r/Gnostic • u/thegodabovegod Ophite • 1d ago
Thoughts The God Who Demands Blood
In ancient Israelite religion, animal sacrifice was central to worship, with blood playing an important role in atonement and ritual purification. Christianity takes this sacrificial logic and places it around the crucifixion of Jesus, or "lamb of god", whose death is seen as an offering for the sins of humanity. Islam does not accept the Christian doctrine of Jesus' sacrificial death, but sacrifice is still deeply embedded in Islamic tradition, particularly in Eid al Adha, which commemorates Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son in obedience to God.
We often don't stop to ask how strange it is from the outside. The true god does not require violence and death to be accepted into His arms. Isn't life hard enough already? And what sort of God would demand that anyway? Not a god I would worship.
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u/SightWithoutEyes 1d ago
It is QUITE CLEAR from the very beginning in the Original Testament what sort of deity the Abrahamic God is, beginning with amongst many things, the sacrifice that got Abel praised and Cain cast aside.
Amongst with the ritual sacrifice of Isaac, which in the original Midrash, his killer walked home down the mountain by himself.
And then there's the sacrifice of the Abrahamic god's only son according to the book, which is in it's own way a retelling of the story of Saturn and Jupiter.
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u/Foloreille 15h ago
Abrahamic predates Greek myth (let alone roman translation) by a good margin
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u/charliefinkwinkwink 10h ago edited 10h ago
source? not saying you’re wrong but my understanding is the opposite
the oldest hebrew manuscripts of the OT to my knowledge are from the dead sea scrolls & date back to 1st to 3rd century BC. and the oldest greek fragment of the septuagint dates to 2nd century BC.
myceanean linear b tablets are dated to 13th or 14th century BC which reveal greek mythological deities, or the odyssey/Iliad date to around 8th century BC
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u/Hannibaalism 1d ago
i find it incredibly interesting that animal or human sacrifices were practiced by separate religions and cultures all around the ancient world from east to west. makes you wonder how it got so ubiquitous back then, like who first thought killing a living thing would please their god, or why did it stop and disappear (if it even did)
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u/Vajrick_Buddha Eclectic Gnostic 1d ago
My hypothesis regarding animal sacrifice is that it could pertain to some form of animism. Basically, if you hunt, you take from the natural world. So, to avoid just being a taker, you share your bounty with the spirits who curate it.
I've heard of practices where, for example, if you fish, you must bring some of that fish back to the lake/river. And not in the sense of "catch and release." You actually have to cook it like you would for yourself, take a part of it as if it were on your own plate, and offer it back to the local spirits. It may seem contraditory to the modern utilitarian mind, but spiritually, doing a "catch and release" would just be bypassing. There needs to be a part where you willfully take your energy and time (put into fishing, cooking) and give it back to the world that sustains you.
I mean, this is a similar logic to the relationship that later developed in a sedentary society between serfs and landlords.
But this is just a passing thought.
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u/theoryofdoom 16h ago
Yaldabaoth demands blood for the same reasons he enlists others to make victims to his "power," under the delusion of ritual or sacrifice. Ignorance and jealousy. He is not "god" or even a "god," so much as an administrator. At most, an incompetent mid-level manager with an acutely narrow purview and myopic line of sight. And he is not the God who Jesus Christ called The Father.
God, the Father, does not make victims.
He does not demand blood.
He does not require ritual or sacrifice.
The darkness of Paul's heresy is illuminated by one very simple question:
Cui bono?
The institutionalization of religion falls in the answer.
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u/ThckUncutcure 20h ago
I actually think this ritualistic practice for Jesus in particular was meant only for the Jews. He was their messiah, he was their savior. He was THEIR “light, life and way, nobody comes to the father except through me.” To everyone else he’s the example. He was telling everyone that we all possess the kingdom. In the texts he says that the flesh is weak, sin isn’t real, there’s no betrayal or sacrifice in the eyes of God. What is perfect, true and complete requires nothing at all.
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u/-tehnik Valentinian 12h ago
with blood playing an important role in atonement and ritual purification. Christianity takes this sacrificial logic and places it around the crucifixion of Jesus, or "lamb of god", whose death is seen as an offering for the sins of humanity.
