You don't accidentally lose an ax that keeps you alive. They did it for religious reasons — they are offerings.

We can only speculate how she eventually died. Was everyone from the hamlet there? Was there a priest there? We don't know.

For many years the rain was pouring down and the crops failed. So first the people would start offering the gods food, and then tools and other things of value. When everything failed, the elders would decide to make the ultimate offering. There is no written history of what happened there, but what we do have is a record of human sacrifice.

A religion that demands absolutely irrefutable obedience, is anything but religion.

There is a basic terrorist germ in fundamentalism – a germ that is purely genocidal. This germ drives the psyche of mentally unstable individuals in the path of chaos, which actually is presented to them by the fundamentalists as the path of God.

As they perform this ritual, I almost have to turn away, thinking again what a boomeranging, out-of-body experience it is to watch a religious childhood from the outside, when before I was in the very marrow of it.