"The gods need you," explains David Carrasco, professor of religious history at Harvard.
Hmmm. *Science needs the freedom to clone embryos, embryonic stem cell research etc.
"They depend on human life for their own existence, there's this kind of reciprocity."
*Think of how many diseases we could cure if you would only support the sacrifice of the tiniest of humans - no one would even miss them.
In sacrifice, he adds, the people are becoming like gods.
*We decide whose life is valuable, and we can use the lives of those who we decide are inconsequential to attempt to make the important people, those with power and money, immortal.
What the professor is saying about their beliefs is nontheless true. That is what they believed. Those chosen to be sacrificed generally believed it to be a high honor as well at least with the Mayas. The Aztecs were much more indiscriminate and brutal.
In fact, another factor in their loss to the Spanish was that their battle tactics stressed capture of the enemy rather than killing them in order that they could be sacrificed. This gave the Spanish an advantage having no inclination to do anything but kill the enemy in battle.