Mike Clawson here…
Atheists may think they have the corner on baby-eating, but I was just recently reading a Christian text from the early third century that addresses some of the many accusations that Romans tended to make against Christians, and I noticed this:
The notoriety of the stories told of the initiation of new recruits [to Christianity] is matched by their ghastly horror. A young baby is covered over with flour, the object being to deceive the unwary. It is then served before the person to be admitted into their rites. The recruit is urged to inflict blows onto it – they appear to be harmless because of the covering of flour. Thus the baby is killed with wounds that remain unseen and concealed. It is the blood of this infant – I shudder to mention it – it is this blood that they lick with thirsty lips; these are the limbs they distribute eagerly; this is the victim by which they seal their covenant; it is by complicity in this crime that they are pledged to mutual silence; these are their rites, more foul than all sacrileges combined.
Seems we Christians were eating babies long before atheists came on the scene. 🙂
And the passage continues:
We all know, too, about their banquets… On a special day they gather for a feast with all their children, sisters, mothers – all sexes and all ages. There, flushed with the banquet after such feasting and drinking, they begin to burn with incestuous passions. They provoke a dog tied to the lampstand to leap and bound towards a scrap of food which they have tossed outside the reach of his chain. By this means the light is overturned and extinquished, and with it common knowledge of their actions; in the shameless dark with unspeakable lust they copulate in random unions, all equally being guilty of incest, some by deed, but everyone by complicity. For whatever may happen in individual cases is the general aspiration and desire of them all.
Baby eating and incestuous sex orgies! Now how are you going to compete with that? 😉
