Do all Theists feel the need to placate God?

Question

Am I the only person that sees a similarity between Aztec human sacrifice, Jewish sacrifice and atonement ceremonies, and the Christian theology of vicarious atonement? Your thoughts please....and stick to the point.

Answer 1

That is a good question and I think I can answer it for you. Vicarious atonement in Christianity (I am Catholic) is not really man placating God. God became man on our account in order to bear the brunt of sin. In some other religions God, or the gods need to be placated, but in Christianity we owed God a debt and he paid it for us. The Bible teaches, in both Testaments, that we cannot earn God's favor or forgiveness. He bestows it on us for free. That is why it is called the "good news". Hope that helps.

Answer 2

No.

There is no need to "placate" the Lord and Lady.

They have already given us a world in which there are built-in consequences. I do NOT mean punishment or reward; I mean consequences, as in, if you let go of something, it will fall, not float off into space.

As in, if you plant at the wrong time, your crops will not grow.

Placation of Deities only exists in religions that believe in personalized punishments and rewards, and in a "God" or Gods that want to be fed.

The God and Goddess don't care if you work with their pattern in the Natural world or not. YOU probably care, because of the consequences of your choices, but really, They don't care.

If you mess up, you mess up. There's no "forgiveness" for it, you just have to deal with the consequences. Begging won't change things. Offering sacrifices (bribing) won't change things.

The only thing that will change things is making different choices. And that won't bring you a "reward" or "approval". The different choices will simply either be more successful or less so.


The things you mention are all carryovers from a primitive belief that man could bribe the powers of the world to not visit disaster on the people doing the sacrificing; that by sacrificing a life, or many lives, or the best of their crops, that the powers would be "fed", and would be content with what was offered. If they were appeased, they would not, themselves, chose to take other things as their nourishment. This was the way that primitive peoples tried to guarantee good crops, and a lack of disease, and no events like hurricanes or floods or drought or plagues or crop failure.

It all boils down to "Take, this, please, 'cause I don't want YOU to decide what to take - I may not like what YOU choose"

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The sacrificial god-king is another matter entirely.

It's a very old belief that the god-king, being associated with the propagation of grain (seed) crops, mimicked the grain itself. While fruit trees may be harvested without killing the tree, the same is not true of grain. Early on, people realized that the grain plants didn't bear year after year, but had to be replanted. And they also discovered early on that destroying (plowing under) the "chaff' made the ground more fertile for planting. So, then, the god-king must be killed so he could live again, as the crops do.

It is eloquently explained by one of the revelatory phrases that initiates into the Elusinian Mysteries were told; "The God is in the grain"

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Pretty much every religion, in it's early form, had some sort of propitiation thing going on.

Some have kept that, in a modified form (they still believe in the sacrifice, but don't actually give up anything on the altars for the Deity or Deities) and some have not.

Answer 3

no