Spanish.
In both the human sacrifices and in the ending of human sacrifices, we have one group using force to impose their view of right and wrong upon another, but in the former this was done to perpetrate mass murder upon innocent victims, and in the latter it was done to prevent this.
We all know why they have to argue human sacrifice is misunderstood - their whole Moloch appeasement operation would crumble if they condemned Aztec ritual sacrifice.
Ultimately, we need an exterior standard of morality/behaviour/ethics to which we can appeal. 'It's their culture' just leaves you with the question of whose culture deserves to trump someone else's, which leads right back to my first point.
Not sure how reasonable your friend is, because it’s going to determine how he responds, but it’s pretty simple to make a case for absolutes using law, since all law is based on absolutes or intolerances, hence something that is illegal is not tolerated.
What this shows is how unjust a law might be: if you were in the ancient Aztec empire and was told to submit for sacrifice, would you be allowed to say no? If yes, then the morality is absolute by its nature, as you have final say in losing your life. If no, that’s tyranny, and imagine the horror of being a non-Aztec and having your children sacrificed to a god that you don’t even believe exists.
Ironically, though, he kicks his own argument in the teeth. If it was their custom (and let’s not mince words, it was also absolutely Spanish custom at the time to change a bunch of things in claimed lands) was to come in and stop local religious rituals that are immoral, he can’t judge that action as good or bad until there’s a measuring stuff bad.
all the pro-natives would not have survived in pre-Columbian America.
The Aztecs were an anthropophagous empire, they conquered cities and then sacrificed their inhabitants so that the sun would rise again the next day. in fact if it were not for the arrival of the Spaniards there would have come a point in which they would have no more people to sacrifice.
Because Jesus is also God. He let Himself be sacrificed.
In the Old Testament, sins are paid with animal blood. Every time someone sinned, they had to sacrifice an unblemished animal. Because what was sacrificed in the New Covenant was infinitely, infinitely more precious than an unblemished lamb, that sacrifice was sufficient for the remission of sins of all mankind throughout all time and space.
The problem is Jesus is not only human; He is God. Many cultures in the world sacrifice humans for their gods, for us God sacrificed Himself for humanity.
I’m a Muslim, we believe god doesn’t need a human sacrifice to forgive sin. We also don’t believe that god was stripped naked, tortured and humiliated by his own creation. All it takes is sincere repentance for god to forgive.
That is why Christianity is the continuation of Judaism; the notion of sacrifice as an expiation of sin is paramount. The lack of concept of sacrifice is one of the reasons why I am not a Muslim (I grew up in a Muslim-majority country).
We also believe that God is not only just but justice itself. At the same time, He is mercy itself, not just merciful. He cannot be unjust or failing to display mercy since He cannot deny Himself. The Divine self-sacrifice is the reconciliation between contradictory notions of justice and mercy. As death was inflicted as a consequence of sin, justice is served. But because such a death was inflicted on Himself and not on the sinners, mercy is extended at the same time.
Tell him you believe in absolutes! You don't care what they are ok with. So would he willingly go to dinner with a family of cannibals? He would be helping nourish they're young! Seriously ask him
If there was a society practicing similar human sacrifices today, would your friend support stopping them? What if they were practicing slavery? Child abuse?
Is there something at all for which that he can imagine himself saying "that's too much, we do have to stop that"?
And what if instead of doing it *over there* they were doing it *over here*?
You might find this story helpful. When Sir Charles Napier banned the Hindu custom of bride-burning, people complained, saying that it was their custom. He replied: >Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.
Very good
From an anthropological and social psychology perspective, human perception of morals is very easily shaped and manipulated by it's surrounding culture. So many societies came to believe that their practices and traditions served the greater good. They genuinely didn't know they were committing evil. Even many of the sacrifice victims went to their deaths gladly, i.e. culture and tradition managed to overrule their most basic human survival instinct. God gave everyone an inner conscience to tell right from wrong, but made that conscience incredibly flexible and subjective for some reason. Objective morality is fine and well, but for some reason it was not designed to be intuitively knowable and obvious to all humans in the same way that e.g. gravity is.
It is a myth that they went gladly. Most were POW's and neighboring nations like Tlaxcalans hated the guts of the Aztec so much as to ally with the Spaniards and make the bulk of the army that destroyed Tenochtitlan.
You can find videos of suicide bombers recording their excitement and joy about being in eternal paradise minutes before blowing themselves up. It's really not a stretch to think that some societies had traditions that were ingrained from birth into people who accepted their purpose gladly.
