Ah, religious diversity

Or a troll's nest full of hornets.

What we see here is the insufficiency of "religious tolerance" as an absolute value. Pluralism is fine, except when it has to find the philosophical wherewithal to exclude religions and forms of religion that threaten the common good. What do we do then? If you think there is no such thing as the common good, you're stuck; the only way you can fight it is by a naked expression of power. If you believe in the idea of the common good, you have to have some kind of objective, transcendent ideal or set of ideals upon which to base it.

Ah, the predictable defense: While Rod uses this story to mock the concept of religious diversity, I'm sure whatwill eventually be revealed is that those involved in this shrine are fringe even to Afro-Caribbean religions and, if they were involved in human sacrifice, they will get the punishment they deserve. We all believe in the common good, Rod, and the set of ideals we use to uphold this-- good old fashioned secularism-- will not be injured by this wacky story.

From what I know of Santeria, which is admittedly little, having only read 2 books about it - "The Altar of My Soul" (ISBN: 0345421558) and "Santeria: The Beliefs And Rituals Of A Growing Religion In America" (ISBN: 0802849733) - the human sacrifice incidents (if that's in fact what they were) have nothing to do with Santeria. I wouldn't, however, be surprised if the participants in whatever sick ritual resulted in those deaths didn't *think* they were practicing Santeria. I wonder if some compromise couldn't be made in the lawsuit. Would the practicioners be willing to have their ritual sites inspected to be in line with accepted slaughtering laws?

Weren't animals slaugh...er sacrificed at Jesus' presentation to the Temple?

Which is why I am very alarmed to hear some African Catholic clergy are seeking permission to offer a blood sacrifice as a "libation to the ancestors" in connection with the Mass. That's very, very retrograde. Santeria has for centuries hidden its rituals under the veneer of the veneration of the saints.

Here's the thing, the guy probably has a good court case. One of the most important religious freedom cases involved Santeria. It's called Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah. http://www.oyez.org/cases/case/?case=1990-1999/1992/1992_91_948 SCOTUS found the city couldn't pass laws that single out a specific religion. Arguably, the fact that the Santeria can raise animals for human sacrifice means Christian churches can give wine to minors or display art of a man on a cross in public. Minority religions make it easier for majority religions to survive.

dbkenner, that film was "The Believers" and it's pretty good, I would say -- I saw it when I was 20. The film shows that Santeria proper stops itself short of human sacrifice, but many of the faithful adherents are into the darker practices as well. B-Dog: "While Rod uses this story to mock the concept of religious diversity..." I think Rod is rightly showing the logical conclusions of believing in so-called diversity as an absolute good.

Pauli -
I've always appreciated Roger Ebert's review of "The Believers." Most notably: "I am as ignorant as most people on the facts about such religions, including the ancient Cuban cult in "The Believers," which keeps its diabolical gods a secret by disguising them as Catholic saints. I would like to imagine that most Caribbean religions, like most religions everywhere, are a comfort to their believers, and hold up a prospect of a saner, more joyous life. I would like to believe that, but the movies give me little reason to. Every voodoo movie ever made has depicted bloodthirsty cults of savagely sadistic murderers, vengefully thirsting for innocent blood. There has been a lot in the papers recently about "Arab-bashing," the practice of creating strongly negative stereotypes of Arabs on TV and in the movies. I'm in agreement. But what about voodoo-bashing? Isn't it just as prejudicial?"

Unless I'm mistaken, didn't Christian liturgies and Passover Seders that require the use of wine enjoy a blanket exemption from Prohibition? I'm afraid I don't really see the difference in principle between that and giving practitioners of Santeria an exemption from statues banning the slaughter of animals. I agree that this does show the limits of religious tolerance as an absolute good, and shows that every society has to have set of basic commonly-accepted, assumed values to survive. Religious tolerance can really work only when the religions being tolerated aren't too terribly different from one another. Unless we want to have a society in which pretty much anything goes.

Susan, As my North Dakota "Norvegian" friends would say: "Uff-Da!" (The equivalent of "Daaaaayum!" All religions and religious rituals, when observed by outsiders, appear to have elements of both the grotesque and the absurd.

Don't jump on her too hard, Christine. Imagine for a second, if it is possible, that you were not a Catholic believer. Then re-read her statement. I perceived no insult there.

Excuse me? Most people find animal sacrifice pretty sick? One and a half books of the Bible talk about almost nothing else. Are we going to start censoring Leviticus? The impulse to use sacrifice as part of religious ritual is almost universal. We more enlightened moderns may be uncomfortable with it, but we need to ask ourselves why it's there, what purpose it serves, and how else we can accomplish the same purpose.
Animal sacrifice doesn't have to lead to human sacrifice--that's ANOTHER lesson to be found in the Bible. Most mainline santeros find human sacrifice inconceivable.
Mainline Muslims, BTW, still engage in animal sacrifice as part of their celebration of a major holiday. So even modern monotheists still do it. At the risk of repeating myself, "EEEUUUWWW" is not an argument. It is just barely evidence.

