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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 1085704" data-attributes="member: 7240">My understanding is that while blood sacrifice had always been a key part of mesoamerican religion, the scale of the sacrifice increased when the Aztec confederacy took over the Mexico Valley. Many of the subject peoples were upset that the Mexica increased the scale of such sacrifice to a considerable degree. Remember, also, that a significant portion of those sacrificed were volunteers -- winners of ball games, participants in the flowery war, etc. This is hardly surprising when it is considered that the purpose of the sacrifice was to prevent the world from ending. It seems to me that it would be impossible to view as evil the sacrifice of a willing volunteer. Sacrifice, thus, is not really the problem we are talking about -- the problem we are talking about is state-sanctioned murder.Ronald Wright, author of Stolen Continents made rather a good point on that front in a radio interview: really, the Spanish and Mexica deserved eachother -- they were the two empires in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that slaughtered the most innocent civilians in the name of god. There is no doubt that what the Mexica did was monstrous but I think a case can be made that it was not objectively evil. While characters might object to the sacrifice of unwilling victims, and the excessive sacrifice of too many people per year, there is no reason for them to object to human sacrifice in principle.One last thing, though: the people living under the Mexica when Cortes arrived had the most vegetarian diet of any society since antiquity.</blockquote>

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