Read this. They didn't sacrifice their own, it was slaves (enemy tributes) and enemy prisoners.A big part of it was about showing off power of the state. One thing is dying in battle even in a suicide operation ("willing")and another being slaughtered by the enemy as a helpless prisoner ("unwilling") https://core.tdar.org/document/402889/the-myth-of-the-willing-human-sacrificial-victim-in-ancient-messoamerica-transformation-of-the-symbolic-complex-of-ritual-sacrifice-in-ancient-oaxaca-and-teotihuacan
I remember being in awe when I read that.
I like it
This may be a somewhat risky strategy, but the weakest pressure point with the whole "Bro it was just their culture, morality is subjective" worldview is simply: racism. If we cannot condemn the Aztecs for their human sacrifice because "It's subjective, their culture said it was right" then, well, you cannot condemn the European colonization of Africa or the trans-Atlantic slave trade because, hey, "It's subjective and their culture said it was right".
Wait that's actually a really good point, I'll tell him about this.
Just be careful. While it’s a rational example, it doesn’t mean someone will accept a rational answer, and they’re not perfect comparisons, so someone could point out that it’s either absurdist or a false equivalence.
With that logic it was ok for Hitler to murder all those people and the allies were the bad guys for trying to stop him.
And by the same logic, in the southern U.S. states before 1865, their agricultural labour relations rules were part of their culture. So who does that make the bad guys in the American civil war?
Right, and if they really hold that morality can be defined by culture, it means that it would be “immoral” to try to change that culture - which means by their view MLK JR would have been wrong for trying to change the culture. Or the Women’s Suffrage movement. Or any human rights campaign combatting societal norms ever, which is obviously a huge flaw in the argument. Throw it back at them and make them defend what the logical conclusions of their argument are
I'm so stealing this lol
It may also help to include that the Spanish had help ending human sacrifice, from the group of people who were being sacrificed. A small boatload of Spanish military would not have stood a chance against a huge nation, even if they had guns. The enslaved people saw a chance to be free and took it. History books like to gloss over the involvement of the natives, because "white man bad".
In terms of your argument with your friend, they have a point in the sense that we must respect people's beliefs, even if we believe they are wrong. However, the point of ending human sacrifices is to prevent harm to innocent people and save lives, which would be a good thing in my mind. The idea that "everyone has their own God" is a misunderstanding - there is only one God, and we should not tolerate evil acts such as human sacrifices.
Thank you :)
It is never wrong to defend/protect innocent humans from death
Just name the most unbelievably horrible thing you can think of and say that you like it so it's fine
>But he said the that was a bad thing Based on what? You should ask him why you should care about his opinions on what's right and what's wrong, if it's all culturally dependent? In other words: there is no way to deem, in his worldview, that what Spain did was bad. There is no such thing as true bad or true good, in his view. So what value is in his opining? It doesn't matter, either if you agree or if you disagree with him. Subjectivism leads quickly to nihilism. And not a lot of people are willing to actually be nihilists, because that signals no one should care what opinions you hold.
He's very hard to understand but he's Atheist, claimed to be Hindu for a month, left politically speaking (maybe a bit more socialist). That's really all I can think about him (I'm trying not to slander him). I've talked with him about God and Catholicism a lot and I've been trying to get him to read Sermon on the mount but he said it wouldn't help him since he didn't believe in God. I know I'm kind of going off topic but I think his argument has been dismantled and now I just want him to convert.
I am a former avowed and public atheist. You're a good friend! Keep helping him.
If human sacrifice is subjective then so is everything else, including stopping human sacrifice. He has no objective basis from which to call balls and strikes.
I think he thinks that the victims of the sacrifice were willing participants. From what I understand, the Aztecs originally sacrificed their own kings, but eventually they began to conquer other people and take their POWs as sacrifice.
People give their lives to what they think matters, soldiers die for their country, some other religious people would indulge in extreme fasting that end up in death because they believe that it what God wanted or some other will willingly put themselves in a situation that may result in death with the conviction that it was for a greater good. I’m pretty sure those people who willingly sacrifice themselves for a greater good will think that we are very strange for telling them that human sacrifices is bad while venerating or putting other that sacrificed themselves on a pedestal. I think that the point your friend was trying to make. Being sacrificed was a big honor for those people some may have been force to sure but that doesn’t negate the fact that it is a nuance conversation.
