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What are the signs of a culture advancing from basic survival mode to a developing culture? Is it an alphabet and written language? Is it farming and improved technologies for higher quality and more productive farming? Is it industrialization? Very likely, each of these or all these combined demonstrates advancement in culture. One of the things that never occurred to us as being an important sign of advancement was the practice of human sacrifice! That is until we read Study Points to Human Sacrifice in Europe. The article discusses strong evidence of human sacrifice in a period dated between 26,000 and 8,000 B.C., or what is called the Upper Paleolithic. The author, Heather Whipps, writes:
Investigating a collection of graves from the Upper Paleolithic (about 26,000 to 8,000 BC), archaeologists found several that contained pairs or even groups of people with rich burial offerings and decoration. Many of the remains were young or had deformities, such as dwarfism.
The diversity of the individuals buried together and the special treatment they received could be a sign of ritual killing, said Vincenzo Formicola of the University of Pisa, Italy.
What, then, do these findings indicate to Heather Whipps?
Human sacrifices have never been apparent in the archaeological record of Upper Paleolithic Europe, though they pop up much later among more complex ancient societies, such as the Egyptians. The Maya and the Aztec would also cut out hearts or toss victims from the tops of temples, historians say.
What sort of human beings were apparently being sacrificed? Well, it seems that a good portion of them were defenseless children and/or handicapped individuals — people with physical challenges or deformities. Some were pre-teens, and one of the allegedly sacrificed individuals had congenital dysplasia. Another adolescent was a dwarf. The common theme here is that these sacrifices involved children. Why were they sacrificed? The writer doesn’t really go into that and, incidentally, does not seem bothered overmuch by the findings. There was no horror reflected in the foregoing remarks. However, what is asserted is that the presence of human sacrifice indicates a more advanced society than the simple hunter/gatherer type society that was previously envisioned. The author conjectures:
The new findings could mean the hunter-gatherers were more advanced than once thought.
Even putting these two ideas — “advanced civilization” and “child sacrifice” – together is rather breathtaking in its callousness, is it not? Until quite recently at least, most of us would never have considered a society that practiced human sacrifice “advanced.” We would instead have called it barbaric.
If, however, child sacrifice does indicate an advanced civilization, then certainly Western culture has “advanced” quite rapidly in recent decades as it sheds the Christian worldview. It seems to us to be advancing ever more quickly today as godlessness holds increasing sway over our culture. Let’s take a quick look back and track our “advancement.”
American Feminist leader Victoria Woodhull, who in 1872 became the first woman to be nominated for president by a political party, stated:
Thus society, while expending millions in the care of incurables and imbeciles, takes little heed of or utterly ignores those laws by the study and obedience of which such human abortions might have been prevented from cumbering society with their useless and unwelcome presence. Grecian and Roman civilizations were, it is true, deficient in the gentler virtues, the excess of which in our day is hindering the progress of the race rather than helping or ennobling it. They, by crushing out the diseased and imperfect plants in the garden of humanity, attained to a vigor and physical development, which has never been equated since. And in so doing they were entirely in accord with nature, whose mandate is inexorable, that the “fittest” only shall be permitted to live and propagate. She is a very prodigal in her waste of individual life, in order that the species be without spot of blemish.
Not so our modern civilization, which rather pets its abortions and weaklings, and complacently permits them to procreate another race of fools and pigmies as inane and useless as themselves.1Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly “Upward & Onward” Nov. 15, 1873
Obviously, Woodhull held Darwinism in very high regard while accusing the prevalent Christian society of being overzealous in “the gentler virtues,” such as protecting, comforting, and hopefully improving the lives of those who could not protect themselves. She was right about those misguided Christians, though, since the vast majority of hospitals, schools, orphanages, and shelters where the hungry, homeless, and or substance abusers could find refuge were founded by Christians. These ideas and institutions were, admittedly, highly detrimental to the evolution of a smarter, stronger master human race.
Then, of course, there is Margaret Sanger, who is greatly honored today as the founder of Planned Parenthood. She pushed the idea of advancing society through Eugenics even further than past adherents had. As a devout humanist, evolutionist, and social Darwinist, she advocated the elimination of “inferior” human beings, such as the poor and minorities. Their problems, in her view, weighed down society and held back the superior human stock – the wealthier and supposedly more highly evolved white race.
She bluntly defined “birth control,” a term she coined, as “the process of weeding out the unfit” aimed at “the creation of superman.” She often opined that “the most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it,” and that “all our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class.”
