Twitterpated

• 08:33 I wonder if I should order the @amandapalmer/Neil Gaiman book. #
• 08:48 Why can't I get back to sleep? It's not even 9 yet! #
• 08:49 @JaredofMo Hey, that's not what Jesus would do! He liked the prostitutes! #
• 11:00 Finally got back to sleep, and now I have an urge to play The Sims, but I don't think I will. #
• 11:04 All joking aside, did the teabaggers really hope to accomplish anything? Seems like their protest was far too vague. #
• 12:06 The President won't let the dog sleep in his bed? What kind of example is he setting for the country? #
• 12:55 Why does Reagan keep turning on my scroll lock? #
• 12:56 I appreciate the short chapters of "Watership Down." I like having convenient stopping points. #
• 13:00 People act out fundamentalist quotes tinyurl.com/dyjscc #
• 22:06 Does anyone ever REALLY use a Q-Tip to get a cat off, or is that just an urban legend? #

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Oh yes, there will be blood

When reading the second volume of Age of Bronze, I was struck by how similar the story of Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia was to the Biblical tale of Jephthah sacrificing his daughter. In both cases, due to a technicality, a war leader feels he needs to practice human sacrifice in order to achieve victory in war. Pretty messed-up accounts from societies that I don't think usually DID practice human sacrifice.

That, in turn, got me thinking about the whole notion of sacrifice as a way to curry favor with deities. The idea behind it seems to be that, if people give up things that are valuable to them, the gods will respect that, and provide good fortune in exchange. The Bible also mentions the idea of transferring the sin of the people onto animals, which doesn't seem entirely fair. The concept that I can do a bunch of bad things and then blame it on a goat kind of contradicts the idea of people being responsible for their own actions, doesn't it? But regardless of the original purpose, it seems like religions based on animal sacrifice often got to the point where the original meaning was lost, and people just decided that the gods liked blood. It's like how Jesus had to sacrifice himself because there can be no forgiveness of sins without blood. But even if this is true, why would it count if God incarnated as an avatar who shed his own blood? As I've read in several places, it's basically God sacrificing himself to himself, and why would that be a good reason to forgive anyone's sins? And with the animals, if an all-powerful being really wanted to smell animals burning, couldn't he set them on fire himself, rather than waiting for a priest to do so? The myth of the Minotaur starts out with Poseidon providing a bull to King Minos of Crete so that he could sacrifice it back to Poseidon. Why the Lord of the Sea didn't cut out the middleman isn't clear. But since Minos decided to keep the bull, maybe it wasn't that Poseidon wanted the sacrifice, so much as he wanted to see if Minos could resist temptation. I have problems with that sort of myth as well, but that's a post for another day.