GIITV: "From what I know of Santeria, which is admittedly little, having only read 2 books about it - "The Altar of My Soul" (ISBN: 034542155 and "Santeria: The Beliefs And Rituals Of A Growing Religion In America" (ISBN: 0802849733) - the human sacrifice incidents (if that's in fact what they were) have nothing to do with Santeria." Well at least you've read a book or two. And you admit you know little. I would bet that those cops who found the "Santeria" shrine don't know the first thing about Santeria and have loosely labeled this crime an act of Santeria followers. Which helped lead the highly educated and illustrious Rod to state: "I hope he loses, because Santeria is ... well, I don't want to break any Bnet rules here, so let's just say it's not a religion I would want practiced in my community."

Modern Judaism no longer practices animal sacrifice just as it no longer practices slavery. It can be dangerous to extrapolate the levitical laws into today's society.
Since the destruction of the Temple prayer and works of charity have replaced sacrifice and there's not too much danger that Muslims are going to permit the rebuilding of the Temple on the site of the Dome of the Rock.

It can be dangerous to extrapolate the levitical laws into today's society.
Incoming visit from curiouser in 5...4...3...2...

I wish you all could see through Rod's conflation here. He's creating a connection between these two stories that doesn't deserve to exist-- in order to serve his purpose of smugly putting down the secular organization of our society. Santeria-related stories just serve the purpose of the day.

becuase of the laws against animal slaughter in unliscensed facilities such as private homes In this case, yes. There are solid health issues in prohibiting people from killing animals in their homes. Last time I was in Europe there was considerable consternation on the part of some landlords because their Muslim tentants slaughtered animals in their homes and plugged up the toilet with bones. The landlords were not amused.

Last time I was in Europe there was considerable consternation on the part of some landlords because their Muslim tentants slaughtered animals in their homes and plugged up the toilet with bones. Provided the landlord had the proper clauses in his lease then he should be able to receive damages from the tenants. Last lease I signed had a whole paragraph about plumbing and my duties to it.

Since she considers Catholicism "foolishness and mysticism" I will have to assume she is Catholic in name only and am led to wonder why she would even proclaim herself as such. It's called thinking outside of the box or playing devil's advocate, or perhaps you read it too quickly getting yourself all emotionally charged up before understanding the context.

To be sure, watsy, I didn't read anything in that post that would lead me to believe that the cat was alive when it was set on fire. The poster in question even stated they didn't see the act happen, they only came upon the remains. That being said - yeah - I am, myself, all for animal rights. I'm also for human rights, and I have a hard time reconciling the right of an animal to not be slaughtered or tortured vs. the right of a human to practice the rituals of his or her faith.

Watsy, OK, I'll let the cat out of the bag. I'm joking. But how do you know the cat was burnt alive? You need the CSI folks to determine that. It could have been found already dead or maybe lethally injected first. Or given the ol' baseball bat in the head like DeNiro's Capone in that "Untouchables" remake. Or maybe the pet owner just opted for cremation rather than burial and didn't have funds for the crematorium. Commenter Lisa provided no real evidence pointing to animal sacrifice, e.g., strange markings or symbols or other indications. Maybe she could clue us in on what gave her the "sense of danger and wrongness" beyond her own imagination.

It seems to me the "crime" here was the one of not living out in the country. People in the country kill animals all the time - for food. Since we have a First Amendment that compels governments to not give any special status to religion, it seems to me that if animals can legally be killed for food, killing them for any other reason is permissible as well.
This is of course assuming that the slaughtering is humane (I'm not going to get into a discussion about meat eating vs. vegetarianism - it's not the point.) But legally I don't see how you can distinguish between a housewife killing the chicken she just nabbed from the henhouse and a Santeria sacrifice. If people live in a suburb with particular ordinances against it, then yes, they can be forbidden - but that has nothing to do with religion.

You're a tad reckless implying that the Santeria (or whatevers) sacrificed people. Wait until Santeria priests are in court for manslaughter/murder for it, I say.

