False Religion and Human Sacrifices

◆ An explorer who has made at least seven expeditions to South American jungles recently told of a tribe that burns their victims. Then they pulverize the bones and spread the remains on a banana leaf and eat it. “They’re not really cannibals,” he explains. “It’s a religious rite. They practice it on their own peoples, too.” (New York Daily News, March 27, 1965) This has been true throughout history: False religion has slaughtered tens of thousands of victims in human sacrifices. The Aztec Indians, for example, practiced human sacrifice on a large scale. In his book Daily Life of the Aztecs, Jacques Soustelle tells how the Aztecs considered human sacrifice a sacred duty toward the sun as a god. Describing how black-robed, long-haired Aztec priests perform their gory religious functions, he writes: “In the most usual form of the rite the victim was stretched out on his back on a slightly convex stone with his arms and legs held by four priests, while a fifth ripped him open with a flint knife and tore out his heart.” This, however, was just one of a variety of forms of human sacrifice. As to other types, he writes:

“Women were dedicated to the goddesses of the earth, and while they danced, pretending to be unaware of their fate, their heads were struck off; children were drowned as an offering to the rain-god Tlaloc; the fire-god’s victims, anaesthetised by yauhtli (hashish), were thrown into the blaze; and those who personified the god Xipe Totec were fastened to a kind of frame, shot with arrows and then flayed—the priests dressed themselves in the skin. In most cases, the victim was dressed, painted and ornamented so as to represent the god who was being worshiped.”—Pp. 97, 98.

In ancient times the Canaanites commonly offered up their children as human sacrifices to their false gods, fire being the usual method of sacrifice, just as it has often been with many false religions. Even the true God’s people the Israelites began to copy the pagans in this abominable form of religious rite. The Bible tells us the view of Jehovah God on the matter: “They have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, in order to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, a thing that I had not commanded and that had not come up into my heart.” (Jer. 7:31) This practice, along with false religious teachings that say that God himself torments human souls everlastingly in a literal fire, is one of the many reasons why, as the Bible shows, no vestige of false religion will survive into God’s new order of righteousness.