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Sacrifice is the practice of offering food, or the lives of animals or people to the gods, as an act of propitiation or worship. The term is also used metaphorically to describe selfless good deeds for others.
Theologies of sacrificeThe theology of sacrifice remains an issue, not only for religions that continue to practice rituals of sacrifice, but also for those religions that have animal sacrifice in their scriptures, traditions, or histories, even if sacrifice is no longer made. Religions offer a number of reasons for why sacrifices are offered.
Sacrifice in Judaism
In Judaism, a sacrifice is known as a Korban from the Hebrew root karov meaning to "[come] Close [to God]". Medieval Jewish rationalists like Maimonides reinterpreted the need for sacrifice. In this view, God always held sacrifice inferior to prayer and philosophical meditation. However, God understood that the Israelites were used to the animal sacrifices that the surrounding pagan tribes used as the primary way to commune with their gods. As such, in Maimonides' view, it was only natural that Israelites would believe that sacrifice were be a necessary part of the relationship between God and man. Maimonides concludes that God's decision to allow sacrifices was a concession to human psychological limitations. It would have been too much to have expected the Israelites to leap from pagan worship to prayer and meditation in one step. In the Guide to the Perplexed he writes:
The teachings of the Torah and Tanakh reveal Judaism's abhorrence of human sacrifices. Animal sacrificeMissing image AnimalSacrificeToday.jpg Sacrifice is the ritual killing of an animal as part of a religion. It is practiced by many religions as a means of appeasing a god or gods or changing the course of nature. Animal sacrifice has turned up in almost all cultures, from the Hebrews to the Greeks and Romans and from the Aztecs to the Yoruba. Animal sacrifice is still practiced today by the followers of Santería as a means of curing the sick and giving thanks to the gods. It is appropriately termed animal offerings and account for extremely small portions of "ebbos", ritual activities that include offerings, prayer and deeds, in Santeria. Human sacrificeHuman sacrifice was practiced by many ancient cultures. People would be ritually killed in a manner that was supposed to please or appease some god or spirit. While not widely known, human sacrifices for religious reasons still exist today in a number of nations, including India. Some occasions for human sacrifice found in multiple cultures on multiple continents include:
Some of the best known ancient human sacrifice was that practiced by various Pre-Columbian civilizations of Mesoamerica. The Aztec were particularly noted for practicing this on an unusually large scale; a human sacrifice would be made every day to aid the Sun in rising, the dedication of the great temple at Tenochtitlán was reportedly marked with the sacrificing of thousands, and there are multiple accounts of captured Conquistadores being sacrificed during the wars of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico. In Scandinavia, the old Scandinavian religion contained human sacrifice and both the Norse sagas and German historians relate of this, see e.g. Temple at Uppsala and Blót. There is evidence to suggest Pre-Hellenic Minoan cultures practised human sacrifice. Sacrificed corpses were found at a number of sites in the citadel of Knossos in Crete, one such find at the North house in Knossos numbered 337 bones of children who appear to have been butchered. It is possible they may have been for human consumption as was the tradition with sacrificical offerings made in Pre-Hellenic Civilization.The evidence that this practice was widespread throughout Minoan culture is not strong. It is also possible that the human sacrifices at Crete were one-off occurances as Knossos did befall an epic tectonic natural disaster around the time at which these sites would have been preserved. Hence these human sacrifices could be explained in terms of the Minoans desperation in the situation and being far from routine procedures. The temple of Anemospilia at Knossos exemplifies this view. Here they found a the sacrifice of a teenager which was interupted by the temple collapsing on the participants due to the tectonic activitity at the time. The myth of Theseus and the Minotaur (set in the labyrinth at Knossos) provides evidence that Human sacrifice was commonplace. In the myth we are told that Athens sent seven young men and seven young women to Crete as human sacrifices to the Minotaur. This ties up well with the archeological evidence that most sacrifices were of young adults or children. This view contrasts with the utopian view of the minoans propagated by the archeologist Arthur Evans. Human sacrifice still happens today as an underground practice in some traditional religions, for example in muti killings. Human sacrifice is no longer officially condoned in any country, and these cases are regarded as murder. Many people in India are adherents of a religion called Tantrism; a small percent of unscrupulous Tantric practitioners engage in human sacrifice, often with the promise of inducing childbirth in a sterile couple (see Further Reading). In the Aeneid by Virgil the character Sinon claims that he was going to be a human sacrifice to Poseidon to calm the seas (of course Sinon was lying). Human sacrifice is a common theme in the religions and mythology of many cultures. Christians believe that the death of Jesus was a self-sacrifice for mankind's sins. Sacrifices in gamesSacrifice is also used metaphorically to describe a number of plays in games. Sacrifices, in this sense, are plays that deliberately lose pieces or opportunities in order to obtain some other advantage. In chess, a number of plays are described as sacrifices: these typically involve losing a piece or a pawn to disrupt the opponent's formation and open up an attack. Chess openings that involve sacrifices are usually called gambits by chess players; in these gambits, usually a pawn is deliberately lost; gambits that lose a piece are rare and risky. In baseball, a sacrifice fly is a play in which a batter deliberately allows himself to be called out so as to enable another player on base to score. Likewise, a sacrifice bunt in baseball is one in which a batter allows himself to be put out while advancing a team mate, usually to second, but sometimes to third base, from where he has a greater chance to score. Players who commit either a sacrifice fly or bunt are not charged with a "time at bat," thus the out that they sacrificed is not charged against their batting average. Sacrifice is also the name of a computer game released by Shiny entertainment in the year of 2000. For more information about the computer game, see Sacrifice (PC game). See also
Further Reading
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