Hacker News Reader

Comment by melenaboija | Hacker News Reader

As Spaniard and European I always think that what we did to the native Americans was atrocious and led to the lost of lots of knowledge and amazing cultures.

Something that is stuck in my mind is a visit to the Iglesia de Santo Tomás in Guatemala[1], I remember the guide explaining us how the Spaniards used to built Catholic churches on top of any place where the Mayas did their rituals. Now the building is used for Maya's rituals again. Having been raised catholic, culturally and personally, seeing that was a weird liberating feeling. Worth visiting BTW.

[1]https://www.beyondtheordinary.co.uk/features/santo-tomas-chu...

View on HN

> Having been raised catholic, culturally and personally, seeing that was a weird liberating feeling.

We should do the same for Greek/Roman deities. They were similarly wiped out by rabid abrahamic cults with a series of leninist moves.

That's true but with a twist.

Christianity is actually a weird hybrid of Abrahamic religion and pre-existing graeco-roman traditions, and is so in a rather complex way, i.e it's not just absorbing a couple of rites here and there, but it also has roots in hybridation with mystery cults like the mysteries of Eleusis and the cult of Dionysus.

Good read: The Immortality Key, by Brian Murarescu.

The reason I said "true" and not "false" is that the church was very successful at rebranding the whole spiel to the point where the memory of the link was utterly removed from the collective awareness and only through digging and analysis we can reconstruct the story (and even then many people will just find it quite unbelievable).

The Aztecs were pretty much hated by their neighbors. They would make a sculpture out of cereal and the blood of their enemies and then eat it.

Yes, it was atrocious, but humans are going to do human things. Cortez's conduct was not so different from how the Aztecs had conquered the region in the preceding 150 years. In any case, germs from Europe, Asia, and Africa would have wreaked havoc no matter what. The Americas would have had to be isolated until the discovery of vaccines.

Still, hard to imagine how much art, music, philosophy, world view in general was lost and where it would be today if American societies could have developed into nation-states.

Why only native Americans? Spain colonized my country for 333 years too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com