Originally Posted by Toto

I don't see what this has to do with appeasing karma - that usually involves some attempt to right wrongs or make up for past sins.

Securing divine favor through sacrifice does not involve doing justice to your fellow humans, but a pointless sacrifice of something valuable to a higher being who has no discernable need for a sacrifice.

Post-Enlightenment human beings may knock on wood, but no one actually believes in the tree spirits. Modern people may at times engage in old rituals, but usually as rituals, not as serious attempts to gain divine favor.

Originally Posted by barre

Let me restate my "argument."

- Ritual sacrifice is an primitive practice
- Christianity teaches that "God" ritually sacrificed his "son" for the sins of the world.

ergo

Christianity is primitive.

Originally Posted by DCHindley

Myth, as I am using it, is roughly as described by Roland Barthes. One of the myths he uses as an illustration is the French myth of a unified empire.

"I am at the barber's, and a copy of Paris-Match is offered to me. On the cover, a young Negro in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolour. All this is the meaning of the picture. But, whether naively or not, I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his soc-called oppressors. I am therefore again faced with a greater semiological system: there is a signifier, itself already formed with a previous system (a black soldier is giving the French salute); there is a signified (it is here a purposeful mixture of Frenchness and militariness); finally, there is a presence of the signified through the signifier."

"Before tackling the analysis of each term of the mythical system, one must agree on the terminology. We now know what the signifier can be looked at, in myth, from two points of view: as the final term of the liguistic system, or as the first term of the mythical system. We therefore need two names. On the plane of the language, that is, as the final term of the first system, I shall call tha signifier: meaning (... a Negro is giving the French salute); on the plane of myth, I shall call it: form. In the case of the signified, no ambiguity is possible: we shall retain the name concept. The third term is the correlation of the first two: in the linguistic system, it is the sign; but it is not possible to use this word again without ambiguity, since in myth (and this is the chief peculaiarity of the latter), the signifier is already formed by the signs of the language. I shall call the third term of myth signification. This word is here all the better justified since myth has in fact a double function: it points out and it notifies, it makes us understand something and it imposes it on us."

"The relation which unites the concept of the myth to its meaning is essentially a relation of deformation. The signifier in these examples has two aspects: one full, which is the meaning (... of the Negro soldier), one empty, which is the form (... Negro-French-soldier-saluting-the-tricolour). What the concept distorts is of course what is fill, the meaning: ... the Negro [is] deprived of [his] history, changed into [a] gesture[...]. What ... French imperiality obscures is also a primary language, a factual discourse which was telling me about the salute of a Negro in uniform. But this distortion is not an obliteration: The ... Negro remain[s] here, the concept needs [him]; [he is]half-amputated, [he is] deprived of memory, not of existence: [he is] at once stubborn, silently rooted there, and garulous, a speech wholly at the service of the concept. The concept, literally, deforms, but does not abolish the meaning; a word can perfectly render this contradiction; it alienates it."

"Myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts: myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion. The principle function of myth is to transform history into nature. ...In a mythical system causality is artificial, false; but it creeps, so to speak, through the back door of Nature. This is why myth is experienced as innocent speech: not because it intentions are hidden - if they were hidden, they could not be efficatious - but because they are naturalized... What allows the reader to consume myth innocently is that he does not see it as a semiological system but as an inductive one. For the myth consumer, signification is taken for a system of facts: myth is read as a factual system, whereas it is but a semiological system."

"Myth is dopoliticized speech. It has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal. Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact. If I state the fact of French imperiality without explaining it, I am very near to finding that it is natural and goes without saying: I am reassured. In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissfull clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves."

http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/i...yth_today.html

So, when you are talking about the ritual sacrifice in the Jewish or Christian religion, you are not really talking about a primitive ritual, you are talking about the significance of this ritual in a greater complex of meaning, of which ritual sacrifice is a mere part.

DCH

Originally Posted by barre

What submit is what we have in Christianity is an antiquated religion, antiquate by time, history and human progress. I saw we take a hard look of the primitive nature, with a sacrificing deity of traditional Christianity.

It is obivous that any religion undergoes revision. But my point is that Christianity is too radically primitive to "modernize," without changing it and calling it Christianity. Christianity could be thought of as a "geo-centric" religion which cannot function or be modified to fit our "helio-centric" world. The concepts are incompatible and ony one is correct. So while one may try to minimize the cultural and historical gap, I urge that it is severe.

Originally Posted by barre

Ever since human beings have become aware that they are dependent upon higher forces, they have socially constructed a divine world through which they hoped to manage their situation. This effort often involved securing the blessings of their deity or deities or placating them to avert divine wrath. Christianity belongs to this primitive mode of thinking in that it advocates the view that a now cosmic sacrifice was necessary to secure divine favor and avert divine wrath.

It is important to note that the securing divine favor through sacrifice is most primitive, something that is far from the pratical reality of post-Enlightenment, modern human beigns. I know of no one who practices ritual sacrifice to influence higher powers and even holds to this primtive thinking. It is not something modern man does, and this lack separates him from primitives.

Christianity has as its central belief the idea of a (divine) sacrifice and for that reason is both primitive and intellectually antiquated. From this perspectivge, those who support and are supported by Christianity are (imho) dinosaurs, seduced by a superstitious, primitive, "magical" world view that is actually long . Since the practice of sacrifice is patently primitive and outdated, so is Christianity.

Barré

Originally Posted by barre

Also, I should add the adjective, "barbaric" to my description of the Christian idea of a sacrificing deity.