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Flame » in reply to Paganism went out of fashion when people got tired of all those human sacrifices

And Judaism has come quite a ways from God telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on the mountaintop too.
Mary Anne — (archived)

To what former practice do you think that might have been a literary reference? "You showed you were willing to kill your child for Me, so you don't have to do it anymore. Here's a ram. Since you were ready to kill something, kill it instead."

Religions begin in this primitive, literalist mode, recognizing the brutality life and death, trying to square that with the beauty of nature and our own self-awareness as a species. They progress to more symbolic methods of expressing the same types of behavior. Thus we have animal sacrifices in the Temple and the doctrine of eucharistic transubstantiation of bread into the Body of Christ in St. Peter's Basilica. "This [bread] is My Body, Which has been given up for you." Now, eat up!

Paganism is nothing more than worship of nature (the universe), personified in numerous small gods. Sometimes it involved human sacrifice, sometimes not. The Athenians in the time of Pericles, for instance, were pagans through and through, but did not practice human sacrifice. Greek mythology reverberates with references to it, but often with cautionary outcomes. The Minotaur was not a beloved figure. Agamemnon paid later for sacrificing his daughter to get a good wind to Troy.

As with other religions, paganism evolved away from violent propitiation of its gods as civilization's progress made the violence of nature less immediate to people.

Paganism went out of fashion when emperors and kings adopted Christianity and demanded that all their subjects do likewise, or else. All the executions for heresy... would you consider them to be "human sacrifices"? I would.

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