Introduction: Holocaust, Human Sacrifice and Infanticide

Last Sunday was National Sanctity of Life Day first declared as a national observance by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 on the 11th anniversary of Roe v Wade. This year is the first Sanctity of Life Day that is post- Roe v.  Friday, June 24, 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Something I had never thought to see in my lifetime if ever. The truth is that the belief that human life is sacred has been held among a very small minority of nations and peoples throughout history.

In ancient times among pagans, the killing of infants was not commonly accepted. In the lands of the Philistines and the Canaanites, the worship of Moloch and Baal reached its highest devotion with the sacrifice of a child. The worshipers of Baal would take a child and place it into a larger clay pot and then bury that pot in the corner of their home in order to receive the blessing of their bloodthirsty god. The worship of Moloch was much worse. In a ceremony called passing their children through the fire, they would place a living baby in the hands or lap of a bronze idol of Moloch which had been heated by an oven built into the base of the metal idol and the child would literally be scalded to death as the worshipers watched. Is it any wonder that God had Joshua drive out and destroy the inhabitants of that blood polluted land?

Among the Greeks, a child born with deformities would be taken into the wilderness or to a cave and left for the animals and scavengers to devour. In ancient Rome, babies weren’t considered fully human upon birth, instead they gained humanity over time, first with their naming and later when they cut teeth, according to some sources even up to 3 years old the child could still be killed as non-human.

The so-called refined and educated Cicero (106-43 BC) in his On the Laws 3.8 states: “Deformed infants shall be killed.” The “deformity” could simply be an unwanted child, a sickly child, a deformed child or the wrong sex. The Stoic philosopher Seneca (4 BC-65 AD) comments On Anger 1.15: “…mad dogs we knock on the head…unnatural progeny we destroy; we drown even children at birth who are weakly and abnormal.”

Even the preeminent and to this day influential Greek philosopher Aristotle recommends that parents should be compelled by law to expose deformed or handicapped babies. In Politics 7.1335b Aristotle says: “As to exposing or rearing the children born, let there be a law that no deformed child shall be reared;  but on the ground of number of children, if the regular customs hinder any of those born being exposed, there must be a limit fixed to the procreation of offspring…

Nor was it just the life of a child that was considered of no value in the ancient world, all human life was simply something to be given to the bloodthirsty gods. In the 1500s, when the Spanish Conquistadors came to America and conquered the Aztecs, they observed the daily sacrifice of humans atop the great pyramids. A firsthand account of the sacrifices was written by Bernal Diaz del Castillo's. "Hardly a day passed by that these people did not sacrifice from three to four, and even five Indians, tearing the hearts out of their bodies, to present them to the idols and smear blood on the walls of the temple. The arms and legs of these unfortunate beings were then cut off and devoured, just in the same way we should fetch meat from a butcher's shop and eat it: indeed I even believe that human flesh is exposed for sale cut up in their markets."

Human sacrifice had a long history in Mesoamerica, long before the rise to prominence of the Aztec Empire. The Toltec, Mayan and Teotihuacan civilizations all practiced human sacrifice, it was a common practice, accepted and even looked upon as an honor.

In one special year, 1487, the Great Pyramid in what is now Mexico City was complete. They held a massive celebration to inaugurate their great temple and by the Aztecs own count sacrificed 84,000 people over a period of four days. Overall, it is estimated that 250,000 people were sacrificed by the Aztecs across Mexico during an average year.

Do you know what stopped such horrific pagan practices as human sacrifice and infanticide? The Bible, God's Holy Word, stopped it. The Word of God declared that human life was sacred because man was specially created by God in His image and His highest creation and believing this, the people of God began to literally change the world.

One of the resources I copied said this, “The catacombs are filled with very tiny graves with the epitaph “adopted daughter of…” or “adopted son of…” inscribed on them. These inscriptions refer to the many babies and young children Christians rescued from the trash over the centuries. Tertullian says Christians sought out the tiny bodies of newborn babies from the refuse and dung heaps and raised them as their own or tended to them before they died or gave them a decent burial. The Christian idea that each individual person has worth because they were created by God was foreign to the lies of pagan society where the State, the tribe, the collective was the only value they knew.”