I can remember in my Catholic elementary school days the term "ransoming" a pagan baby. I don't remember now whether that meant collecting money for missionaries to baptise them or to buy them from their parents who couldn't afford to raise them. I'll have to do more research. The practice you allude to in your parody was the reason the Roman Republic declared "Carthago delenda est". We have a different name for it today: "choice".

Yes. We have a sad tendency of romanticizing the religions of past. Yet we still know perfectly what they were about: perverted sex, murderlust and bloodshed. We know enough of those religions that Romans' decision of exterminating Carthago was actually a good one. Likewise, I do not shed a single tear on Aztecs and their religion. It was pure and unalturated murderlust and it was only good it disappeared in the dustbin of history.

The topic of human sacrifice was, and still is, one thing that can nauseate me to even read of it. The passage of time and "entertainment" has perhaps jaded me to graphic depictions of crime, war, natural disasters, and the like. I once tried to read a novel "Aztec" which depicted that culture's depraved religion from the standpoint of a man who accepted it as part of life, in the fashion that a Catholic takes communion or a Lutheran sings hymns. Of course, the Spanish did to the Aztecs what the Romans did to Carthage, or the Americans did to Germany and Japan. The eternal question is how do you fight ultimate evil with the only effective means possible, and yet not become another evil yourself?