Blogs For Victory

That its wrong? Not good enough. I need the real argument – I need someone to tell me, with precision, why human sacrifice is wrong.

There once was a time when Western man would simply not tolerate such a thing as human sacrifice. Chesterton, trying to describe just why the Romans were so bitterly opposed to the Carthaginians, asked us to understand that what the Carthaginians did in their highest religious ceremony was to put on their Sunday best and go watch a baby being roasted alive. Hernan Cortes is usually cast as a villain in modern accounts of the conquest of Mexico, but there was once a time when most people would say that even if Cortes and his men were base and greedy, they did do the world a favor by destroying the Aztec Empire with its horrific record of human sacrifice. It took modern liberals to find redeeming qualities in people who cut out the hearts of their living victims, and then ate them. We only have to wait a while, I suppose, and liberals will find good things to say about Pol Pot’s activities in Cambodia.

While we wait for our liberals to find the thus far unheralded benefits of Potism, we can pause and ask about that re-write of Mexican history which has the Europeans who stopped human sacrifice be in the wrong. We must presume that the argument against human sacrifice was found insufficient to excuse Spain’s conquest of Mexico. It is really no surprise, when you get down to it. After all, the arguments against abortion, infanticide and euthanasia have all, in their turn, been found wanting when confronted with the benefits liberals believe are conferred on society by the once abominated practices. If one can contemplate ripping an unborn baby out of a womb merely because it is inconvenient, how much thought would one then spare for people 500 years ago who had their hearts ripped out of their chests? At least they were recycled, you understand?

So what to do when someone comes along and says he must sacrifice a human being to propitiate the gods of the rain forest? That he doesn’t have a willing victim? Perhaps, but given that Jim Jones convinced more than 900 people to commit suicide with him, how hard will it be for some crank to convince just one person that the rain forest is so important that we must sacrifice a human being in its name? The willing victim is tied to the altar, the Goobagumba of the Swamp Goddess has his knife poised to strike – what do you say? What argument do you marshal against the blade?

Now, some redneck on a hunting trip might come along at that point, size up the situation, shoot the Goobagumba and send the victim off to psychiatric counseling. But that is because rednecks are just like that – they don’t understand the subtle nuances. What do our highly nuanced liberals say?

Perhaps, in the end, our liberal will just have to fall back on the fact that it is wrong – and he might be able to do it without realizing that he’s referred to a universal standard outside of human control, and thus acknowledged that there is right and wrong. It would be a dicey proposition, of course, because it could lead, in the end, to belief in God and, worst of all things, to conservatism. Given the risks, it might be that some liberals will allow the blade to fall…