Joseph McCabe

“ Generally, animals were substituted for men; but there was a peculiar development in the "scapegoat."
Sin began to be treated as a sort of unpleasant commodity that you could unload on some other person; Just as an Arab will bend down when you are cursing him and let the curse fly over his head. That was in part the meaning of the human sacrifice. And as the gods wanted something good, not any shabby old thing, kings and king's sons and daughters had to die. This, in conjunction with another idea which we see elsewhere, led to "sons of God" taking the sins of the world upon themselves. ”

“ These were relies of the middle stage of man's religious evolution. The spirit of generation, in man and in nature, was just as likely to he deified as the sun and moon. The act of generation then became in a sense a religious act. ”

“ Savagery in this sense is not a primitive quality of man. Those lowest fragments of the human race to which I have often referred are not at all "savage." The Tasmanians, it is true, were so wicked as to fight for their land when Europeans wanted it. The Maoris, Red Indians, and others were equally wicked. But at the most primitive level man is peaceful and honest. ”

“ At all events it is certain—the belief and practices based upon it lingered in Europe in the Middle Ages—that men came to believe that by human generation they prompted the fertility of mother earth. This easily led to what we call license or promiscuity. ”

“ I am noting it as one of the most awful aberrations of man's moral instinct under the influence of religion. It so got into the blood of men that people who considered themselves highly intellectual and refined in modern times could see no harm in it. ”

“ Heaven is always a feeble reflection of earth: of the hunting grounds of the Indian, the harem of the Asiatic, or the dull intellectual world of the Christian philosopher. In the early stages the active, spirits or demi-gods are even worse than men. They are generally devils. At the best, they follow the character of living humanity, and we saw how this develops. Man smites the offender or, if he cannot find him, smites his wife, children, and relatives. Then he smites the family and relatives as well as the man. He visits the sins of the father on the children and on all his kin. ”

“ The Egyptians chose a bull. The Iroquois Indians transferred all the sins of the tribe once a year to a white dog, which they (more prudently) burned. The Peruvians washed their sins off in the river, as the Hindus do in the Ganges today, and the spiritual animalculae were supposed to float out to sea.
Much less amusing was the development in the direction with which we are more familiar. Where there was only a very dim idea about the future life, the prosperity of the wicked was always a terrible problem. ”

“ What about the last hundred thousand years, so vividly represented to us by the savage tribes which linger in the various phases through which the whole race has passed during that period? It is no mystery to us from the evolutionary point of view. You see how easily we introduce order into the chaos of facts. ”

“ When the same scientific men find a drawing of a male organ, or a woman with an exaggerated pubic part carved out of a bit of mammoth's tusk, they say, "How naughty," and shut it away. Why not the same magic? ”

“ One great root of these moral eccentricities is that the spirit of the murdered man has to be appeased. It may, otherwise, make itself very unpleasant. The murderer must die, if he can be found; if not, somebody belonging to him must die. ”

“ Other peoples had no problem. They invented hell. Their gods would pass the record of the most ferocious torturing kings that had ever been. They would keep their victims alive for all eternity and torture them all the time. ”

“ The advance of humanity—the reform never came from the priests—led to some curious modifications of this. In Peru, where the priests wanted the blood of children for the sacrament, they were in the end only permitted to punch the children's noses. In ancient Rome dolls were strung on little trees at mid-winter instead of the old human sacrifices. In China paper images of men were burned. ”

“ Some of the California Indians would kill the murderer's best friend, not the murderer, on the idea that it inflicted more pain. The Maoris, Aetas, and others would, after a murder, go out and kill the first man they met. ”

“ Priests of the goddess discovered, to their advantage, that it was particularly fortunate for women to have commerce with them. Priestesses were not likely to avoid the act of which their goddess was the presiding genius. ”

“ They tell how the women had to go to the temple and have commerce with a man before they could marry; how little crowds of the less pretty women might be seen at the door soliciting the interest of casual sailors and other men of little taste and much feeling. ”