Carving up children

[dreamer_easy]

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.

Comments

[jblum.livejournal.com]

My response to the oft-quoted paragraph is, no, even then I wouldn't think they deserved the death penalty. Imprisonment, banishment, social punishments for real crimes against society... but even by a standard as harsh as a life for a life, you have to take a step further to reach "a life for turning your neighbor into a newt".

And to apply Lewis-style pseudo-logic to it... if the devil were real and these people had sold their soul to him, then they were already guaranteed a punishment far greater than anything we could mete out on Earth. If they're facing an eternity of torment, then any mere hours or months of torture and painful death which we could inflict would be positively redundant.

When it comes to the reality of child sacrifice, though, for me the biggest stumbling block is, at what point do you think this makes sense? The same headspace problem I have with the various Aztec pierce-your-sensitive-bits-with-thorns rituals: how on Earth can a person popularize a tradition like that? I just can't wrap my head around the mindset which would lead to such a conclusion, or accept it. "Sex is good for the crops" or "Sex is bad for the crops", sure... since people engage in this activity fairly frequently, I can see how people might think they're observing a connection. But if you don't kill your kids as a matter of course, what makes you decide that this would be a thing to try to end the famine?

[issi-noho.livejournal.com]

Carthaginian child sacrifice: a brief summary of the arguments (http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/C/carthage/carthage_life.html#child_sacrifice).

[jenavira.livejournal.com]

Oh, C.S. Lewis. I have such conflicting feelings towards him. On the one hand, he loves old mythologies passionately and deeply and much in the same way I do, only he can articulate it better -- I just read That Hideous Strength for a mythology class, and the first description of the Director (who is assuredly a Christ figure, but who has been introduced, at this point, as a Mr Fisher-King) makes my heart glow. But then he moves on to doing things like resurrecting Merlin and informing him that while it was acceptable in the fifth century to be communing with nature, that sort of thing just isn't done any more.

I admire the completeness of his belief. I just don't like what he does with it sometimes.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[drhoz.livejournal.com]

alas, whatever God demands is, ipso facto, moral.

Because he's a JUST god.

(and if you can read that without laughing or crying, you're a stronger man than I)

[purplepooka.livejournal.com]

"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?"

Explored in 'The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas' by Ursula LeGuin. A Utopian society in which everyone is happy and fulfilled in every way, but everybody knows that the continuation of this state relies on the unending pain and abject misery of one innocent child. The metaphor's a critique of capitalism, but you could use it literally in this situation. The price is not "this life for those", but the knowledge that the life is being deliberately taken for your benefit. Merely surviving the famine puts blood on your hands - that's the real price.
All gods everywhere are fucking with our minds.