Sacrificing Goats

The ancient Hebrews used to do this (that's what the Day of Atonement is all about - the scape-goat, etc. etc.) ; perhaps the Hebrews borrowed the custom from other ancient Middle-Eastern cultures, I don't know.  But to see that modern-day Islamists STILL do it, on a regular basis -- to ward off the evil eye!?!  Oh my.  How sad that the followers of Islam still believe that their God requires blood sacrifice from an innocent animal in order to perform "charity" and act as a protective mechanism.  Can someone please explain to me just what the differences are between the practices of ancient Judaism and modern Islam when ti comes to animal sacrifice?  And these people, of the same blood, are killing each other daily?  So much for their false gods.

Isis sent me this article - but not the sentiments written above.  She is far more civilized than I.

A Reuters report at Yahoo news:
Leader slaughters goats to ward off evil?
Wed Jan 27, 10:47 am ET
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has a black goat slaughtered at his house almost every day to ward off "evil eyes" and protect him from "black magic," a newspaper reported Wednesday.

A spokesman for the president told the Dawn newspaper the goats were slaughtered as an act of Sadaqah -- meaning "voluntary charity" in Islam whereby one gives out money or the meat of a slaughtered animal to the poor to win Allah's blessing and stave off misfortune.

"It has been an old practice of Mr Zardari to offer Sadaqah. He has been doing this for a long time," the spokesman, Farhatullah Babar, told the paper.

Pakistan is a predominantly Muslim country where many of the well-off offer Sadaqah. Though Muslim, many people also follow certain superstitious practices.

Hundreds of goats had been sacrificed at Zardari's house since he was sworn in September 2008, the Dawn newspaper reported.

It said Zardari's detractors would see in his "new-found religiosity" a sign of nervousness in the face of growing woes.

Zardari, who rose to power after the assassination of his wife, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, in late 2007, has become increasingly unpopular and faces a range of problems from Islamist militancy to a stagnant economy and political rivalry.

A Supreme Court ruling last month throwing out an amnesty for Zardari, several top aides and thousands of political activists and government figures triggered a political storm and expectation that Zardari was on his way out.

(Reporting by Zeeshan Haider; Editing by Robert Birsel)

