I asked Life Coalition International missionary Patricia McEwen to comment on the following article.

The key passage from the article by Josh Clark is here:

The concept of human sacrifice is a difficult one for many modern people to accept. A tenet of anthropology, however, is cultural relativism: To understand a culture, one can judge that culture only by its own standards, not by another culture’s standards. This holds true for all cultures past and present, and through this lens, the motives of a people come into focus.

To them, it must have seemed as though their sacrifices pleased their gods. The very successful Incan empire stretched 2,500 miles from modern day Ecuador to Chile [source: University of Colorado]. It reached a population of more than 1 million people just a couple hundred years after its founding. Through technology, might and communal society, the Inca tamed the Andes. And yet, when the Spanish came, it took fewer than 200 men to bring down this civilization in the sky.

The Inca didn’t sacrifice children for sport or because they didn’t value their young. The ritual was a solemn, dignified process by which the Inca hoped to appease their gods. On the contrary, children were sacrificed because they were valued by the Inca: To sacrifice such a valuable part of their society was to show their devotion to their religion.