Cultural Significance of Sacrifice
🔪Human sacrifice is a cultural universal across societies, with circumcision serving as a surrogate that answers every test of archetypal significance and has a compelling presence in stories across cultures.
💡The notion of sacrifice is equivalent to the discovery of the future, allowing humans to make a pact with existence by giving up something valuable now for better outcomes later.
Developmental and Historical Context
🌍Child sacrifice, while a pathological extreme, is a historical fact that has occurred in all cultures based on explicit beliefs, representing the ultimate sacrifice.
🧠The developmental history of sacrifice is united with the evolution of moral intuitions, potentially detrimentally affecting them in religious contexts.
Origins and Religious Implications
🧬The origin of sacrifice lies in behavioral patterns with survival significance, selected through standard selection practices, evolving from a bottom-up process of behavior to story representation.