History from a Journalist’s Perspective

A recent article from The Wall Street Journal on human sacrifice in ancient civilizations, children and maidens being slaughtered en masse for what we would not deem esoteric, superstitious and simply unknown reasons, says the following:

At the distance of millennia, these and other ritual killings appear barbaric. But to the cultures that carried them out, human sacrifices served myriad purposes, including fulfilling a universal desire to manage the uncontrollable world in which they lived.

“We think of this as such a bizarre practice, something very unusual and unexplainable, but three-quarters of societies did it,” according to Peter Turchin, an evolutionary scientist at the Complexity Science Hub, a Vienna-based research organization, who wasn’t involved in the research.

I’m not sure about millennia, but future journalists from some era, perhaps in the not too distant future. In fact, even journalists from our present time, consider the human sacrifice that is abortion and infanticide “a bizarre practice, something very unusual and unexplainable”, but most nations on this planet have not only legalized such human sacrifice, but fund it, and make illegal any protest against it, with punitive fines and jail terms.

Ah, the blindness of the present moment. Like the blind spots in our eyes, and the Mayans and Aztecs of old, we cannot see the evil right before us.