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First of all, we’d like to thank everyone who helped nominate us for four different categories in the Madison Area Music Awards!

Sunspot is up for

Alternative Performer

Rock Album – Weirdest Hits

Hard Rock/Punk Song – “Messiah Complex”

Drummer/Percussionist – Wendy Lynn Staats

The Madison Area Music Association is a charity that runs these awards every year as a fundraiser for music programs in the local schools, so it all goes to a good cause. By supporting us and voting in the contest, you’re help less-advantaged kids get instruments in their hands. Please visit the MAMA Awards site and cast your vote for Sunspot in those categories.

Wendy Lynn is also one of the finalists for Strings Player of the Year at the Wisconsin Area Music Awards, it’s not a voting award, but it’s an exciting nomination (and she’ll find out if she’s the winner by the next podcast!)

So, speaking of charitable contributions, this week’s topic is human sacrifice. And if the heart of charity is giving something up, then I can’t think of anything more charitable than giving up your life (or the life of someone that matters to you.) But in most societies today, we completely disapprove of sacrificing someone to appease the gods (although it still happens, as this shocking story of human sacrifices in Uganda in February of 2016(!) to bring “good luck” for an election attests to.)

That Uganda story feels horrific and savage and sad in the current age, and of course the idea of human sacrifice is an affront to our modern “civilized” society. But it doesn’t matter which culture you trace your background to, sacrificing human beings is somewhere in the history of it, it’s baked into all of our history at some point. A journal article that just came out talks about how human sacrifice can be attributed to the development of social hierarchies in human society.

So, the study was done of dozens of societies in Austronesia – that’s a particular area of the South Pacific and Australia (and a word I’d never heard before, so learning is fun!) And they found that the more egalitarian a society was (the more people were treated equally), the less human sacrifice was practiced. The more stratified a society was (as in the more differentiation there was in social class between the haves and have nots), the more human sacrifice was performed.

Here’s the money quote from the study:

Religion has long been proposed to play a functional role in society, and is commonly claimed to underpin morality. Recent evolutionary theories of religion have focused on the potential of pro-social and moral religious beliefs to increase cooperation. Our findings suggest that religious rituals also played a darker role in the evolution of modern complex societies. In traditional Austronesian cultures there was substantial religious and political overlap, and ritualised human sacrifice may have been co-opted by elites as a divinely sanctioned means of social control.

Bingo. Just a little something to think about next time