Making the rounds this past week were comments by a Mexican archeologist regarding the discovery of a Mayan altar at which child sacrifices were performed.
As reported by CBS News, the altar, found in Tikal National Park, showed “the remains of three children not older than 4 years,” according to the scholar who led the discovery team.
The savagery of how such sacrifices were performed, however, is not brought up. Instead, we merely read how Tikal was “a cosmopolitan center,” a “center of cultural convergence,” and how the altar had a “figure representing the Storm Goddess.”
CBS also managed to get a comment from an archeologist not affiliated with the findings at Tikal. How come? Probably because María Belén Méndez of the National Autonomous University of Mexico said the child sacrifices were merely “a practice.”
“It’s not that [its practitioners] were violent,” Belén Méndez said, just that sacrifices were “their way of connecting with the celestial bodies.”
As Reason Senior Editor (and former College Fix contributor) Robby Soave put it, “mostly peaceful child sacrifice”?
Now, imagine CBS News finding some deep-woods gentleman in, say, Middle-Of-Nowhere Arkansas. He’s holding several individuals captive on his property and forcing them to work for him and tend to his land:
Professor Antoinette Whitebread told CBS News it’s not that this man was practicing slavery. It was just his way of connecting with the Bible. After all, in Leviticus and Joshua we read “Moses tells the Israelites on the way to the Promised Land how they should acquire and keep slaves,” and that “some of you shall always be slaves.”
In the the New Testament, Ephesians notes that Paul said “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling.”
We have to imagine this as of course CBS would never run such a segment — because it’s ridiculous. The West long ago rejected such justifications (if they ever really existed in the first place), and there’s no way CBS or other news outlets would treat this hypothetical without referencing the inherent barbarity.
Oppression studies dictates that Western values, culture, and even science aren’t any better than others’, and since they’ve been the (positive) focus for so long, the focus must now shift elsewhere — but only with favorable narratives.
New Zealand, for example, tells us “indigenous ways of knowing” are on par with modern Western science methods. The University of Massachusetts Amherst got a $30 million federal grant in 2023 to “braid” indigenous knowledge into science. And a required nursing class at the University of Alberta teaches about “indigenous ways” of understanding “health … and being one with nature.”
In the meantime, high school and college students are taught that the West’s history of “settler-colonialism” is responsible for just about any conceivable ill. Courses and workshops on “whiteness,” “white supremacy,” “white fragility,” etc. cover all that and then some.
The irony of the CBS story is that 1) the Maya/Teotihuacan never encountered Europeans (their eventual successors, the Aztec, wouldn’t meet Cortez and Co. until 700 years later), and 2) the Maya actually were quite advanced mathematically and scientifically.
Thus, even on an oppression studies basis, there’s no reason to sugarcoat their heinous practice of human sacrifice.
But whoever said oppression studies and its adherents make any sense?