I once had a high school student who was into Nordic mythology break a new pencil and toss it into the wastebasket before taking an exam. He told me it was a sacrifice. Indeed he had the original idea of sacrifice--taking something useful to human survival and deliberatly destroying it so that no human could use it so as to receive a favor from the gods. Waste was the sacrifice. I suggest that we just don't comprehend the waste element of sacrifice and can't appreciate it. Waste as worship? I guess in the the pre industrial age, wasting what man had to work so hard to produce was a way of killing himself.
For me to give money which I have earned so that someone else may eat, money that I might have used for my own enjoyment or even for my own basic needs, that is sacrifice that makes sense to me. No waste involved. Something useful for human life is produced, not annihilated. I don't enjoy it but someone else does.
And already even along with the animal sacrifces it was becoming evident in the OT that the sacrifice God wanted was the good works and the humble heart. It's like the two ideas are fighting each other. And while Christianity taught that the animal sacrifices of the Old Law were done with, still Christian theology and liturgy to this day can't shake off the old language and the old ideas that a bloody and once and for all human sacrifice was necessary to satisfy an angry God.
I'm not for santeria but I can see how a lot of Catholicism fed and feeds right into it.
Our theology needs work before third world Christianity takes over, as it will.

I'm not really a cat person or a dog person. I'm not really an animal person at all.... I don't know where I was going with this, but I just want to say that I hope this thread never, ever ends. When it does it will be sad, like when you realize you've seen all the Python skits ever made.

I don't mean to troll, but it seems to me that the underlying problem most people have with Santeria has nothing to do with animal sacrifices (as has been pointed out exclusively on this comment wall, most of us participate in the downstream effects of sacrificing animal flesh to one end or another thrice daily). Rather, I think most Christians object to the Africanization of Christian narrative. But more bluntly, we're pissed off because they made our good white religion into a black religion when we told them they couldn't have their old black beliefs anymore.
If you can't appreciate the power struggle and class dynamic underlying Santeria's infusion of traditional African religion with Christian imagery, then you probably shouldn't really say anything about it in the same sense that if you don't understand anything about sin then you should probably keep silent about salvation.

But more bluntly, we're pissed off because they made our good white religion into a black religion when we told them they couldn't have their old black beliefs anymore. Absurd. I'm pissed off about it because I think it's a form of demon worship, and besides which, it's savage.

Daniel, I'm trying to put my finger on what I don't like about this. I don't have a problem with people practicing religious beliefs in a different sort of way. There's no way for me to say what I'm thinking without sounding like a snob, so I'm going to just say it and be done with it. Killing animals as a sacrifice to the gods is primitive. I wouldn't think much of this if I heard that a tribe was doing this in Africa. I wouldn't care if people in this country built a fire in a pit in the backyard and did a dance around it to the beat of drums while wearing a loin cloth. I would say, "to each his own." But I associate killing animals to sacrifice to gods in this country as something that one with has a sick mind would do. We talk about animal rights in this country and teach children lessons about life through books and videos with talking animal characters. We don't slaughter them.

We don't slaughter them. You mean outside of slaughterhouses, right? And while we might pride ourself on the "humanity" of our methods of disposal, I for one have no doubt that the chicken in my Chipotle burrito were not kept in very "humane" living conditions. I'm pissed off about it because I think it's a form of demon worship, and besides which, it's savage. I have a hard time with the demonism argument. Our sight is obscured by so many planks (the church ignoring poverty, the church ignoring the environment, white churches all over the south refusing to apologize for their part in fighting against the Civil Rights movement and in doing so rejecting their black brethren, etc) that I doubt we can differentiate a speck from a demon at all. And savage? Really? What a strange word to choose, given said word's long history of being used to denigrate any less-developed, usually indigenous or African custom that we don't understand or find aesthetically reprehensible. So what are you saying when you call it savage? Are you saying that it poses some threat to our society? Or are you simply saying that it is different from our norms and I can dismiss it pejoratively on that basis alone? If the former, then you should probably make that argument explicit; but be warned that such an argument is empirically challenging. If by savage you mean the latter, then (to quote my mom), "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."

Christine -- I don't see much difference if somebody uses the blood and guts for what they perceive as a higher purpose. How is it any different than utilizing it for nourishment, since we really do not HAVE to eat meat. I admire people who do not eat meat, but that is not me. I'm a professed carnivore at least right now.
It was mentioned that one of the offenses was breaking laws about slaughtering in an inappropriate place. While I let my husband do the slaughtering, I do the dressing, without a permit and on my premises. Will I not be allowed to do that? Or is it purely disgusting because it is a religious practice?
I do not see much difference in this situation because of the end result. What I understand to be offensive is that it is "primitive." You equate it with demons, I do not.
I mean, I can entertain the argument that people shouldn't do it if absolutely NO ONE was doing it for any reason, including eating -- Especially since I do have access to a grocery store. I just happen to prefer homegrown food.
And I presume that some here are just mortified that some people do do their own butchering. I'll becha.

