Stephen Green posted about CBS’s very woke take on child sacrifice at a Teotihuacan altar in what’s now Guatemala: It was a gentle, nuanced thing, non-violent, and spiritual. Yeah, right. But we must admit something right now: Our child-sacrifice culture is infinitely worse.

The cool thing is that another bit of archaeology has emerged from the Latin American jungle. I find it endlessly fascinating how the Earth still hides so many secrets about our past. As CBS reports, the Teotihuacan altar—that is, an altar to what became one of the central Aztec gods—emerged in Tikal National Park in Guatemala:

Edwin Román, who leads the South Tikal Archaeological Project within the park, said the discovery shows the sociopolitical and cultural interaction between the Maya of Tikal and Teotihuacan's elite between 300 and 500 A.D.

Román said the discovery also reinforces the idea that Tikal was a cosmopolitan center at that time, a place where people visited from other cultures, affirming its importance as a center of cultural convergence.

Image: YouTube screen grab.

What’s archaeologically mysterious is how this altar appeared there, given that the Aztec culture, which elevated the Teotihuacan worship to extreme and blood heights, came along about 900 years after the altar.

Oh, there’s one other thing about the newly discovered temple, and that’s the fact that it was used primarily for killing children:

Lorena Paiz, the archaeologist who led the discovery, said that the Teotihuacan altar was believed to have been used for sacrifices, “especially of children.”

“The remains of three children not older than 4 years were found on three sides of the altar,” Paiz told The Associated Press.

Fear not, though. This wasn’t some nasty, pedophile child murder stuff. Instead, it was death with dignity for the greater good:

María Belén Méndez, an archaeologist who was not involved with the project, said the discovery confirms “that there has been an interconnection between both cultures and what their relationships with their gods and celestial bodies was like.”

“We see how the issue of sacrifice exists in both cultures [Mayan and Aztec]. It was a practice; it’s not that they were violent, it was their way of connecting with the celestial bodies,” she said.

Stephen Green correctly calls out Méndez for that statement:

Well, yeah — it is that they were violent. If Teotihuacan culture was anything like the Aztecs, who followed in their bloody footsteps, they carved the still-beating hearts out of children under the age of four. But no matter how the Teotihuacan did it, “their way of connecting with the celestial bodies” was a murderous business.

However, here’s a thought that ought to embarrass us all. In a way, Méndez has a point.

The children sacrificed at that altar weren’t slaughtered willy-nilly. Instead, they were a gift from the people to their gods. The relatively small number of children who died at that altar were unwittingly performing a service for the entire community by protecting them from the arbitrary and capricious nature of pagan deities who, unless placated, would wreak havoc on an insufficiently respectful and generous community.

In America, abortion—which we were once assured would be “safe, legal, and rare”—has resulted in the deaths of roughly 65 million children. Significantly, abortion is no longer to protect women from death, abuse, or becoming a pathetic societal outcast. Instead, it is for the woman’s convenience to allow her to finish her education, hold on to her career, dump her boyfriend, or just have consequence-free sex.

In 2004, one woman’s narrative led to a very famous essay. She explained to the author that when she discovered she would have triplets, she thought to herself, “I’ll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise.” That thought was a death sentence for two of the triplets.

Eighteen years later, an abortion activist named Sarah Lopez testified before Congress that  “Having an abortion was the easiest decision I’ve ever made. It was transformative, it was liberating, it was an act of self-love.”

What Lopez said (and the Shout Your Abortion crowd would echo) is incredibly profound...in a bad way. While people once sacrificed babies to placate the gods, women now do so to benefit and transform themselves. They are the new gods and, with 65 million dead babies, infinitely more bloodthirsty than the old ones could ever dream of being.

So, before we sneer at those long-ago Teotihuacan worshippers, we need to remember that we are worse, both in motive and sheer numbers.