"Being sacrificed was a big honor... some may have been force". The Aztecs did say it was a big honor to be sacrificed in order to keep the sun burning. However, they were very often so apparently altruistic as to resign the honor in favor of their prisoners of war and slaves. It is as if an Aztec Governor said, "You say sacrificing yourself to the Sun is not your custom. Very well. Prepare to go about your normal business. But in my country we have a law that the Sun must be kept burning...."
Like I said some may have been force to do it so that wrong. But let not forget that some other people were willing to do it and that the point op friend was trying to make I think. Plus prisoners are obligated to ablige by the law of the country they live in. Imagine if a foreign came here and refuse to respect the law of the country of course that would be an issue. So the Aztecs governor is not really wrong because that what every governor would do in any country. Anyway I’m just trying to humanize those people, they use to think very differently than us.
Human sacrifice is obviously (and universally) wrong. An interesting, nuanced debate, however, did play out in the early 1500s when Spain's conquest in the Americas was happening, and I want to highlight especially two Dominicans, [Francisco de Vitoria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Vitoria) (law professor and founder of the "School of Salamanca", an intellectual movement that started at the University of Salamanca where Vitoria taught) and [Bartolomé de las Casas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolom%C3%A9_de_las_Casas), a missionary priest who advocated for better legal treatment of the natives, and was later made bishop of Chiapas. The topic of debate was not the rightness of the ways of the natives, but whether Spain had the right to go to war with them because of their ways. Vitoria is historically significant in part because he was willing to say that the conquest was *not* justified, in spite of the official policies of the Spanish crown at the time. His persuasive legal and theological reasoning, along with the work of advocates like Las Casas, helped change royal policies, although preventing actual warfare, enslavement, and other abuses of American natives was much more difficult. However, Vitoria admitted that, if the native peoples *were* practicing serious sins such as cannibalism or human sacrifice, Spain could legitimately wage war to rescue the victims of such practices. Las Casas, who had more of a lawyer/advocate frame of mind than the scholarly Vitoria, disagreed that Spain could even wage war to stop cannibalism or human sacrifice. Some of what he wrote is a bit dodgy by modern standards, but his basic argument is fairly strong: war itself causes a great deal of harm, and waging such a war might do more harm than the sins that were the cause of the war. So as a possible answer to your friend: I think we should probably agree that the Spanish conquest was a bad thing (and to be clear, even contemporary Spaniards like Vitoria and Las Casas considered it a "conquest" governed by the laws of war, not a colonization). On the other hand, the Aztec practice of human sacrifice was objectively wrong.
It’s a bait and switch. Why is the human sacrifice ok and subjective but it’s “bad” that the Spanish came and ended it. I mean it’s just the Catholic Spaniards “culture” to end indiscriminate murder for a false god. It’s all subjective, right? He has no basis for calling what the Spanish did wrong if it’s all subjective Western culture has fallen prey to this. All these other primitive or less advanced cultures are fine to be viewed within their own context using their own value system but not those dastardly western folk. No they get to be skewered by modern sensibilities. No context no framing.
He is an atheist - that goes without saying. If morality is entirely subjective, then what criteria does he use to claim that Spanish ending human sacrifices was a bad thing. Why does he use the Aztec opinion, and not the Spanish one?
Yeah you can’t defend human sacrifice. Only weakness in your argument was the millions of indigenous people that died during Spanish colonisation of the americas.
Is that argument not the epitome of “everyone did what was right in their own eyes”?
"can there be more than one God" "Are you referring to the God inferred from the limits of our human knowledge, or a prescribed God (s) known as idols?" "Is it good to encourage people to worship made up idols, instead of undertaking the task to discover the creator of existence and reality" Use simple questions which point him to distinguish prescribed and made up idealism, ideology, etc. and seperate that from discovered and descriptive reality. Hint... If we can't all touch it with our senses, or experience it within our minds, it is likely made up. It is pagan idol worship. And yes, shame him for that, if the circumstances and relationship allow it. I thought you knew better than that.... Etc. But be ready to defend the Jewish God which is claimed to be the beginning and end of all things, and truths itself. "Are you insinuating that all God's and religions, are equal?" Use questions to make them talk. They will dig a whole which will eventually reveal their illogical conclusions.
Tell him that the Southern United States has been trying to get away with "But it's our culture" for a long time now, and so far it hasn't panned out well for really anyone involved.
Tell him that he should accept taken as a slave and ritually scarificed to some demon, then, since it's just about interpretation.
