Muslims Return To Sacrifice

[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor.

But sacrifice, like anything else, can be abused. In particular, rulers have a way of making their people sacrifice for their own acts of impurity. In the story of Iphigenia in Tauris the king of Tauris (in the Crimea), agonized by his crimes, decides to sacrifice to the gods the next stranger that arrives in Tauris.

In its extreme abuse, sacrifice becomes a blood frenzy. You can see this in the Ghost Shirt movement in the US among the young warriors of the Native American tribes on the western plains, and you can see it in the young men of the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the 20th century in China.

So when Ralph Peters talks about the orgy of self-sacrifice among Muslim terrorists, you can get some perspective on what he is talking about.

The big thing about the three Abrahamic religions is that they stopped the blood sacrifice. It starts with Abraham, about to sacrifice his son Isaac when God tells him to sacrifice a ram instead. Then in Christianity, God sacrifices his Son so human fathers don’t have to sacrifice their sons. The same thing happened in Islam, according to Peters.

The Prophet sought to purify the idolatrous devotions of his people, to do away with heartless desert cults...

But now the young men of the Muslim faith are returning to the barbarities of the days before the Prophet.

What’s the meaning of those beheading videos and suicide bombings, the slaughter of fellow Muslims and the exploitation by pagan cults, such as Hamas, of masses of the faithful as human shields? Why stone 13-year-old girls to death? What’s this celebration of blood lust all about?

It’s about the threatened collapse of the Middle East back into an age of human sacrifice - the precise sort of gruesome travesty the Prophet inveighed against.

The thing is: this is not unexpected. When a culture is failing, when everything is going wrong, that is when a society reaches back into the past for the old ways.

After the defeat of World War I, the people of Germany, “the most advanced country in the world,” felt utterly humiliated. It seemed that the new ways that had been developed in the 19th century had failed them. So they found it easy to return to the old ways of Blood and Soil offered to them by Hitler. They were willing to sacrifice in order to find the right way forward.

One of the old ways is human sacrifice. And the greatest sacrifice of all is for a young man to sacrifice his own life. So it’s not surprising in the tumultuous Middle East, reeling from centuries-long humiliations, should turn to the ancient way of human sacrifice.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

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[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

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