Modern Sacrifices

We like to think that we're better than them, the people of the past. We might toss off a joke about “cavemen”, shake our head in disgust at the thought of authorities burning alive someone accused witchcraft, maybe laugh at the use of leeches and bleeding medical patients. The truth is our DNA and brain structures have not appreciably changed at all in the past 300,000 years or so. In terms of brain computing power and rational thinking, we are not at all different from a caveman etching an antelope into a cave wall 30,000 years ago or the doctors that bled George Washington to death after he caught a cold.

We might like to think that we're better than them, but a very good argument could be made that someone 10,000 or 100,000 years ago would have been higher functioning both in terms of body and brain than someone today. Lower caloric intake, massive amounts of exercise, a challenging environment; if the ancestors of yore made it into their teens without being taken out by warfare, famine, predators, or disease, they could have literally run circles around most modern humans in terms of physicality and brain functionality.

So why do we think that we're better than them? Because they didn't know anything about atoms, DNA, the structure of the universe, and hadn't invented airplanes? All that stuff is culturally bound knowledge that took thousands of years to accumulate and refine. Without mathematics, there wouldn't have been the work of Isaac Newton; without Newton there would have been no Wright Brothers; without the Wright Brothers there would have been no astronauts going to the moon. The fact that I'm alive in an era when humans have walked on the moon, and we have figured out the building blocks of the structure of life and how to manipulate them is a historical accident. This is a roundabout way of saying that thinking that we're somehow more advanced than the people of the past is a fantasy. Yes, we have a greater base of knowledge, but it took eons of trial and error and cavepeople figuring things out to get to this point. Alright, set this concept aside for a moment.

During the recent Supreme Court case United States vs. Skmetti (Docket Number: 23-477) one concept came up repeatedly which was basically along the lines of “What right does the state have to interfere with the private medical decisions between doctors, parents, and their child?” It's a reasonable question, one that seems like a “Gotcha!” for the side in favor of transitioning children. The Tennessee Solicitor General J. Matthew Rice responded brilliantly when he said “....that there are certain times in medicine, history has shown, where the states in their traditional role as regulators have had to intervene. And that's not because -- of course, the parents are trying to do the best they can and get the best treatment for their kids, but we've had multiple instances in somewhat recent history where we have stuff like lobotomy, eugenics, that had widespread acceptance among the medical community, and the state had to intervene as a regulator to protect the children.” Bam!! Listening to this live I almost stood up and cheered out loud.

This is exactly what I saw happening. An unholy conglomeration of therapists and medical professionals, egged on and enabled by a cabal of postmodern academic loons, is careening dangerously through society like an armored truck whose brakes have failed on a hill in San Francisco, smashing up lives and bodies.

The reference to lobotomies and eugenics was spot on but I would go back even further. The history of ritual human sacrifice in Central America is well known but not much discussed. Probably because certain people think that it's racist to draw attention to it, ignoring the fact that many civilizations were doing virtually the same things over hundreds or thousands of years. And that's just the sites that archaeologists have found. Imagine the piles of sacrifice victim's bones that will never be discovered.

The mind naturally pulls back in horror at the thought of perfectly healthy adults, children, and infants being murdered, sometimes in a mass, assembly line type process, to appease some supernatural forces that would bring the spring, or rains, or prevent the crops from failing. Things that would be coming anyway without any gratuitous bloodletting, but they didn't know that. They were sure they were doing good, although the process was distasteful. Only a psychopath could have enjoyed such horrors. Many times the victims were war captives or slaves, but not always. Often it was seen as a great honor to be killed to help the larger community.

We have the benefit of time and science and satellites and the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and thousands of people seeking a more truthful and rational way of seeing the world around us. Massive raw intellectual talent of numerous people, combined with determination and a burning desire to know more, have fueled the revolution in knowledge of the past several hundreds of years. So we're smarter and more moral than the people of the past, right?

