Posted by
Rob on Saturday, December 05, 2009 10:39:27 AM
I have blogged incessantly about our 21st century obsession with Post-Modernism. What few people seem to realize, is that PoMo really is nothing more than the polytheism that was vanquished from Rome in the 4th century. It took 1000 years for the last vestiges of polytheism to be banished, and thereupon the Reformation and Enlightenment set the West on a trajectory that has conquered the world. But with the reascendancy of PoMo polytheism, we are now about to descend into the Dark Ages of alchemy and magic and assassins and poisoners.
Archaeologists have plotted these declines before, they are not Chicken-Little fantasies. When the Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain immediately after the Romans pulled out, the production of china plates stopped immediately. For the next 200 years, the Brits ate on inferior half-fired clay plates. Why? All trade with Rome ceased, and all the factories were shuttered. Skillsets and tradesecrets died with the conquest.
When our scientists are more concerned with
political power than with truth, the Enlightenment is finished, the Reformation is undone. When our press corps prefer
power over
truth and
public interest, the court jester is finished. When our politicians prefer their
position over their constituents, democracy is finished.
But this isn't what put me in a white heat to write this blog. It was
this post, from the British intelligentsia. From the educated cream of British nobility, Lords and Ladies and Professors galore, such as Sir David Attenborough and Professor DasGupta, comes this website with the creepy title
PopOffsets. Ever since Al Gore's carbon credit trading scheme made the intelligentsia guilt go away, while making him rich, there's been this nagging feeling that they weren't doing enough. In a way, this was entirely predictable, because idols always ha
d a
voracious appetite, and the environmental idol is as greedy as all the others. These intelligentsia paid the ultimate price, having one or even no children at all, so as to limit the world population, but it still wasn't enough. So as they sat about sipping their sherry, they came up with this glorious scheme. "What if we kill two birds with one stone? What if we pay/coerce others not to have kids?"
When God commanded Joshua to go into the land, he was to purge it of 7 tribes that were beyond redemption, leaving not a man, woman, child, donkey or goat alive. I have elsewhere blogged on what sin could have resulted in such condemnation, but one of the sins that were "an abomination" to God, was that of child-sacrifice.
This was one of the sins Jeremiah told the inhabitants of Jerusalem, that would bring swift and certain punishment from the Babylonians. Outside the city gates was
The Tophet, where children were burned alive to the idol Molech or the idols of the Phoenicians (which in Biblical literature were called Philistines.) The Phoenicians lost their coastal cities to Babylon, to Alexander the Great, retreating eastward until the last of the great city states was Carthage, controlling the shipping lanes of the Mediterranean. And it was recent archeological digs that revealed large columbariums at Carthage, filled with
childrens bones. Generalizing from Jeremiah, it is undoubtedly true that the Punic Wars were retribution upon Carthage for this practice.
But why would the gods demand child sacrifice? I have tried to address that in my survey of
Bronze Age religion, but suffice to say that it enables the parents to live in luxury. And when we make that an idol, there are appetites to feed.
It is not that Rome was innocent either, and evidently many Roman families practiced infanticide as well, but somehow it seemed less institutionalized, less evil than the Tophet of Carthage. The Christianization of the Roman Empire included a complete intolerance of abortion and infanticide, and for 1500 years we have not seen what our current generation has--a legalization of abortion and infanticide.
But if we have recapitulated Rome, this website is evidence that we have now recapitulated Carthage.
The gods have returned. And they are hungry.