Perhaps it would help to carefully define what we mean by human sacrafice. It seems that most people on this thread implicitly define human sacrifice as killing someone in an act of worshiping some god. This is a fine definition, but may be a bit narrow. To illustrate Charles Mann (in 1493 I think) suggests that the rate of judicial killing (i.e. execution) in 15th century England was roughly analagous to the rate of human sacrifice in the Azetec Empire at the same time. In the case of judicial killing, the person is killed to appease the conceptual entity known as the state. In human sacrifice as worship the person is killed to appease a conceptual entity known as a god. Obviously, there are difference, but as my word choice should suggest I do not see these differences as large. If we start to think about judicial killing as a form of human the obvious question becomes has human sacrifice in fact become less common or more (look at the 20th century...)? If we want to draw a sharp distinction between human sacrifice as worship and judicial killing what is our basis for drawing such a distinction (aside from facile arguments that basically boil down to human sacrifice as worship is icky and judifical killing is ok).