What good was the Inca or Aztec religions?

J

John J. Bannan

Registered Senior Member
Some people mourn the loss of the Inca and Aztec empires. Obviously, the loss of life was horrible. However, would you rather be having your heart cut out to the Sun god, or attending mass?
 
OMG, I just googled it, and it turns out the Aztecs were pretty blood-thirsty; so I was wrong.

Mendoza_HumanSacrifice.jpg
 
The Aztec method of performing human sacrifice was to take a sharpened stone and cut the person's heart out while it was still beating. They continued by taking the heart and the blood and mixing it with a potion of peanuts, chocolate, hot peppers and other spices and eating it.http://www.advocate611.com/Aztecs.htm
 
I always wondered how a religion like that starts? How do they decide gutting is good and pleases the gods?
 
Astrology appears to be from Babylon - not the American Indians.The origins of much of the astrological doctrine and method that would later develop in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East are found among the ancient Babylonians and their system of celestial omens that began to be compiled around the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrology
 
How does one please the Gods? This is how gutting people starts. What can we humans do for the Gods? Let's kill someone to show how important you Gods are to us. In other words, we will even kill our own children to show you Gods how important you are.
 
John J. Bannan said:
Some people mourn the loss of the Inca and Aztec empires. Obviously, the loss of life was horrible. However, would you rather be having your heart cut out to the Sun god, or attending mass?
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Heart cut out. They preferred virgins, so I'm safe. At least it wouldn't be boring.
 
There is another side to the coin.

A) The History comes down to us from the Spanish and is surely biased.
B) Romans paraded the leaders of their enemy's armies (dressed in their finest native attire) through Rome. The Romans asked for blessings and gave official gifts to their Gods and in the end, when the pomp and ceremony was done, strangled the enemy and tossed his body into a pit.
C) The Catholics used round up "barbarians" force them in a river or lake, shoot arrows over their heads so they would duck under the water, give a blessing so their soul was "saved" and murder them.
D) Allahu Akba .. .. .. boom!
E) You see, the Spanish came and used their guns and murdered people whose land they were stealing and left them to rot on the ground. The English and French came, used their guns and murdered people (and also used disease infested cloth to murder people) and steal their land and left their bodies to rot. The Aztecs actually considered their form of killing rivals much MORE civilized. The Aztecs went to war using their hand-held weapons and, similar to the Romans, considered hand to hand combat an honor. Instead of killing and leaving the bodies of their opponents on the ground to rot they took them back to their God and scarified them because this gave honor to both the conquered and to the conquerer.

Just to put things in perspective,
Michael
 
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John J. Bannan said:
Some people mourn the loss of the Inca and Aztec empires. Obviously, the loss of life was horrible. However, would you rather be having your heart cut out to the Sun god, or attending mass?
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I'd rather be living without any religion to keep me doing only what they think is right.
 
Orleander said:
why was blood sacred?
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It was the life-water that kept people alive, and people were considered the mortal descendants of the divine, in some ways.
So, they thought "the stuff that keeps us alive is sacred, because we are sacred". They just took it too far, I guess.

Well, at least their religious gatherings weren't boring. :D
 
Hapsburg said:
It was the life-water that kept people alive...
Well, at least their religious gatherings weren't boring. :D
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Imagine if they thought it was semen. That's a religious gathering that wouldn't be boring either. Messy and sticky, but not boring.
 
Orleander said:
Imagine if they thought it was semen. That's a religious gathering that wouldn't be boring either. Messy and sticky, but not boring.
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Semen is revered by Buddhist, Daoist, Hindu and Gnostic traditions and it is mentioned in the Bible as "Dew".

Sacred_semen

There is an ancient Chinese saying that goes: "One drop of semen equals a hundred drops of blood". They were not that far after all, Semen contains 100 times more Zinc than the blood.
 
Orleander said:
?? Where?
And I'll never drink Mountain Dew the same way again.
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From Wiki (the link I pasted):

"Dew was once thought to be a sort of rain that fertilized the earth and, in time, became a metaphor for semen. The Bible employs the term “dew” in this sense in such verses as Song of Solomon 5:2 and Psalm 110:3, declaring, in the latter verse, for example, that the people should follow only a king who was virile enough to be full of the “dew” of youth."

(Songs of Solomon 5:2)
"I was asleep but my heart was awake. A voice! My beloved was knocking: 'Open to me, my sister, my darling, My dove, my perfect one! For my head is drenched with dew, My locks with the damp of the night.'

(Psalm 110:3)
"Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power, in the beauties of holiness from the womb of the morning: thou hast the dew of thy youth."
 
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