Shulem wrote:huckelberry wrote:Shulem, Are you a vegetarian strictly avoiding both Mcdonalds and backyard barbecues? You realize that the animal sacrifice business was a matter of shared meals. Now even if you believe vegetarian is a superior way of life surely you do not see the folks at Mcdonalds with the same white hot hostility because of the daily murder of cows and chickens going on behind the façade?
I don't have a problem with eating meat. I don't have a problem with killing animals for a source of food. I do have a problem with slaying animals for religious cult practices and for the purpose of forgiving sins. I have a problem with ritually pouring animal blood on human bodies and religious objects as a matter of veneration and worship. The law of Moses and cult rituals associated with it were a horrific and barbaric practice. Sick and degenerate! All that is beneath you and I.
Shulem, though there are Christian leaders who are homosexual and are looking to change future Christian attitudes about homosexuality, there is sufficient history of violent rejection and ill treatment to be reason for you to choose to keep a clear distance from Christian groups for yourself. Of course you have other reasons as well.
Its is more just to think about the world we live in and our human past that I am inclined to comment about blood and sacrifice. Two things come to my mind. First this animal sacrifice business is hardly something invented by Moses or his followers. It is a virtually universal human activity in the past. Well where it was not being practiced with human victims. During the same time the Jerusalem priest slaughtered animals Europeans were merrily wacking people and spilling their blood. It is possible that a practice so widespread had some sort of meaning important to people.
I am glad society has found substitutes for the practice, particularly the human variety. Even so animal sacrifice had the reasonable benefit of creating shared meals that people enjoyed,and needed nutritionally. I cannot help but think you are imagining in an unrealistic way to picture blood poured on people and the creation of a lot of fear. I have heard of some Mithric rites pouring blood all over the initiate. It is not an Old Testament rite. The old testament people celebrated and believed that their Gods love endures forever.
I think the Bible records a path of rethinking the cultural prehistory which assumed all sorts of sacrifice including human. The meanings of those ancient traditions were reviewed , changed and in the process the actual sacrifices changed. The human sacrifice stopped and later animal sacrifices stopped. Our society still reflects upon the meaning of sacrifice however. I think it is also true that our society has not come to unified and final understanding of its meaning.
But sacrifice is something we ask of ourselves and respect in others if we understand it to be for a worthwhile cause. (or at least the idea of a worthwhile cause)