Originally posted by Tango
Willing or not it was still murder.
As for Christians, where does the Bible say anything about making human sacrifices? Issac was tested and stopped before he could do it, so don't use that as an example.
I never said that any human sacrifice was used by Christians or for that matter by pre Christian Jews. You made that assumption all by yourself.
All I said was that human sacrifice performed by most of the Druidic Celts was performed upon willing subjects who were selected and prepared specifically for the task as opposed to the christian sponsered belief that the subjects were unwilling victims. There are of course documented cases where the subjects were that selected from enemies defeated in warfare, but then similar examples can be selected from contemporary conflicts that could also quite accurately be described as ritualistic killings.
As to it being murder, that's simply a personal observation. Murder is what the individual society calls it, much like warfare. If such a killing is accepted in that particular greater societies belief and judicial structure then it ceases to become murder to anyone accept an outsider. Make no mistake, if someone not qualified to perform such an act attempted it, they most certainly would have found themselves accused of "murder" and may have then been subject to another form of ritual killing, "execution".
