Ancient Faiths And Modern: A Dissertation upon Worships, Legends and Divinities in Central and Western Asia, Europe, and Elsewhere, Before the Christian Era. Showing Their Relations to Religious Customs as They Now Exist.Inman, Thomas
Religion
Ancient Faiths And Modern: A Dissertation upon Worships, Legends and Divinities in Central and Western Asia, Europe, and Elsewhere, Before the Christian Era. Showing Their Relations to Religious Customs as They Now Exist.
Inman, Thomas
Religions
Surely the Christians have too much sin amongst themselves to cast a
stone at the inhabitants of Mexico.
We find a strong offset to the horror of Aztec cruelty in the very
Bible, which we regard as the mainstay of our religious world. What,
for example, is the essential difference between a Mexican monarch
sacrificing one or ten thousand men taken in battle, and Moses
commanding the extermination of the inhabitants of Canaan, and only
saving, out of Midian, thirty-two thousand virgins, that they might
minister to the lust of his Hebrew followers? What, again, are we to say
of David's God, who would not turn away his anger from Judah until
seven sons of the preceding king had been offered up as victims? And
lastly--thought still more awful! what must we say of the fundamental
doctrines of Christianity, that Jehovah Himself sacrificed His own Son
by a cruel death; and not only so, but that He had intercourse with
an earthly woman, and had thus a son by her, for the sole purpose of
bringing about his murder? Can we object to religious cannibalism in the
Aztec, when Jesus of Nazareth is said to have urged his followers to eat
his body and to drink his blood; and when hundreds of priests have shed
the blood of millions of men, who, disbelieving the power of any man
to convert bread and wine into flesh and blood, have refused to profane
their lips by a cannibal feast?
Having now examined the nature of the Aztec faith, let us, for a while,
linger upon the fruits which it produced. Who can read the mournful
story of the fall of Mexico without contrasting, in his own mind, the
respective characters of the conquerors and the conquered? In every
so-called Christian virtue Montezuma proved himself to be superior
to the lying, unscrupulous, rapacious and covetous Cortez. Even the
greatest fire-eater who ever lived cannot fail to see that the Spaniard
would not have been victorious over the Mexican, if the latter had been
equally well equipped with arms, armour, and horses, as the former was.
We can only tell vaguely what was the condition of Anahuac prior to
the invasion of Cortez; but, from the testimony given by Prescott, we
believe that there were annual wars between adjoining tribes, who met
solely to obtain from their enemies victims for sacrifice, the battles
always ending with the day, and never being resumed for conquest, or for
the plunder of maidens to be an indulgence of a victor's lust. What the
condition of the same country under Christian rule has been, and still
is, every reader of modern and contemporary history knows; and he sees,
with regret, that Jehovah Sabaoth, Jesus of Nazareth, and the Holy
Spirit, with an army of saints, angels, virgins, and martyrs, as well as
ancient gods of the Eastern Hemisphere are, if they are to be judged by
the acts of their worshippers, as cruel, revengeful, and malignant, as
were the deities of the Mexican kingdom.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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