There are also sacrificial motifs that move disturbingly close to human sacrifice. In the Abrahamic traditions, for example, the willingness of Abraham/Ibrahim to sacrifice his son is presented as a peak test of obedience—and in Islam it is commemorated annually in Eid al-Adha, the “Festival of Sacrifice,” in which animal sacrifice functions as a memorial of that story. And in Christianity, the theme of sacrifice is carried into the central story of Jesus: a dramatic moral and symbolic reframing of sacrifice into self-sacrifice, offered “for others.”
Nor is sacrifice some oddity of the Abrahamic traditions. Across much of the ancient world, sacrificial traditions were common, and they were often brutal. Ancient Greek religion had animal sacrifice. Vedic religion in India revolved around yajña, sacrificial ritual. Ancient China too had elaborate sacrificial practices directed toward ancestors and higher powers, sometimes involving animals and at times human beings. The Aztecs are especially notorious for human sacrifice. And the roots of all this may go back shockingly far. A 2019 archaeological paper on symbolic destruction says that “the earliest evidence, dated to about 26,000 BP,” comes from Dolní Věstonice, in the form of making and then “exploding” clay figurines. If that interpretation is right, proto-sacrificial or ritually destructive behaviour belongs among the earliest traces of symbolic culture that we have.
Why would an all-powerful deity, especially one associated with the highest standards of morality, want a dead animal or a burnt work of art as a gift? One might think that a god worth revering would consider it a gift if you were to help other people, or care for the natural world, rather than to destroy objects or kill things. But sacrificial systems do not usually work that way.
Sacrifice is, in my view, an extension of ordinary human ideas about reciprocity and gratitude—infused with magical thinking. In a community we do favors, give gifts, and care for one another. These behaviors can be altruistic, but they are also supported by norms of reciprocity. If one believes that a mystical power controls destiny, fertility, weather, health, wealth, or military success, it becomes psychologically “reasonable,” within that worldview, to give that power a gift—hoping for a return.
And once a person enters this mindset, the logic can become self-sealing. If you make sacrifices and misfortune still comes, you can conclude the offering wasn’t sufficient, wasn’t sincere enough, or wasn’t given with the right purity of heart—so you must increase it next time. If something good happens afterward, it feels like proof that the sacrifice worked, and should be repeated. In this way, practicing sacrifice can become an escalating, brutal, and destructive behaviour. The sacrificed animals—often the most vulnerable and least able to “consent” to the human story being told about them—do not get much say in the matter.
Another motivation for sacrificial rituals likely came from the brutal necessities of ancient life: hunting animals, or killing domestic animals for food. Most humans bond to animals easily, and it would be psychologically troubling to watch an animal struggle and suffer. Ritual can function as moral anesthetic: a way to consecrate violence, to assuage guilt, and to turn a grim necessity into a story of gratitude, order, and meaning.
Sacrifice can also be political performance. Public ritual can consolidate hierarchy, especially priestly hierarchy, display power, intensify fear, and signal unity. It is not hard to see how sacrifice functions as a kind of social technology: it makes shared belief visible and costly. It puts loyalty on display. It shows who is serious, who is obedient, who can be trusted, and who has the authority to declare what counts as holy.
This is also where sacrifice connects to group psychology. Some scholars have argued that costly rituals—things you would not do unless you were committed—operate as signals that strengthen trust and cooperation within a group, partly by filtering out free riders. A community bound together by shared sacrifice can feel safer, warmer, and more morally serious to its members. But that same mechanism can harden boundaries and intensify suspicion of outsiders.
And costly sacrifice does not merely send a signal to other people; it also works on the person making the sacrifice. People are generally reluctant to admit that they have suffered for nothing. So the greater the sacrifice, the stronger the pressure to reinterpret the suffering as meaningful, noble, or necessary. That helps make sacrificial systems self-protective and self-reinforcing. The cost itself becomes part of the “evidence” that the belief must matter.
Speaking of reciprocity: it is a strongly selected trait to favor and help genetic relatives, sometimes even in self-sacrificial ways. If there is a person who has a trait that causes them to selectively help close relatives, then that trait will tend to persist in the family line, because close relatives are more likely to carry the same genes that helped produce that tendency in the first place. This is a simple evolutionary logic: kin altruism increases the survival and reproductive success of the shared family “pool,” even when it costs the individual something in the short run.
But humans do not walk around calculating degrees of genetic relatedness. Instead, we rely on crude, fast estimates—cues that, over most of human history, were often correlated with kinship and shared ancestry. People who live near each other, marry each other, and raise children together will, over generations, tend to share not only genes but also language, accent, customs, dress, habits, and social norms. They may also tend, on average, to resemble one another physically more than they resemble people from a distant village, tribe, or lineage. Conversely, people who look different, speak differently, or practice very different customs are often from a different village, tribe, or family network—and therefore are somewhat less likely to be as closely genetically related as the people who share your immediate cultural and familial world.
Similarity of appearance, familiarity of accent, shared habits, shared rituals, shared dress, and shared taboos can all become proxies—very imperfect proxies—for “one of us.” Religion gives people common dress, common restrictions, common foods, common sacrifices, common songs, common stories, and common enemies. In other words, it manufactures the feeling of kinship, even among people who are not literally kin.
The mind has evolved to be slightly more generous, trusting, and self-sacrificing toward those who are more likely to be “one of us,” so it follows that it may also be less generous, more suspicious, or more emotionally distant toward those who feel like “not us.” These tendencies are not destiny, and they are not moral justification—but they are part of the psychological and evolutionary foundation of prejudice. These are precisely the sorts of inherited inclinations we must learn to recognize, challenge, and actively override.
