Sacrifice

Ritual, Masks, and Sacrifice

INTRODUCTION Ritual is intimately connected with the mask, either in the wearing that hides the true face, or in the adoption of a public face. The mask makes the disengagement from ordinary time and the connection to the ancient and repetitive, which is the heart of ritual, psychologically acceptable. Together, ritual and mask facilitate the apprehension of identity and its connections with pa...

The sacrifice precision method

Sometimes problems are only hard when the numerical quantities are arbitrary, complicated large integers. When these numerical quantities are limited to being small integers, the problems become efficiently solvable. (One way to formalize this is to consider these quantities as being specified in unary, and ask if the problem becomes polynomial-time solveable.) This is called being “hard in the...

What Will You Sacrifice?

Sacrifice and Sorting in Clubs

In club models of religion, sacrifices demanded by religious groups promote efficient production of club goods by screening out free riders. An alternative, complementary view is that religious clubs provide a means of sorting, matching individuals with similar characteristics. Sorting differs from screening in that it operates on traits that do not directly affect club goods production. This p...

Beyond sacrifice: Milton and the atonement