Why blood sacrifice?

[fr0d0]

I think so too.

[Godscreated]

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I had said: Christianity does not seem like a very healthy mindset on a lot of levels.

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You are correct there. I imagine early Christians as blood thirsty psychopaths, licking their lips over the sadistic fiction they wrote to enslave mankind in gory chains of unquestioning obedience.

Well put. I see it pretty much that way myself. In the interest of being fair, it would not appear to be at all uncommon to be OK with behavior that in this day and age we consider to be hideously barbaric, even sick.

Why would you consider Christians blood thirsty, Christ's death ended the blood sacrifices, not just for Christians but, the Jews quit sacrificing after His death. Up until His death and I'm saying in His life time the Jews practiced blood sacrifice, why did the Jews who did not believe in Christ all of a sudden stop something they had practiced for 1500 years? Christians knew God was putting an end to the blood sacrifices, we did not nor do not practice them. I ask you again why did the Jews stop at the same time Christians stopped?

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Hmmm... Methinks you should read up on your ancient pagan religions. After all, they are what Judaism and subsequently christianity stemmed from.

Ancient gods required sacrifices, they weren't as easy going as Jesus' dad.

In fact, it's in the OT that the smell of burnt offerings were pleasing to YWVH. But only the purest and/or fattest of the crop would do to please the insatiable god of the jews. Just like the other gods worshiped beside him in the ancient polytheistic culture that was early judaism before YWVH was adopted as the one "true" god.

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Yes, you are right about that. Some early religions were even, shall we say, messier. Human sacrifice was far from unknown all over the globe.

The nation of Israel never was to give a human sacrifice to God, even though a few did and God punished them for it. All the nations around Israel practiced human sacrifice.

So yes, in the OT all kinds of things occurred. Blood sacrifice was common, as YWVH was pleased by it, he was even displeased by Cain's offer of produce instead of a live animal sacrifice as Abel had offered him, never mind that Cain was a farmer, not a shepherd. Seemed kind of unfair to me.

God was pleased by what the sacrifice represented. God did not want blood sacrifices, but sin required it.
Where did you get that God was displeased with Cain's sacrifice because it was crops he offered? Why do you believe that Able's sacrifice of animals was better? If that was the reason God did not accept Cain's sacrifice then I would agree it would be unfair.

I can understand that 2,000 years ago something as far gone as someone going through a long, drawn-out torturous death as a blood sacrifice to atone for humankind's sins would not cause anyone back then to so much as bat an eye.

Who back then knew or believed that Christ was a sacrifice for man's sin? If no one knew then who was to be surprised or as you put it "bat an eye," who did know?

But I'm not someone from 2,000 years ago when the Romans presented people getting killed in their arenas as entertainment. I would hope that we've advanced since then.

The Twin Towers!!!

What it is that bugs me is that the nuns, when I was a kid, taught us this nauseating story as if this is how things should be, for lack of a better way to put it. It gets constantly referred to here by our resident Christians as no big deal. It never seems to occur to any of these people that this is sick. How can it not be? Try and approach it and all you get is an attitude of if Godditit then it must be what was right.

I'm not sure what you are referring to here, the blood sacrifices the Israelites made, or the sacrifice Christ made, or both?

Or humanity's sins were that bloody awful, nothing less could atone for them.

Sins are that bloody awful, if they were not don't you think God would have used another way?

If God existed and he is omnimax as claimed all he had to do was make it so, whatever it was that he wanted.

I see how the atheist here react to God even though they do not believe He's real, so how would you react if you knew God was real and forced you to accept Him? That would be the only other alternative would it not, those who do not believe He's real show their disdain for God, so what would they do if He forced them to accept Him?

But they can't see that. They never even notice the sheer horror of what is supposed to have happened.

No one knows better than Christians the horror of Christ's sacrifice, we admit it's our fault, we take responsibility for it, why do you think God grants us salvation through grace. You have no idea what it's like to know you're responsible for Christ's sacrifice, this is a horror in our lives we live with all the time, yet we are able to rejoice because God through our belief and His grace has forgiven us and we can live our lives free in the truth of salvation.

What kind of God is that? It's as if they are afraid to call him out on that, like you can't even have the thought that perhaps some of what he is supposed to have done is wrong, perhaps even pyschopathic. Maybe it is just me, but this is some seriously sick stuff.

It is you, and there is nothing sick about it on God's part, because He loved us so much He allowed Christ to give Himself as a sacrifice for our sins. God wanted mankind to be redeemed, so He paid the price we could not, love accounts for all God has done for man. So to answer your question, "what kind of God is He," He is the God of unfathomable love, a love beyond our understanding.

[Cyberman]

I think it's important to keep in mind that ancient people viewed blood as the essence of life. Blood sacrifice was most probably viewed as sacrificing that which is most sacred.

Just so long as it wasn't their own blood being sacrificed. A hella lot of atrocities under religion's banner have been/are being excused like that.

[Dragonetti]

Religion has given justification for killing and sacrificing fellow humans for no real good reason.

[Cyberman]

Religion has given justification for killing and sacrificing fellow humans for no real god reason.

FTFY.

[Angrboda]

I think it's important to keep in mind that ancient people viewed blood as the essence of life. Blood sacrifice was most probably viewed as sacrificing that which is most sacred.

I'm not sure you're correct about this. I'd have to do some serious research, but a couple of points, granting I could be wrong. The early Jews associated the breath with life, not the blood. If I recall correctly, there is no Hebrew word for soul in the Old Testament, and any analogous references to it are with words referring to the breath (in Genesis for example, God 'breathed' life into Adam). It's possible that there was a less than fully explicit understanding of the matter, as I'm sure that people of the time could well associate blood with death, if the Hebrew language and first millennia medicine are any indication, it was not thought of as the life giving substance.