Found: An Ancient Monument to the Soul

Story from The New York Times By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD Published: November 17, 2008 In a mountainous kingdom in what is now southeastern Turkey, there lived in the eighth century B.C. a royal official, Kuttamuwa, who oversaw the completion of an inscribed stone monument, or stele, to be erected upon his death. The words instructed mourners to commemorate his life and afterlife with feasts “for my soul that is in this stele.” University of Chicago archaeologists who made the discovery last summer in ruins of a walled city near the Syrian border said the stele provided the first written evidence that the people in this region held to the religious concept of the soul apart from the body. By contrast, Semitic contemporaries, including the Israelites, believed that the body and soul were inseparable, which for them made cremation unthinkable, as noted in the Bible. Circumstantial evidence, archaeologists said, indicated that the people at Sam’al, the ancient city, practiced cremation. The site is known today as Zincirli (pronounced ZIN-jeer-lee). Other scholars said the find could lead to important insights into the dynamics of cultural contact and exchange in the borderlands of antiquity where Indo-European and Semitic people interacted in the Iron Age. The official’s name, for example, is Indo-European: no surprise, as previous investigations there had turned up names and writing in the Luwian language from the north. But the stele also bears southern influences. The writing is in a script derived from the Phoenician alphabet and a Semitic language that appears to be an archaic variant of Aramaic. The discovery and its implications were described last week in interviews with archaeologists and a linguist at the University of Chicago, who excavated and translated the inscription. “Normally, in the Semitic cultures, the soul of a person, their vital essence, adheres to the bones of the deceased,” said David Schloen, an archaeologist at the university’s Oriental Institute and director of the excavations. “But here we have a culture that believed the soul is not in the corpse but has been transferred to the mortuary stone.” A translation of the inscription by Dennis Pardee, a professor of Near Eastern languages and civilization at Chicago, reads in part: “I, Kuttamuwa, servant of [the king] Panamuwa, am the one who oversaw the production of this stele for myself while still living. I placed it in an eternal chamber [?] and established a feast at this chamber: a bull for [the god] Hadad, a ram for [the god] Shamash and a ram for my soul that is in this stele.” Dr. Pardee said the word used for soul, nabsh, was Aramaic, a language spoken throughout northern Syria and parts of Mesopotamia in the eighth century. But the inscription seemed to be a previously unrecognized dialect. In Hebrew, a related language, the word for soul is nefesh. In addition to the writing, a pictorial scene chiseled into the well-preserved stele depicts the culture’s view of the afterlife. A bearded man wearing a tasseled cap, presumably Kuttamuwa, raises a cup of wine and sits before a table laden with food, bread and roast duck in a stone bowl. In other societies of the region, scholars say, this was an invitation to bring customary offerings of food and drink to the tomb of the deceased. Here family and descendants supposedly feasted before a stone slab in a kind of chapel. Archaeologists have found no traces there of a tomb or bodily remains. Joseph Wegner, an Egyptologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the research, said cult offerings to the dead were common in the Middle East, but not the idea of a soul separate from the body — except in Egypt. In ancient Egypt, Dr. Wegner noted, the human entity has separate components. The body is important, and the elite went to great expense to mummify and entomb it for eternity. In death, though, a life force or spirit known as ka was immortal, and a soul known as ba, which was linked to personal attributes, fled the body after death. Dr. Wegner said the concept of a soul held by the people at Sam’al “sounds vaguely Egyptian in its nature.” But there was nothing in history or archaeology, he added, to suggest that the Egyptian civilization had a direct influence on this border kingdom. [What? Like these people would have neve heard of the Egyptians or their religious beliefs? That's a lot of baloney! They haven't found the proof yet - may never do so - that doesn't mean contact and cultural blending did not happen, it just means we can't prove it. We know it happens today; people haven't changed since the beginning of human history, the same things happened back then as today. As the writer of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes succinctly wrote: There is nothing new under the sun.] Other scholars are expected to weigh in after Dr. Schloen and Dr. Pardee describe their findings later this week in Boston at meetings of the American Schools of Oriental Research and the Society of Biblical Literature. Lawrence E. Stager, an archaeologist at Harvard who excavates in Israel, said that from what he had learned so far the stele illustrated “to a great degree the mixed cultural heritage in the region at that time” and was likely to prompt “new and exciting discoveries in years to come.” Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute, said the stele was a “rare and most informative discovery in having written evidence together with artistic and archaeological evidence from the Iron Age.” The 800-pound basalt stele, three feet tall and two feet wide, was found in the third season of excavations at Zincirli by the Neubauer Expedition of the Oriental Institute. The work is expected to continue for seven more years, supported in large part by the Neubauer Family Foundation of Chicago. The site, near the town of Islahiye in Gaziantep province, was controlled at one time by the Hittite Empire in central Turkey, then became the capital of a small independent kingdom. In the eighth century, the city was still the seat of kings, including Panamuwa, but they were by then apparently subservient to the Assyrian Empire. After that empire’s collapse, the city’s fortunes declined, and the place was abandoned late in the seventh century. A German expedition, from 1888 to 1902, was the first to explore the city’s past. It uncovered thick city walls of stone and mud brick and monumental gates lined with sculpture and inscriptions. These provided the first direct evidence of Indo-European influence on the kingdom. After the Germans suspended operations, the ruins lay unworked until the Chicago team began digging in 2006, concentrating on the city beyond the central citadel, which had been the focus of the German research. Much of the 100-acre site has now been mapped by remote-sensing magnetic technology capable of detecting buried structures. This summer, on July 21, workers excavating what appeared to be a large dwelling came upon the rounded top of the stele and saw the first line of the inscription. Dr. Schloen and Amir Fink, a doctoral student in archaeology at Tel Aviv University, bent over to read. Almost immediately, they and others on the team recognized that the words were Semitic and the name of the king was familiar; it had appeared in the inscriptions found by the Germans. As the entire stele was exposed, Dr. Schloen said, the team made a rough translation, and this was later completed and refined by Dr. Pardee. Then the archaeologists examined more closely every aspect of the small, square room in which the stele stood in a corner by a stone wall. Fragments of offering bowls to the type depicted in the stele were on the floor. Remains of two bread ovens were found. “Our best guess is that this was originally a kitchen annexed to a larger dwelling,” Dr. Schloen said. “The room was remodeled as a shrine or chapel — a mortuary chapel for Kuttamuwa, probably in his own home.” They found no signs of a burial in the city’s ruins. At other ancient sites on the Turkish-Syrian border, cremation urns have been dated to the same period. So the archaeologists surmised that cremation was also practiced at Sam’al. Dr. Stager of Harvard said the evidence so far, the spread of languages and especially the writing on stone about a royal official’s soul reflected the give-and-take of mixed cultures, part Indo-European, part Semitic, at a borderland in antiquity.

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Well, I think that last paragraph is baloney too, because if I remember my history correctly, Indo-European speaking peoples invaded Persia and India about 1,000 years before, and I'll eat my wool beret if it took 1,000 years for the intermixture of language, writing and culture to occur in this dynamic region.

Animal Sacrifice at Indian Temple

India - such an intriguing, confusing, frustrating mix of old world and new world. ORISSA 800 goats sacrificed at Rakhyakali temple Monday April 7 2008 12:35 IST BHADRAK: Despite efforts of district administration to stop animal sacrifice, as many as 800 goats were slaughtered at Rakhyakali temple in Rameshwar village here late last night to appease the Goddess. Till Sunday afternoon, an additional 64 goats were sacrificed by the devotees. "And all this was done in the presence of police," according to a local, Santosh Pati. Animal sacrifice in this temple is a decade-old ritual practised by devotees despite stringent opposition by animal lovers and the district administration. "Devotees who sacrifice goats, register their names with the temple management committee a month prior to the event and deposit mahasul (money for the sacrifice)," informed Parikshit Barik, a member of the committee. Barik added that the devotees take the meat of the animal home and consume it as ‘prasad’. Earlier, the practice was observed once in five years and then it became an annual affair. Dhamnagar police station OIC Sriballav Das said, "Villagers did not allow us to enter the sacrifice spot. So far, I have reports of 200 goats being sacrificed."