: Re: how can I portray a culture that practices human sacrifice as not being uncivilized? In our world, we consider human life to be precious and valuable. It is meant to be preserved, and a deliberate

@XinRu607

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Make sure to genuinely thoroughly understand the worldview of people in that society. Then show (don’t tell) that to your readers.
The commonest problem in portrayals of societies with moralities different from ours is that the author hasn’t managed to understand what it would be like to live in that society. Which is complex, and not the same for each person, and often not explicit. Some people may think of the sacrifice as a noble glory, others as a necessary evil, others as an outmoded cruelty, others as the thing setting us apart from the barbarians next-door who sacrifice helpless animals instead. Most people probably don’t think about it at all most of the time — they’re busy getting on with their lives as traders or healers or bookbinders or nightsoilmen. But their view will certainly not be “it would be bad because [modern real-world-reality view], except it’s justified by [reasons]”. Their morality will be a single unified whole — not simple or consistent or coherent (no real-world morality is), but not just a modern secular morality with a few exceptions bolted on.
So really understand and think it through! A good exercise in this is to read well-written historical novels in periods whose moralities are just sufficiently different from ours to have some major moral differences — just off the top of my head, Mary Renault’s Alexander trilogy and Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy both do this well. Both involve sympathetic characters doing things we would think appalling, but shows how they fit into the characters’ worldviews. They also show different characters who have very different individual moralities, while inhabiting the same consensus moral universe (e.g. Cromwell, Henry, and Thomas More in the Mantel books).
And then, having thought this through carefully, in as much of its complexity and implications as you can… hide your working from readers! Don’t give heavy-handed infodumps; just show how the characters behave when the subject comes up, as much as is needed to interact with the story. If that means not showing it much at all, that can be fine — provided you’ve got a convincing understanding of your characters’ moralities, and so can portray them acting consistently and plausibly, readers will generally be willing to accept the setting without needing an explicit explanation. The thing that will make readers question it is not the practice itself — it’s if the characters’ attitudes around it aren’t realistic and believable.

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