Posted on 11/28/2001 10:12:40 AM PST by electron1
Edited on 09/03/2002 4:49:35 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
In his mind's eye, the image of what Jose Antonio Serra saw in a burned patch of jungle on the Amazon's edge is still chillingly fresh -- not because the murder happened just seven weeks ago, but because there are some things a father can never forget.
What he found, a short walk from his family's mud hut, were the remains of his 13-year-old son: a figure on its knees, head buried in the dirt, genitals and middle figure removed with cuts that looked almost surgical. In shock, Serra noticed an odd detail: The mutilated body looked diminished, even shrunken. Then he noticed the gash in the boy's jugular vein, and realized that his blood had been drained.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
The article talks about gruesome witch killings done on little children.
We are no better than they are.
Who are we to judge?
All cultures are equally good.
All cultures are equally valid.
It would be wrong to criticize.
In book four one of the bad guys cuts off his own arm and tosses it into a cauldron to render a spell efficacious. Any similarity to real life witchcraft is surely coincidental.
Here's hoping you just forgot the /sarcasm tag.
There are unicorns in Brazil?
The article states that the boy's body was drained of blood. What do you suppose the black magic practitioners do with it?
Coincidentally, Voldemort, the chief practitioner of black magic in HP drinks the blood of a unicorn to gain some kind of power.
You could probably do a search on "Satanism + blood drinking." I don't have the stomach for it right now.
Notice that mutilation is an essential part of real-life black magic rituals, as it is in the fictional children's book series, Harry Potter.
You can go back to creating straw arguments to knock down now.
However, as the victims' parents and community leaders have blamed the slayings on the dark side of popular African-influenced religions practiced by millions of Brazilians, that tolerance is facing its greatest test in years.
Even more interesting coincidence, in an older work, a Jewish deity called Yahweh likes blood strewn about the altar.
Animal blood. The Jews often lapsed into animal worship. This was the Lord's cure.
Note that cultures contemporary to the Jews often performed infanticide or human sacrifice, unlike the Jews. That is the lesson of the story of Abraham and Isaac, of which you seem to be conveniently ignorant.
Unlike you or I, this deity couldn't forgive sins without a murder being committed, either of the sinner or some substitute. Didn't have to be human.
God couldn't forgive a man's sins unless the sinner was killed? Or do you mean that a sinner could not be forgiven unless a human was sacrificed? You may be reading Aztec history.
God did require the sacrifice of animals in the Old Testament for the reasons stated above, and also as a form of penance, which shouldn't be problematic unless you're a member of PETA.
Anyways, in this morally appalling work, which has a human sacrifice as it's culmination, his thirst was finally quenched on his own son's blood.
You mislead by separating God the Father from the Son. They are separate Persons in the same Substance. God redeems us by sacrificing Himself in the ultimate act of love.
Notice that the obscene self-mutilation in Harry Potter is an attempt to gain power, as is the real life mutilation described in this article.
There are unicorns in Brazil?
There aren't any unicorns anywhere. So the next best choice is human blood.
Not being into black magic myself I'll take your word for it. Hmmm, you seem to know a lot about it...
All kidding aside, let's look at my "strawman": you are clearly drawing a cause-and-effect relationship between Harry Potter and real life black magic. "Any similarity to real life witchcraft is surely coincidental" (no sarcasm tag but I could hear it all the same.) Given that millions of people, children and adults alike, have read the books and seen the movie we should see a huge upsurge of self-mutilation, shouldn't we?
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