About religion Why and how did the Aztecs sacrifice to the sun god?

Why were Aztecs careful to take so many war captives alive?

How might ordinary Aztecs have felt about the blood sacrifices to Huitzilopochtli ?

How did religion feed the need for war? How did this impact Aztec rule?

When the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his men arrived in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in 1521, they described witnessing a grisly ceremony. Aztec priests, using razor-sharp obsidian blades, sliced open the chests of sacrificial victims and offered their still-beating hearts to the gods. They then tossed the victims’ lifeless bodies down the steps of the towering Templo Mayor.

Andrés de Tapia, a conquistador, described two rounded towers flanking the Templo Mayor made entirely of human skulls, and between them, a towering wooden rack displaying thousands more skulls with bored holes on either side to allow the skulls to slide onto the wooden poles.

they thoght they were going to nuke each other

"they had a large area of land that they owned."