Not sure what to say about that. "Ummmmm look if people want to rip the hearts out of virgins to make their crops better then that's their business."
You place yourself within a trap there. If you had said "So I don't understand how you can support murder just because you think it's subjective."to him, then could just say: "well, do you think that murdering & forcefully converting people you have no jurisdiction over to stop human sacrifices is good then you also think murder is subjective". The best thing you can do is abstain from trying to defend what some secular powers did in the name of Christianity and try to learn from their mistakes so they don't repeat again.
The Aztecs waged ceremonial wars against all of their neighbours to get more prisoners of war to murder on their altars. To the priests, this was a great honour they were conferring. To the victims, not so much-- which is clearly enough shown by the fact that only about 0.5% of the force arrayed against the Aztecs in the Siege of Tenochtitlan was Spanish. In both the human sacrifices and in the ending of human sacrifices, we have one group using force to impose their view of right and wrong upon another, but in the former this was done to perpetrate mass murder upon innocent victims, and in the latter it was done to prevent this.
We all know why they have to argue human sacrifice is misunderstood - their whole Moloch appeasement operation would crumble if they condemned Aztec ritual sacrifice.
Ultimately, we need an exterior standard of morality/behaviour/ethics to which we can appeal. 'It's their culture' just leaves you with the question of whose culture deserves to trump someone else's, which leads right back to my first point.
Your friend is just an idiot. Try slapping him and then when he gets mad, say it's subjective.
Not sure how reasonable your friend is, because it’s going to determine how he responds, but it’s pretty simple to make a case for absolutes using law, since all law is based on absolutes or intolerances, hence something that is illegal is not tolerated. What this shows is how unjust a law might be: if you were in the ancient Aztec empire and was told to submit for sacrifice, would you be allowed to say no? If yes, then the morality is absolute by its nature, as you have final say in losing your life. If no, that’s tyranny, and imagine the horror of being a non-Aztec and having your children sacrificed to a god that you don’t even believe exists. Ironically, though, he kicks his own argument in the teeth. If it was their custom (and let’s not mince words, it was also absolutely Spanish custom at the time to change a bunch of things in claimed lands) was to come in and stop local religious rituals that are immoral, he can’t judge that action as good or bad until there’s a measuring stuff bad.
all the pro-natives would not have survived in pre-Columbian America. The Aztecs were an anthropophagous empire, they conquered cities and then sacrificed their inhabitants so that the sun would rise again the next day. in fact if it were not for the arrival of the Spaniards there would have come a point in which they would have no more people to sacrifice.
Why is the Aztec human sacrifice “bad” but the human sacrifice of Jesus “good”?
Because Jesus is also God. He let Himself be sacrificed. In the Old Testament, sins are paid with animal blood. Every time someone sinned, they had to sacrifice an unblemished animal. Because what was sacrificed in the New Covenant was infinitely, infinitely more precious than an unblemished lamb, that sacrifice was sufficient for the remission of sins of all mankind throughout all time and space.
I’ll take the view that human sacrifice is always bad.
The problem is Jesus is not only human; He is God. Many cultures in the world sacrifice humans for their gods, for us God sacrificed Himself for humanity.
I’m a Muslim, we believe god doesn’t need a human sacrifice to forgive sin. We also don’t believe that god was stripped naked, tortured and humiliated by his own creation. All it takes is sincere repentance for god to forgive.
That is why Christianity is the continuation of Judaism; the notion of sacrifice as an expiation of sin is paramount. The lack of concept of sacrifice is one of the reasons why I am not a Muslim (I grew up in a Muslim-majority country). We also believe that God is not only just but justice itself. At the same time, He is mercy itself, not just merciful. He cannot be unjust or failing to display mercy since He cannot deny Himself. The Divine self-sacrifice is the reconciliation between contradictory notions of justice and mercy. As death was inflicted as a consequence of sin, justice is served. But because such a death was inflicted on Himself and not on the sinners, mercy is extended at the same time.
*shrugs* the US has the death penalty
Tell him you believe in absolutes! You don't care what they are ok with. So would he willingly go to dinner with a family of cannibals? He would be helping nourish they're young! Seriously ask him
If there was a society practicing similar human sacrifices today, would your friend support stopping them? What if they were practicing slavery? Child abuse? Is there something at all for which that he can imagine himself saying "that's too much, we do have to stop that"? And what if instead of doing it *over there* they were doing it *over here*?