The closely held secret that most of us won't acknowledge in our lifetimes if we are even aware of it at all is: we're no different from those people who were slaughtering masses of humans to appease the gods and ensure the rains would come and the crops wouldn't fail. We are quite literally genetically identical to those people. There is no difference except for the fact that maybe we need to accept the idea that we are probably, generally slightly duller and more dim-witted than them. A life of easy food, the non-interactive storytelling machines (television, streaming) and lack of exercise has dulled our senses. If anything, we are probably functioning at a lower level than your average caveperson.

The point is, we're deluded if we think that we're any better or more inherently moral than anyone living in the Aztec Empire or Norse Scandinavia a thousand years ago. But we are better than them, right? We must be! In a way, maybe. We understand that throwing infants off of cliffs or cutting the hearts out of hundreds of people isn't going to ensure that the sun won't disappear forever below the horizon and the rains will return. But being virtually the same as them, what are we doing now that's equally as irrational and destructive as our ancestors? Aren't we essentially sacrificing some not insignificant proportion of our children to equally amorphous and unknowable gods? The God/Goddess/They-ness of Gender is something that, if you ask ten different gender ideologues what it is, you will get ten different answers, none of them making any sense.

The side effects and possible complications from “gender affirming care” are so extensive and horrendous that it would take an entire book to unpack the whole subject. And even if everything goes “right” what are you left with? A lifelong medical patient beholden to Big Pharma who has screwed up their endocrine system so badly that they can't ever return to their “natural state” of being, as they desperately seek more drugs and more surgeries to affirm their undefinable sense of their “authentic self”. Not all trans people are deluded or dupes. I'm willing to accept that for some very small group of people, “transitioning” may be the best course of action for them, but as adults. Definitely not as minors. When the percentage of people identifying as trans goes from 0.0015% of the entire population before the 2000s to 3.3% of high school children, to me and any other rational person that's a clear sign that something has badly gone off the rails. That's a 2250 times increase in the number of people identifying as trans in 25 years and that's not taking into account that virtually zero high school students identified as trans before 2000. That percentage of change is difficult to begin to calculate.

Considering that our brains haven't changed in any significant way for hundreds of thousands of years, and the fact that we are virtually identical to the people who lined up children and adults to be sacrificed to the some amorphous deity-- we must recognize that the same thing is happening now. What difference is there between some child bravely declaring their willingness to have their heart cut out or their throat slit to appease Huitzilopochtli and some teen “bravely” going under the knife to appease some ill-defined, ineffable Gender God and then dancing around in a Tic-Tok video showing off their mastectomy scars? I don't see much of a difference at all. And the people doing the sacrificing this time around are spouting the same nonsense and thinking the same irrational thoughts the priests in the temples were thinking in the past, that they are sacrificing the child's body to save their soul. Sure, the one in the past would be good and dead after the deed was done, but the modern one, maybe after having their puberty disrupted, and looking forward to a lifetime of subservience to Big Pharma and probably more surgeries, loss of fertility and sexual pleasure. Haven't they entered a kind of living-death netherworld?

Society is slowly waking up to this reality, but very slowly in the U.S., and I worry that the recent gains in stopping this sort of sacrificing of children are going to drive the “affirming therapists” and their criminal surgical compatriots underground. It's not as preposterous as it might sound. Look at the “timeline of ritual human sacrifice” and how it extends into our present time, it's like they just can't help it. Some people just feel the urge to kill some other people for nebulous reasons. The urge to murder someone to make things better seems to be enough justification. Laws and societal objections won't stop them. Some people now feel the need to hack up healthy children's bodies to serve some undefinable higher purpose too and although it's not Huitzilopochtli or Odin they are trying to appease, the gods they are sacrificing to are equally as ambiguous, equally as imaginary.

It's not all bleak, we are winning. Slowly but slowly, we are winning. I predict common sense, rationality, and virtue will win in the end and we can save the bodies of the children and their souls at the same time.