Human Sacrifice

Human sacrifice is the act of killing one or more humans as part of a ritual, which is usually intended to please or appease gods, a human ruler, an authoritative/priestly figure or spirits of dead ancestors, such as a propitiatory offerings, as a retainer sacrifice when a king's servants are killed in order for them to continue to serve their master in the next life. Closely related practices found in some tribal societies are cannibalism and headhunting.

Human sacrifice was practiced in many human societies beginning in prehistoric times. By the Iron Age (1st millennium BCE), with the associated developments in religion (the Axial Age), human sacrifice was becoming less common throughout the Old World, and came to be looked down upon as barbaric during classical antiquity. In the New World, however, human sacrifice continued to be widespread to varying degrees until the European colonization of the Americas. Today, human sacrifice has become extremely rare. Modern secular laws treat human sacrifices in the same manner as murder. Most major religions in the modern day condemn the practice.

In Christianity[]

The Law of Moses explicitly commands that, "thou shall not murder." Concerning human sacrifice, the prophet Jeremiah reported that Yahweh said it is "something I did not command, nor did it enter my mind." In the account of Abraham's near sacrifice of his son Isaac, where "God tested Abraham" by asking him if he were faithful enough to obey God in sacrificing his own son, God then prevents the sacrifice from happening and tells Abraham to sacrifice a ram instead.

The beliefs of most Christian denominations do however hinge upon the substitutionary atonement of the sacrifice of God the Son, which was necessary for salvation in the afterlife. According to Christian doctrine, each individual person on earth must participate in, and/or receive the benefits of, this divine human sacrifice for the atonement of their sins. Early Christian sources explicitly described this event as a sacrificial offering, with Christ in the role of both priest and human sacrifice, although starting with the Enlightenment, some writers, such as John Locke, have disputed the model of Jesus' death as a propitiatory sacrifice