(no subject)

The cats are on a bit of cardboard in the hall, making a film called We Ended Up Having To Eat Each Other.

Insects

Frank ate a bullant.

Jon is trying to vacuum up fruit flies.

Silver lining

The 2 am squashed toe trip to the casualty ward enabled me to see the spectacular pre-dawn sky, including Scorpio riding high and Venus peering through the back windows of the house.

Carving up children

I've been searching vainly through my LJ for the discussion of C.S. Lewis' "filthy quislings" quote. Forgive me if I'm going back over ground we've collectively covered. Here's the oft-quoted paragraph again:

"If we really thought that there were people going around who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him and in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbors or drive them mad... surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did."

Anyway, I was pondering the ghastly ancient practice of sacrificing children, one which Hebrew prophets accused their own theologically meandering people of adopting from their neighbours. As I commented to synaesthete7, if Jeremiah et al had merely accused the dirty Pagans of killing their own children, I'd take it with a huge grain of salt; pretty much everyone is accused of that by religious rivals. Accusing his own side is more convincing. And in the end, the archaeological evidence clinches it - there really was child sacrifice in places such as Carthage.

How do I get to Lewis from there? Because my eye ran over something which explained that the Carthagians may have only used child sacrifice as a last resort, in an emergency - perhaps a famine. (That was the case with the young women killed and mummified by the Inca.) If that was true, if it wasn't just out of greed or mindless tradition, if they really thought that sacrificing a child would save their community - perhaps thousands of lives - then what does that do to our perception of the morality of their act?

Now the last thing I want to argue is that slaughtering babies on the altar could somehow be right. But as soon as I tried to bend my neurons into the slaughterers' perspective, the Lewis quote popped right into my head.

Now where I found the Lewis quote this time was in an essay on Wicca which prefaced it thus: "...it should also be noted that the real problem with [the historical] witch hunts is more factual than theological." This made me think about the prophetic denunciation of child sacrifice in Jeremiah 7. A modern reader like me sees a moral gulf between murder or adultery, and idol worship; between offering cakes and offering children. But for Jeremiah, these are equally wrong, equally forbidden by God; it seems to be the worship of other deities which enrages God, more than human wickedness. For me, sacrificing children is abominable in the modern sense, evil and revolting; to Jeremiah it's abominable in the older sense, ritually unclean, offensive to God. Which brings me back to the old philosophers' question: is it moral because God commands it, or does God command it because it's moral?

The above is rather incoherent... in fact, I think you're listening to me think out loud.

(no subject)

... that essay on Wicca contains a hilarious remark on historical witch hunts:

This was not a feminist issue. A substantial number of victims - about 25% - were male.

Uh-huh. And the millions of gays, Gypsies, Christians, dissidents, and others murdered by the Nazis mean that the Holocaust was not a Jewish issue.