Man, cathedrals are beautiful, but now I’m wishing they had a religious motivation to construct fantastic, ornate furnaces (hopefully ones that do not necessitate human sacrifice, or where sacrifice has been abstracted away from their ritual purpose). If Carthage had martyred Christ instead of Rome, we might have had awesome hearths throughout Europe wherever there are crosses today. Great for worshipping in winter, perhaps bad for the lungs! Could a population suffering emphysema in large part have held off the Ottomans?
I'm imagining a world in which the dominant feature of any town is not a bell tower decorated with a cross, but a giant plume of ritual smoke, visible from miles around...
I can't see child sacrifice and Christianity co-operating in any universe. That's the sort of thing that the early Church fathers would have directly condemned, much as they condemned the sexual sins of the Romans.
You're not the first to tell me this, and my response is that y'all lack imagination :)
I mean, I agree that it makes very little sense to imagine a Christianity that practices child sacrifice, given all that we know. But I can imagine a Christianity that arises in a culture where child sacrifice is more widespread and normal than it was historically; and perhaps one of the early Christian evangelists decides to compromise and integrate the practice in order to win the hearts of people he's trying to convert; and later there are theological debates at a Council of bishops, in which child sacrifice is finally deemed Christian. I'm not saying that this scenario would have definitely happened, but it seems to belong at least in the realm of plausible universes.
There's imagination, and there's plausibility. Christianity arose from Judaism, and the Jews were just as opposed to child sacrifice. I can't see your early evangelists not being declared heretical, given how many other evangelists who had variant ideas less offensive to early Christianity were declared heretical.
Granted, I'm no expert in early Christianity, but your interpretation makes more sense in this neo-pagan age than it would have in the days of the martyrs.
Great essay and great comment here. This is really how religions work and adopt values from secular culture.
Christians adopt practices from secular culture all the time. Most Christians 50 years ago thought gay people were abominations of God. Now many Christians support gay rights.
Slave owners in the American South used mentions of slavery in the Bible to justify owning African slaves. People don't follow religion and decide their beliefs on that. Instead, people have beliefs, then they try and use religion to justify it.
If child sacrifice was a thing, Christians could point to the Bible, where Abraham almost sacrificed his son Issac for God. Christians could argue that God in some cases may want parents to sacrifice their kids.
Nov 18, 2022·edited Nov 18, 2022Liked by Étienne Fortier-Dubois
Early Christians did adopt many pagan practices so that the pagans would convert easier. For example, Christmas was originally a pagan holiday know as Saturnalia. The Bible never mentions Christmas. By celebrating the birth of Jesus on that same time, it made it easier for pagans to convert.
And Christians still today adopt many practices from secular culture. Most Christians 50 years ago thought gay people were abominations of God. Now many Christians support gay rights.
So in a world where child sacrifice is the norm, it's not a stretch to say Christians may have taken up the practice.
What a deep thought experiment! But I don't think a civilization's values are so arbitrary. A culture's ideas have a vital impact on its ability to survive and outcompete rival ways of life.
That's true, but it's necessarily a mix of both. I think it's possible both that child sacrifice is "less adaptive" culturally and also that it can randomly appear and persist for some time just due to random quirks of culture. In fact those quirks of culture are necessary for cultural evolution to occur, just like random mutations are necessary for genetic evolution.
Have you read Richard Dawkins' Selfish Gene? Being an evolutionary biologist, he talks about the evolution of cultures. Just as "genes" are the units of biological change, "memes" are the units of human culture. Very insightful comment, and good article too.
Man, cathedrals are beautiful, but now I’m wishing they had a religious motivation to construct fantastic, ornate furnaces (hopefully ones that do not necessitate human sacrifice, or where sacrifice has been abstracted away from their ritual purpose). If Carthage had martyred Christ instead of Rome, we might have had awesome hearths throughout Europe wherever there are crosses today. Great for worshipping in winter, perhaps bad for the lungs! Could a population suffering emphysema in large part have held off the Ottomans?
I'm imagining a world in which the dominant feature of any town is not a bell tower decorated with a cross, but a giant plume of ritual smoke, visible from miles around...
I can't see child sacrifice and Christianity co-operating in any universe. That's the sort of thing that the early Church fathers would have directly condemned, much as they condemned the sexual sins of the Romans.
You're not the first to tell me this, and my response is that y'all lack imagination :)
I mean, I agree that it makes very little sense to imagine a Christianity that practices child sacrifice, given all that we know. But I can imagine a Christianity that arises in a culture where child sacrifice is more widespread and normal than it was historically; and perhaps one of the early Christian evangelists decides to compromise and integrate the practice in order to win the hearts of people he's trying to convert; and later there are theological debates at a Council of bishops, in which child sacrifice is finally deemed Christian. I'm not saying that this scenario would have definitely happened, but it seems to belong at least in the realm of plausible universes.
There's imagination, and there's plausibility. Christianity arose from Judaism, and the Jews were just as opposed to child sacrifice. I can't see your early evangelists not being declared heretical, given how many other evangelists who had variant ideas less offensive to early Christianity were declared heretical.
Granted, I'm no expert in early Christianity, but your interpretation makes more sense in this neo-pagan age than it would have in the days of the martyrs.
Great essay and great comment here. This is really how religions work and adopt values from secular culture.
Christians adopt practices from secular culture all the time. Most Christians 50 years ago thought gay people were abominations of God. Now many Christians support gay rights.
Slave owners in the American South used mentions of slavery in the Bible to justify owning African slaves. People don't follow religion and decide their beliefs on that. Instead, people have beliefs, then they try and use religion to justify it.
If child sacrifice was a thing, Christians could point to the Bible, where Abraham almost sacrificed his son Issac for God. Christians could argue that God in some cases may want parents to sacrifice their kids.
Thank you! This is exactly what I think, and your Abraham example is a plausible scenario that I hadn't thought of.
Early Christians did adopt many pagan practices so that the pagans would convert easier. For example, Christmas was originally a pagan holiday know as Saturnalia. The Bible never mentions Christmas. By celebrating the birth of Jesus on that same time, it made it easier for pagans to convert.
And Christians still today adopt many practices from secular culture. Most Christians 50 years ago thought gay people were abominations of God. Now many Christians support gay rights.
So in a world where child sacrifice is the norm, it's not a stretch to say Christians may have taken up the practice.
What a deep thought experiment! But I don't think a civilization's values are so arbitrary. A culture's ideas have a vital impact on its ability to survive and outcompete rival ways of life.
That's true, but it's necessarily a mix of both. I think it's possible both that child sacrifice is "less adaptive" culturally and also that it can randomly appear and persist for some time just due to random quirks of culture. In fact those quirks of culture are necessary for cultural evolution to occur, just like random mutations are necessary for genetic evolution.
Have you read Richard Dawkins' Selfish Gene? Being an evolutionary biologist, he talks about the evolution of cultures. Just as "genes" are the units of biological change, "memes" are the units of human culture. Very insightful comment, and good article too.
https://youtu.be/4BVpEoQ4T2M?feature=shared