Sanger frequently featured racists and eugenicists in her magazine, the Birth Control Review. Contributor Lothrop Stoddard, who also served on Sanger’s board of directors, wrote in “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy” that “[w]e, must resolutely oppose both Asiatic permeation of white race-areas and Asiatic inundation of those non-white, but equally Asiatic regions inhabited by really inferior races.2Steven W. Mosher, “The Repackaging of Margaret Sanger,” Wall Street Journal; Dow Jones & Co., Inc., 1997
Very inconveniently, Eugenics and the search for an evolved “superman” or super race took a hit with the advent of WW2, when one of its premiere adherents, gifted spokesman, and “activist” was none other than Adolf Hitler. Brian Clowes, Ph.D., writes in The Strange World of Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review: Part I:
One of the most enthusiastic supporters of eugenics in the pages of The Birth Control Review was Professor Doktor Ernst Rudin, Adolf Hitler’s Director of Genetic Sterilization and founder of the Nazi Gesellschaft fur Rassenhygiene [Society for Racial Hygiene]. In fact, Rudin’s boss, Adolf Hitler, avidly read American eugenics journals and developed his ideas of an Aryan “master race” from their writers.
Hitler and his team brought these lofty ideals for societal advancement into a bit of disrepute by actually applying them to a modern society, sacrificing millions of “unfit racial inferiors” in the process and plunging the whole world into the horrendous bloodbath of WW2. These events crashed into what remained of a Judeo/Christian worldview and stalled the “advancement” for a time. But the evil movement never died; it just went underground until it was deemed safe to be dusted off and foisted upon us again, wrapped in the pretty paper language of “human rights.”
From Sanger to Singer
As Hitler’s atrocities and the Eugenics basis for them were forgotten and the Judeo-Christian Worldview gave up ever more ground, the emboldened beast of human sacrifice awoke from its slumber, and abortion on demand was legalized in 1973. It seems to us that Euthanasia and infanticide are not all that far off in our cultural future as we look at where “the new Eugenists,” not known by that name today but absolutely its brainchild, are taking us. Peter Singer from Princeton argues that children up until the age of two do not possess full moral status, and parents would be able to choose to euthanize them.3Peter Singer Says Full Moral Status Not Earned by Babies “Until After 2 Years,” Wesley J. Smith, First Things, 11-23-2010 Michael Tooley, Professor Emeritus from Colorado University, pushes this to about five years old. Now that we have grown used to sacrificing the defenseless young, why not move on to the defenseless aged? The catchy new motto could be: Every grandma should be a wanted grandma! Culture has advanced itself back to infanticide and euthanasia. In Canada, euthanasia accounted for 3.3% of deaths in 2021, and they are currently wrestling with euthanasia for the mentally ill.
Yes, it makes perfect sense that the mentally ill and physically deformed, along with the terminally ill, must be put on the docket because they are a monumental drag on our resources and energy and certainly do nothing good for our “gene pool!” Of course, as we have explained, these “advanced cultures” flourished in the past but had been thwarted by the rise and dominance of Christianity over culture. Jonathon Van Maren explains in his review of historian and atheist Tom Holland’s book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World:
While studying the ancient world, Holland writes, he realized something. Simply, the ancients were cruel, and their values utterly foreign to him. The Spartans routinely murdered “imperfect” children. The bodies of slaves were treated like outlets for the physical pleasure of those with power. Infanticide was common. The poor and the weak had no rights.
From There to Here …
How did we get from there to here? It was Christianity, Holland writes. Christianity revolutionized sex and marriage, demanding that men control themselves and prohibiting all forms of rape. Christianity confined sexuality within monogamy. (It is ironic, Holland notes, that these are now the very standards for which Christianity is derided in modern times.) Christianity greatly elevated women. In short, Christianity utterly transformed the world.
Yet, it seems to many that it is high time to throw off the encumbrance of the misguided Christian do-gooders, kick them to the curb, and at last embrace the brave new world of the Darwinian’s dream, which will give rise to the perfect Superman society of our future. At our current prodigious rate, our culture will leapfrog over the pitiful Mayans, Aztecs, Upper Paleolithic Europeans, Spartans, and even the Romans and become a truly super-advanced, clear-eyed utilitarian culture in the very near future.
Backward and sentimental Christians, with their outdated notions of charity, fairness, and compassion, tend to believe that this current “advancement” may give rise to terrible atrocities, which might even make the Nazis look Pollyannish, but then Christians are, as they have ever been, killjoys of the highest order.Ω
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