Primitive? Or common to humanity??

"One final point needs to be made concerning “sacrifice” and history. Theoreticians from Robertson Smith (1973) to René Girard (1979) have portrayed sacrifice as a product of a certain historical moment, an artifact of primitive magico-religious thought or of underdeveloped social mechanisms for mediating violence. These universal originary claims for sacrifice, however, serve Western culture as origin myths of primitive violence and the birth of inequality—yet just as religion became a “thing” in the moment of its marginalization at the hands of science and secular rationality, so too the category of sacrifice serves to exoticize safely and partition us from the social violence with which it is often associated. If the distinction between religion and politics is a modern invention, however, then the possibility of distinguishing purely “religious” violence becomes untenable, and if we recognize the culturally constituted and frequently affectively loaded nature of violence, then we must also admit that ritualized, ideologically charged killing and destruction is still very much with us. Whether they are framed as national interest, progress, ethnic purity, or sectarian atavism, our gods still demand sacrifice, and blood has not ceased flowing down their altars."—Roderick Campbell
in Sacred Killing , page 321

<idle musing>
Ouch! Too true, especially this: "Whether they are framed as national interest, progress, ethnic purity, or sectarian atavism, our gods still demand sacrifice, and blood has not ceased flowing down their altars." Good to remember as we mark 2000 dead in Afghanistan...national interest is a thirsty god! Better to serve the living God than that one.
</idle musing>