An even more fundamental explanation, I think, is tenable. I was recently watching a film about the Kumari, young girls in Nepal who are worshipped as incarnations of a Hindu goddess. (Nevermind that the bulk are Buddhists.) One important festival involved the sacrifice of 108 goats and sheep, decapitated with a very sharp piece of steel. There is one scene where the recently decapitated animal is carried around a truck, blood spurting on the truck to purify and bless it. This of course reminded me of Yahweh and the blood sacrifices, the scapegoat of Jewish legend, Christ, and even the story of Abraham's commandment to sacrifice his son Isaac, in some ways prefiguring the Christ narrative.

What struck me is that blood sacrifice is a pristine example of 'ritual magic'. You perform some action which, on the surface, would not seem to be causally effective in bringing about the result, and yet, because the ritual is performed, the result occurs, magically. You'll note that every time that the God of the bible wants to accomplish a miracle, there is either some ritual involved, or some mechanism involved (the flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah). In one of the gospels, Jesus' healing of a man is preceded by such things as spitting on the affected organs and the like. Why would a god need to use his own bodily fluids to effect a cure? He should just be able to will it to occur. And other events in the Jesus narrative also smell of traditional, ritual magic; his inability to perform when in a hostile/unbelieving town (what in parapsychology is termed "the shyness effect"). And it didn't end with the first century. The obsession with religious relics, the true cross, body parts of Jesus, saints, and martyrs, for example; that objects, by association with their prior owner, are imbued with power. The phenomena of prayer is a classic example of ritual magic; performing an ineffective action in the hopes that, through intermediary powers, it will be effected (and note that Christian prayers are directed to other things than their god).

It's worth pointing out that, probably one reason blood sacrifice is an important element of ritual magic in any religion's repertoire has to do with the human brain. We have evolved to have powerful emotional and cognitive responses to blood and death. It isn't so much that the person is sadistic so much as the blood sacrifice is a powerful and reliable way of bringing about an altered state of consciousness whose content and primacy, can be linked to the more mundane and less obvious aspects of the religious belief and tradition. (This is a common theme in the psychology of religion; the co-opting of natural cognitive and emotional responses to reinforce and create a meaningful religious experience.)

I think it was only later that elements of Platonic philosophy, and ages long battles to pound the rough metal of the Christian stories into a coherent and smooth narrative, along with a general trend toward becoming less violent, that drained the more horrific and ritualistic elements out of Christianity. It's worth noting that it took a long time and multiple attempts for Christian theology to work out not just that the sacrifice of Jesus was effective, but how it achieved that effect; well into the middle ages, a completely different theory of the effect of Jesus' "sacrifice" was believed than that preached as dogma today. And I think it all comes back to who we are as humans. We need a causal story to believe that person X caused B. It isn't enough for the person X to will that B, and then B occurs; something that X does ('A') must be instrumental in bringing about B. Otherwise, it's not as effective a narrative. (I'm reminded of an African tribe studied by anthropologist Pascal Boyer. According to people in this tribe, the cause of bad things is malevolent magic practiced by a witch against people whose interests are contrary to theirs. Thus, when a hut's roof collapses, the search for explanations is constrained, but not eliminated. The villagers know that roofs collapse, it's not rocket science. But they want to explain, not why it happened at all, but why it happened when it did. Again, we're always trying to use causality to connect intentions with effect; pure magic of the Harry Potter variety may be a somewhat late invention.)


(Regards the connection between blood and life, it's helpful to understand Galen's work and his effect on tradition. However, there were clever Greeks prior to this who likely had other understandings, though it's possible the implications weren't self-consciously known.)

[Faith No More]

Perhaps you're right, and the ancients saw blood more as a representation of death(I realized after I posted that that I was actually just speculating). I was thinking more of the Mayans and the Aztecs than the Jews actually, both of which were big into human sacrifice. The blood may be more of a representation of the sacrifice(the blood shows death has occurred), rather than the actual sacrifice itself.

I haven't been able to find corroboration on the net yet, but when I was younger, we had a presentation at school about the Mayans in which the different ways of sacrifice were discussed. A couple of them did not draw blood, including weighing yourself down with rocks and jumping into a deep pool of water. I took a cursory look to try and find what the purpose of the different methods were and how the spilling of the blood played a part, but found nothing.

Most of that is probably irrelevant, however, as I'm sure the OP was looking for the Abrahamic perspective on blood sacrifice and why the ritual was necessary. (I can only speculate, but I'm guessing that from the viewpoint of Christians such as fr0d0, Jesus' crucifixion was necessary as a representation for god's sacrifice that was easy for humans to digest. The impact would not have been as great if god had just willed the situation away.)

[fr0d0]

I can go for that faith yes.

(btw apo the practice of objectifying anything but God directly is a Catholic perversion as pointed out by Luther. Control by means of ignorance)

[MindForgedManacle]

The Bible just seems to say that God likes the smell of it. Odd fellow, that YHWH is.

In any case, considering God is the "Alpha and Omega", he clearly is the one who set up the system of judgement in the first place, with Divine foreknowledge that there would be occupants in Hell (or else why would he make it?), therefore he cannot be removed from the causal chain leading to there being occupants in Hell.

[Godscreated]

The Bible just seems to say that God likes the smell of it. Odd fellow, that YHWH is.

In any case, considering God is the "Alpha and Omega", he clearly is the one who set up the system of judgement in the first place, with Divine foreknowledge that there would be occupants in Hell (or else why would he make it?), therefore he cannot be removed from the causal chain leading to there being occupants in Hell.

Hell was made for Lucifer and the fallen angels, before the fall of man.