The Irish Were A Lot Better Off Without The Druids

Of course it only seemed fair to a 20th-21st century liberal that I was to feel sorry for those poor Druids who were superseded by the Christians in Ireland.  I guess we're supposed to regret their extinction like they were some species of animals destroyed by over hunting or loss of habitat.

At least that's how I felt until I read that a large number of the of the "bog people," corpses preserved by being submerged in peat bogs, were the victims of ritual sacrifice, presumably at the hands of Druidic priests, many of the victims obviously tortured in the most horrific of ways.   I won't post descriptions and pictures because most of them are extremely gruesome.  Finding that out made the fairy-tale version of Druids and the such evaporate in a foul vapor.

It was because I'm a liberal that that happened.  Being a liberal, the ultimate claim on my pity is with those who are the victims of society, no matter who and those who have the ultimate claim on it are those who are destroyed by society.  I had no right to maintain a clearly false and romantic view of times, people and their old ways when the irrefutable evidence falsifying those was available. I hold that modern societies, especially in my country and the societies and governing authorities that kill people are unacceptably depraved in some way and need changing.  It would be unjust to hold that there wasn't something as wrong with ancient societies that did those kinds of things.  And the people whose sacrificed bodies were preserved in bogs all across Pagan Europe and elsewhere, can be reasonably assumed to stand for a much larger group of people sacrificed, whose remains have yet to turn up or which will never testify to how they were brutally slaughtered by those folks so romantically imagined as being peaceful nature worshipers.

Clearly, the people and societies that gave up Druidic and other religions chose to do so.   It wouldn't have happened if they didn't see the Christianity that replaced those religions as being an improvement.  I can well imagine that having the threat of having your nipples cut off, being dragged to your death by a rope inserted into a hole made in your neck and all of the other means by which people were sacrificed to the gods of Paganism by a priestly class prepared to do so, looked a lot less appealing to you if you thought you or your loved ones stood a good chance of being the ones killed.   I think we should trust their assessment of the choice available to them at the time of that choice.   It was their necks on the line in a very real reality for them, not ours in our fantasy substitute for their experience.   Any Christian who did what the Druids did would have to be violating the strongest prohibitions of the new religion whereas it was clearly not a violation of the old one to do the most horrible things to people, not to mention animals.