"What if you showed the ancient Maya 'The Passion of the Christ'? They'd freak out."
- Stephen Houston, professor of anthropology at Brown University.
1 comment:
Anonymous
said...
Any civiliation that is into human sacrifice is a cruel civilization that deserves to come to an end, no matter how advanced it may be.
After all, human sacrifice is just another pretty way of referring to brutal murder.
If the U.S. were to begin the practice of using a bone knife to cut someone under his last rib so that they can shove their hand up into that human body, grasp the human heart and tear it out while it is still beating, how long before the people decide that this culture would no longer deserve to exist.
The author of this article, clearly unable to find an anthropologist (a scientist who studies civiliations, their development, and other aspect of human history), resorted to seek the opinions of archaeologists (a scientist who studies the objects created by civilizations from the perspective of admiration) in order to defend his apparent bias against any film made by Mel Gibson.
What the author and his archaeologist failed to mention is Maya as well as the Aztecs were societies that controlled vast populations thru conquest and fear. Their human sacrifices were often members of the socities that fought back when the Maya empire invaded. Those societies that cooperated and did not fight back, their citizens were likely to be spared. This sort of societies are capable of horrific cruelties toward ordinary people. So, who is to say that they did not chop up ordinary people?
I suspect that if the movie is made by someone other than Mel Gibson, the author of this article would have no problem praising the historical accuracies.
1 comment:
Any civiliation that is into human sacrifice is a cruel civilization that deserves to come to an end, no matter how advanced it may be.
After all, human sacrifice is just another pretty way of referring to brutal murder.
If the U.S. were to begin the practice of using a bone knife to cut someone under his last rib so that they can shove their hand up into that human body, grasp the human heart and tear it out while it is still beating, how long before the people decide that this culture would no longer deserve to exist.
The author of this article, clearly unable to find an anthropologist (a scientist who studies civiliations, their development, and other aspect of human history), resorted to seek the opinions of archaeologists (a scientist who studies the objects created by civilizations from the perspective of admiration) in order to defend his apparent bias against any film made by Mel Gibson.
What the author and his archaeologist failed to mention is Maya as well as the Aztecs were societies that controlled vast populations thru conquest and fear. Their human sacrifices were often members of the socities that fought back when the Maya empire invaded. Those societies that cooperated and did not fight back, their citizens were likely to be spared. This sort of societies are capable of horrific cruelties toward ordinary people. So, who is to say that they did not chop up ordinary people?
I suspect that if the movie is made by someone other than Mel Gibson, the author of this article would have no problem praising the historical accuracies.
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