In the Middle Ages, parents would routinely obtained the blessings of the Church by bringing a young child in to become a monk or a nun.

If they were truly blessed, their child would spend sixty to eighty years in hunger, exhaustion, self-loathing, physical self-torture, sleep starvation, and humiliation. That was what GOOD monasteries were for.

Usually, in the less perfect convents and monasteries, the child would learn homosexual sex early.

There is one authenticated case, and probably thousands more less well documented, where a boy was delivered to the monastery after his mother died delivering him. In his long life of eighty years he never saw a single female.

That was a GOOD monastery.

In the pagan world they would leave a newborn out in the open to die of exposure in a day or two. For some reason, that was better than actually KILLING the child.

There is an old American country saying, “A man should shoot his own dog.”

In other words, if your dog has to die, you make sure it is done right and painlessly by doing it yourself. To my country mind, if you want to kill a newborn, you should kill it yourself instead of leaving it in hours or days of uncomprehending terror and thirst in the cold and in the sun.

That is the Golden Rule talking. No churchman ever even mentioned that aspect of the matter. The suffering of a newborn doesn’t matter, or we wouldn’t have circumcised hundreds of millions of male babies.

The only thing that mattered to the Church was that the child was exposed and actually killed rather than spending a lifetime suffering. That would been a holy act.

A lot of the sacrifices in pagan days were voluntary. But the Church abhorred that kind of human sacrifice. Human sacrifices in monasteries were usually voluntary, and that makes all the difference.

The difference mystifies me. According to the Golden Rule, you shouldn’t do that to yourself.
The Church disapproved of other forms of suicide.

Political Correctness says that when the Temple Jews convicted Jesus and turned him over to the civil authorities, the Roman, they had no idea he would be executed.

A good conservative can swallow that line, but back on the real earth there were only two alternatives if the Temple Jews convicted a Jew of heresy, stoning by Jews or crucifixion by Romans.

Christianity abandoned the cross when it took over. Instead it used a very slow burning at the stake.

After days or weeks of torture, which the family had to pay for.

When a heretic was burned, the Inquisitors held a celebration feast.

The family paid for that, too.

If they were lucky. Many a person confessed and went to the stake because if they died heretics, everything the family had would be confiscated. They couldn’t pay for anything.

That sort of self-sacrifice was usually futile. The whole family of a heretic was suspected of heresy, so another member was usually arrested later. Eventually the Church would get the whole kaboodle anyway.

My favorite professor made himself a human sacrifice. He and a friend were in a boat when the lake was suddenly flooded and the boat overturned. He was to shore, but his friend couldn’t swim well, so he went back, though exhausted, to try to save him. He drowned trying to save his friend.

He was no Christian, but he died to do something for another person. He died according to the Golden Rule, as Christ did.

That is ONLY reason for human sacrifice, even if the person being sacrificed is you.