Religion can sometimes widen the circle of felt family. But it can also strengthen the distinction between those inside the group and those outside it. Once sacrifice, loyalty, and group identity are fused together, shared customs can take on unusual emotional and moral weight, and group boundaries can begin to feel especially important. The stronger those boundaries become, the easier it is for outsiders to be viewed with suspicion, distance, or moral distrust. This does not mean religion always produces hostility, or that it does so uniquely. These are broader features of human social psychology. But religion can give them a sacred language, a ritual structure, and a greater sense of seriousness. In that way, stronger religious boundaries can contribute to increased exclusion and, in some cases, increased hostility between groups. Religion does not invent this psychology, but it can reinforce it.
Reciprocity, Magical Thinking, and Social Technology
Sacrifice is, in my view, an extension of ordinary human ideas about reciprocity and gratitude—infused with magical thinking. In a community we do favors, give gifts, and care for one another. These behaviors can be altruistic, but they are also supported by norms of reciprocity. If one believes that a mystical power controls destiny, fertility, weather, health, wealth, or military success, it becomes psychologically “reasonable,” within that worldview, to give that power a gift—hoping for a return.
And once a person enters this mindset, the logic can become self-sealing. If you make sacrifices and misfortune still comes, you can conclude the offering wasn’t sufficient, wasn’t sincere enough, or wasn’t given with the right purity of heart—so you must increase it next time. If something good happens afterward, it feels like proof that the sacrifice worked, and should be repeated. In this way, practicing sacrifice can become an escalating, brutal, and destructive behaviour. The sacrificed animals—often the most vulnerable and least able to “consent” to the human story being told about them—do not get much say in the matter.
Another motivation for sacrificial rituals likely came from the brutal necessities of ancient life: hunting animals, or killing domestic animals for food. Most humans bond to animals easily, and it would be psychologically troubling to watch an animal struggle and suffer. Ritual can function as moral anesthetic: a way to consecrate violence, to assuage guilt, and to turn a grim necessity into a story of gratitude, order, and meaning.
Sacrifice can also be political performance. Public ritual can consolidate hierarchy, especially priestly hierarchy, display power, intensify fear, and signal unity. It is not hard to see how sacrifice functions as a kind of social technology: it makes shared belief visible and costly. It puts loyalty on display. It shows who is serious, who is obedient, who can be trusted, and who has the authority to declare what counts as holy.
This is also where sacrifice connects to group psychology. Some scholars have argued that costly rituals—things you would not do unless you were committed—operate as signals that strengthen trust and cooperation within a group, partly by filtering out free riders. A community bound together by shared sacrifice can feel safer, warmer, and more morally serious to its members. But that same mechanism can harden boundaries and intensify suspicion of outsiders.
And costly sacrifice does not merely send a signal to other people; it also works on the person making the sacrifice. People are generally reluctant to admit that they have suffered for nothing. So the greater the sacrifice, the stronger the pressure to reinterpret the suffering as meaningful, noble, or necessary. That helps make sacrificial systems self-protective and self-reinforcing. The cost itself becomes part of the “evidence” that the belief must matter.
Kin Altruism
Speaking of reciprocity: it is a strongly selected trait to favor and help genetic relatives, sometimes even in self-sacrificial ways. If there is a person who has a trait that causes them to selectively help close relatives, then that trait will tend to persist in the family line, because close relatives are more likely to carry the same genes that helped produce that tendency in the first place. This is a simple evolutionary logic: kin altruism increases the survival and reproductive success of the shared family “pool,” even when it costs the individual something in the short run.
But humans do not walk around calculating degrees of genetic relatedness. Instead, we rely on crude, fast estimates—cues that, over most of human history, were often correlated with kinship and shared ancestry. People who live near each other, marry each other, and raise children together will, over generations, tend to share not only genes but also language, accent, customs, dress, habits, and social norms. They may also tend, on average, to resemble one another physically more than they resemble people from a distant village, tribe, or lineage. Conversely, people who look different, speak differently, or practice very different customs are often from a different village, tribe, or family network—and therefore are somewhat less likely to be as closely genetically related as the people who share your immediate cultural and familial world.
Similarity of appearance, familiarity of accent, shared habits, shared rituals, shared dress, and shared taboos can all become proxies—very imperfect proxies—for “one of us.” Religion gives people common dress, common restrictions, common foods, common sacrifices, common songs, common stories, and common enemies. In other words, it manufactures the feeling of kinship, even among people who are not literally kin.
The mind has evolved to be slightly more generous, trusting, and self-sacrificing toward those who are more likely to be “one of us,” so it follows that it may also be less generous, more suspicious, or more emotionally distant toward those who feel like “not us.” These tendencies are not destiny, and they are not moral justification—but they are part of the psychological and evolutionary foundation of prejudice. These are precisely the sorts of inherited inclinations we must learn to recognize, challenge, and actively override.
Belonging and Group Boundaries
Religion can sometimes widen the circle of felt family. But it can also strengthen the distinction between those inside the group and those outside it. Once sacrifice, loyalty, and group identity are fused together, shared customs can take on unusual emotional and moral weight, and group boundaries can begin to feel especially important. The stronger those boundaries become, the easier it is for outsiders to be viewed with suspicion, distance, or moral distrust. This does not mean religion always produces hostility, or that it does so uniquely. These are broader features of human social psychology. But religion can give them a sacred language, a ritual structure, and a greater sense of seriousness. In that way, stronger religious boundaries can contribute to increased exclusion and, in some cases, increased hostility between groups. Religion does not invent this psychology, but it can reinforce it.
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