why sacrifice?
 

I was thinking about sacrifice, and how the New Testament abolished sacrifice while the Old Testament required it. (Okay, I confess, I was reading yet another religion thread. Someone was describing about sacrifice as the priests saying: "Absolve yourself of your wrongs! Bring your cow to the temple, and we'll slaughter it for you and clean up afterwards".)

I came upon an idea: perhaps a large part of (animal) sacrifice was bringing meat to the priests. The priests get all of the best food (after all, it was significant and encouraged to bring your best animals to sacrifice). This can be corrupt, so Jesus the Reformer abolished it.

Do you think they sacrificed kegs?:)

In the modern practice of voodoo, sacrifices are shared among the worshipers, not just kept by the priest/ess.

Now if we could just sacrifice some of the stupids out there, the world would be a better place.

That's always been true. The rub comes with, WHO decides WHO gets sacrificed.:eek:

I think we could come up with a decent committee here on the cellar. :king:

I nominate, for the committee, Dave, LUVBUGS, Radar, TW, Quzah.....:p

I have generated my own list of "stupids" that I can contribute to the cause. I am so damn tired of dealing with stupid, uneducated people who can't use their own brain to think but have to borrow a brain from someone even stupider than they are. To start off with, I would like to donate to the cause the whole system of public education and start over again with real educators and not the politicians! Oh, how the school district fears me!

On topic:
I always been under the belief that sacrifice was a physical way to show dedication and admiration to your chosen god(s). Commonly a lot of cultures used animals and other livestock for sacrifice. This is like saying: "I admire my god so much that I am willing to give up part of my meager food source to him". Let's face it, they didn't exactly have a lot of food back then, generally just enough to live on. Some cultures like the Aztecs and Mayans sacrificed people but thats what they believed their gods demaned from them.

In the Old Testament God did declare animal sacrifice as no longer necessary. I believe that this indicated to the people that God knows your dedicated to him by your daily actions, not by how much of your small food supply you give to him.

Having participated in an Ifa sacrifice of some chickens and doves, the explanation given to me was that the animal spirit is a messenger from the material world to the spirit world. You tell the animal the message you want sent, it gets its neck wrung, and it carries the message to the other world. (I guess spirits don't accept faxes).

The animals are also used to 'feed' your spiritual protectors.

oh, and we plucked, cooked and ate the sacrifice afterward.

Tasted like chicken :)




...well, it was chicken.

I thought it was the New Testament that ended animal sacrifice.

I remember a passage that has the Virgin Mary, like a good Jewish mother of the time, sacrificing some turtledoves in honor of her firstborn son.


Jesus on the cross is supposed to be the ultimate sacrifice that makes all other sacrifice unnessasary.

Maybe some of the non-Christian religions believe that the gods and such really need that sheep. It wouldn't make sense with an omnipotent deity, of course, as It should be able to produce anything It needs without humans.

The people in Taiwan build elaborate paper mansions and cars to burn so that their deceased ancestors will have a nice place to live and something to drive in the spirit world.

It never occurred to me until now that I never saw anybody burning paper representations of gas cans. Perhaps the fuel that gets burned in a running car winds up in the spirit world, and the people with gas guzzling SUVs are beloved by the spirits.

I know that's why the Aztecs or Mayans (i can can never get them right) sacrificed their enermies, captured in war. Without their blood, the gods would die and the universe would come crashing down.

I thought the whole idea was not that God needed the sheep, but that the sacrificer loved God enough to deprive himself to honor God. To put God above personal wants and needs.
I'm not promoting this practice, just trying to understand the reasoning. Oh wait...religion...reasoning.....nevermind.;)

I am sacrificing a 12oz bottle now....


Now sing along with me...


Drinkin' beer for Jesus...
Drinkin' beer for Jesus..

(Forgive me for I have sinned)

This is just a personal theory, no real meat (pardon to pun) to back it up...

In the long-long-ago time all of the early civilizations were very close together proximity wise. As different religious theories grew they regularly traded back and forth ideas and practices. Sacrifice may have just been another practice that had been practiced for so long that the judaic religions just adopted it by for no greater reason than everyone was already doing it, so they just kept on doing it.

Sure, it may have eventually been transformed into a tool for the church to acquire meat, but considering those times I'd say it's likely that the birth of the idea of sacrifice wasn't founded with any ulterior motives. But like most things organized religion found a way to profit off of anything that provided opportunity.

As in, once-upon-a-time you could perform your own sacrifices. Then you needed a priest to do it for you. Then it had to be done in a "holy room", which incidentally was out-of-sight. There are actually recorded cases of priests taking the sacrifices and not even killing them... just takin them out the back door and shuttling them off to their private herd.

Nifty.

I think most religions have had some sort of sacrifice along the way. Sometimes animal, sometimes human and sometimes ritual. Some religions still proscribe the ritual killing of animals to be fit for consumption by the faithful.
Maybe the animals were shuffled out the back door because a lack of refrigeration prevented slaughter until needed. :D