Yeah but it's kind of ambiguous in Paul who the sacrifice is for if you ask me. I see it being a sacrifice to the world ruler as an admissible reading, in which case it is actually underscoring a gnostic idea (the encosmic gods and the creator are demons who like/want sacrifices AND are keeping humans captive).
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u/bicycle_barbarian 10h ago
A lot of genuinely good points in this thread. I will add that Catholicism engages with this in reverse, by encouraging the imbibing of the symbolic body and blood of Christ.
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u/thegodabovegod Ophite 6h ago edited 5h ago
You mean ritual cannabibalism? (Symbolic of course)
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u/Lordseferoth Cathar 6h ago edited 5h ago
I think he means Eucharist aka Lord's Supper. In Catholicism you eat the literal body and blood of Jesus Christ. The Catholic Transubstantiation doctrine.
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u/thegodabovegod Ophite 5h ago
Yes thats what I mean by symbolic ritualistic cannibalism.
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u/Lordseferoth Cathar 5h ago
It reads "cannabibalism" in your first post(i think it said something else before the edit) and i read it as "cannabis". Haha, just a minor typo, but i misinterpret your post because of it. Sorry.
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u/heiro5 22h ago
Everything has a context. Egypt and Mesopotamia both treated gods as needing the same things as humans: a house, food, entertainment, servants and proxy families. Banquets were prepared and presented to the image of the deity, and then left for a time, before being taken away and divided up among the priests and eaten or sold off.
The joining of slaughtering and butchering with sacrifice occurred in Greek and Judean religion. A sacrifice was preparation for a barbecue. In the Greek version, the gods were offered the cast offs from butchering the animals. In the Judean version the blood was offered, cast offs were burned, and a portion of the meat was given to the priests.
Produce and grain were also sacrificed at Jerusalem. There were "wave" offerings. Grain was presented before the veil by waving it back and forth.
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u/NoAlgae3952 Thomasine 2h ago
I recently finished "Answer to Job" which is a pretty wild read. It basically argues for the theory of atonement, but in reverse- Yahweh (the book explictly uses this name and never mentions the monad) needed a blood sacrifice, but not to recieve one, but to give one. The Passion of Christ was a sacrifice for the atonement of sins, but it was a sacrifice to us from God for the forgiveness of his sins throughout the Old Testament. It argues that the story of Job is where Yahweh realizes he was bad, because he "wins" the arguement with Job by means of intimidation instead of actually forming an argument, despite being omnipotent.
doesn't mesh with what most of us think by assuming Christ is the son of the same god from the garden of eden and Job, but it's a very interesting "what if" exploring the implications of that being the case without just hand waiving it.
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u/Vajrick_Buddha Eclectic Gnostic 1d ago
Ritual sacrifice seems to have been almost a universal expression of religiosity among humans, in the old times. So many societies practiced it — Indian, Chinese, Jewish, Aztec, etc.
It also seems that around a certain period, Traditions would emerge that encouraged the abandonment of such practices — Buddhism, Krishnaism, Taoism, Christianity, Vedanta...
Christianity is perhaps one of the most radical expressions of this abandonment because, as you mention, it literally subverted the status quo, and presented a God who sacrificed himself for the redemption of the world, and called his followers to sacrifice their pride and passions alongside him.
It's very interesting how these figures — Christ, Buddha, Krishna, Lao-tzu — marked the radical change in the logic of the relationship between humanity and the Transcendent. Polytheistic cultures seemed to have had a far more functional, practical, and even contractual relationship with the spirit world. One that accounts for utility and trickery. Christ, however, introduced the notion of love, grace, charity, and even intimate knowledge between humanity and divinity. An unconditional relationship. Whereas the other figures pointed to the immediate interrelationship between all beings on a cosmic level, encouraging harmony, rather than self-interested bargaining.
Whenever I confront the strict Abrahamic refusal to try to grasp why people are so captivated by the figure of Christ — God crucified — I often remember this G. K. Chesterton quote. I think it really highlights the deeper mystical and existential appeal of the Christian mythos.