Eating's different. I live in an area where you can't hunt deer because of the human population. It's a problem.
Imagine the world if all of the animals kept breeding and people didn't eat them.
Those who believe that God created the world as it is with intelligence and intention should not be opposed to eating animals. There's a reason that some animals are meat eaters and some are plant eaters. I think that population control might have something to do with it. The problem with man is that our technology has given us an unfair advantage. But that doesn't make eating meat wrong. It means that we have to use reason to determine how and when to do that. Slaughtering animals for gods that have no physical body seems like a violation of animal rights.

here we go -- communion? Ha! No, seriously, I found this really funny. Anybody who as ever read Stranger in a Strange Land should have some appreciation of the shocking nature of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of an object of reverence.

I agree with Moonstar. What KFC does to chickens is just wrong. Further, I find KFC's success indicative of the innate barbarity of man. For chicken done right, one MUST go to Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles in Los Angeles.

"I saw a sign the other day on a meat company truck that said "If God did not want us to eat animals, he would not have made them out of meat." I chuckled at that and the coincidence of this thread going on." Here's your problem. At least from the Judeo-Christian perspective, meat eating is seen as a concession to human weakness after the Fall. It was not considered the ideal. Adam and Eve didn't eat meat in the Garden -- in fact, every living being was vegetarian. I'm not going to do a Bible Bowl here but you can look it up for yourself. And I'd be careful about extrapolating that too far -- some primitive (oh, there's that word again) societies practiced cannibalism. And Daniel, yes, the practitioners of Santeria *do* consider partaking of the slaughtered animal as a form of "communion" among themselves and their ancestors, spirit beings, etc. The big difference there is that in Christianity we believe in what the Christian East calls "theosis" -- by partaking of the body and blood of the risen and glorified Christ "God becomes man so that man can become God" (i.e., man shares in the glorification of his nature while still remaining a creature of God). Watsy, I agree with you -- just as children are vulnerable to the abuses of the society around them so are animals and both deserve protection from cruelty and exploitation.

One way to protect animals IMHO is to help ensure they have an environment to live in.
Where's Roscoe's by the way?

Roscoe's is in LA, various locations. My fav is on Gower at Sunset.

'As St. Paul so eloquently put it, the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit",' Well that punches holes in the whole crunchy argument about food, doesn't it. I thought the premise of the crunchy approach to food was that it is based on a sense of the holy. Christians have this push-pull issue between the Kingdom and the world. "In it but not of it"- yet a crunchy con can equate the correct sourcing of a meal with reflecting/honoring/living in accordance with the Kingdom, but have problems with a religion that has no apparent disconnect between relationship between the spirit and physical worlds. Which is it? This is a perpetual confusion to me as I read the various Christian arguments. I've been following religious news, well, religiously, for over 40 years and this world/Kingdom struggle seems to be a constant theme that Christians struggle with. Wish Rod would start a thread on that. It does address the whole crunchy approach. Rod and other crunchies, how exactly does your premise that certain ways of living in the world are more "authentic" than others square with "in the world but not of it?" In what ways are your chosen paths not "of the world" when the argument you make for your spirituality is made in terms of how you live in the world and what material choices you make? This is a genuine question.

I don't have a problem with animal sacrifice in Santeria or candomble, as long as the animal is given a quick death and its meat isn't wasted.
Come to think of it, I don't have a problem eating meat as long as it was organically and locally raised, ethically slaughtered, and every-bit-including-the-squeal gets used, and food isn't wasted.
Mind you, I don't mess with blood in ritual very often. (And when I have I've pricked my own finger. That's the only ethical way to do it in my path.) But my grandma taught me how to wring a chicken's neck when I was a little girl, and always said that you don't waste food because that chicken died so I could eat Sunday dinner. Even at eight, I felt that there was some sacred responsibility there.
I think you can discuss the mechanics of slaughtering an animal and the pros and cons of doing that in a high-population-density area without discussing the morality of it.
I recommend dipping into Frazier's "The Golden Bough" if you want to understand why animistic religions use blood sacrifices.

any of the Afro-Caribbean religions practiced in Latin America, some of which are wickeder than others (for example, palo mayombe, related to Santeria but trafficking in darker spirits, can involve human sacrifice).

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Ah yes, that "wicked" Palo Mayombe... what school-child could forget the Palo Mayombe Crusades? Or the Palo Mayombe Inquisition?

But seriously folks:

1) The constitutionality of animal sacrifice was settled by Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520 (1993)

2) Palo Mayombe is related to Santeria only by virtue of geography (Cuba)

3) Human sacrifice is no more a part of Palo Mayombe than it is part of the Oprah Book-of-the-Month Club

4) Skulls fall well within the tradition of Christian relics, i.e. "snippits of flesh, bones, and sometimes clothing of holy men and women of the past."

Have a nice day