From: sheaffer@netcom.com (Robert Sheaffer)
Subject: Re: Peace-loving Paradise of the Goddess
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 92 16:57:09 GMT
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services  (408 241-9760 guest) 

In article <1992Apr16.020715.24154@s1.gov> lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich) writes:
>:        (Sheaffer writes:)
>:             From  the following passages, I think you'll agree  that  as 
>:        good  skeptics, we would have to conclude that the *most  likely* 
>:        reconstruction  of the "Goddess societies" of "Old Europe"  would 
>:        be  to  assume  them  more or less  like  the  surviving  Goddess 
>:        cultures  described  below, and not as  some  peaceful  "paradise 
>:        lost."
>
>	The article stated that human sacrifice had reached a low
>during the Buddhist era, and also stated that the Khonds had been
>pushed southwards by the Aryans. So the Khonds are not "unmolested".
>
>	I note also that Robert Sheaffer presents no direct evidence
>that Old Europe was like the Khonds 

  Nor does Gimbutas or anyone else present any "direct evidence" that
  it was a "female-centered" paradise of sweetness and light. It was
  a prehistoric culture, and NOBODY has any direct evidence of what
  its social life was like. Gimbutas and other feminists like to
  portray it as a vanished 'Paradise Lost', where women had unprecedented
  power (even if it was not an actual matriarchy). But it is more
  reasonable to conclude that the "Goddess culture" of Old Europe is
  similar to those cultures surviving into recent times that still
  follow the ancient Goddess practices. Especially since we DO have
  reason to believe that the peace-loving Goddess worshippers of Old
  Europe practiced human sacrifice AT LEAST occasionally.


>-- indeed, there is little or no
>evidence of death by violence, which only started appearing when the
>Kurgans started showing up. I concede that this does not exclude death
>by strangling or poisoning or drowning or some other way that does not
>leave some imprint on the skeleton or some stray artifacts, such as a
>broken-off arrowhead. All he could come up with was that one burial.
>Among the Minoans, there has been only one plausible case of human
>sacrifice found, that of a young man who had been stabbed in a temple
>that had been wrecked by an earthquake. This sacrifice might have been
>done after a big earthquake, only to be interrupted by another
>earthquake's destroying the temple (earthquakes sometimes occur in
>swarms). So while human sacrifice was occasionally practiced in
>pre-Indo-European Europe, it was almost certainly not a regular
>occurrence. 
>
>	Thus, Old Europe was probably _not_ like the Khonds in respect
>to human sacrifice.

As I said, Loren would have us believe that the Peace-Loving feminists of
the ancient Goddess cultures only practiced human sacrifice under
extreme duress, like when a recovering alcoholic falls off the wagon.
Another possible interpretation of the "sacrifice preserved under earthquake
debris": human sacrifice was such a COMMON occurrence in the temples
of the Peace-Loving Goddess socies that a random event like an
earthquake, creating a random "snapshot" of a moment of time, 
was likely to preserve one.

In any case, contemporary Horrid Patriarchal societies are
definitely unlike the Goddess-worshippers in respect to human sacrifice,
in having eliminated it! 
-- 
  
        Robert Sheaffer - Scepticus Maximus - sheaffer@netcom.com
  
 Past Chairman, The Bay Area Skeptics - for whom I speak only when authorized!

     "In the 1970's the world will undergo famines - hundreds of millions
     of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs 
     embarked upon now ... in 1985, when it is calculated [under the most
     optimistic scenario] that the major die-back will be over, ..."
       
                       Dr. Paul Ehrlich, "The Population Bomb," 1968