LIFE ISSUES NO. 39-20

MOLOCH

Most of you have heard of the ancient Phoenician god, Moloch.  We remember him primarily because living babies were sacrificed to him.  Many of us have compared this to the sacrifice of the innocents in abortion today.  But how many of you know details about him?

He was considered a symbol of purifying fire which, in turn, was the symbol of the spirit.  As the story went, there was a catastrophe when time began, and this particular spirit transformed himself into darkness by becoming matter.  Man was the incarnation, the fruit of this particular tragedy, and man was marked with serious sin.  According to the worship of this god, men and women had to be redeemed from this sin.  The only way to do this was to offer their children as live human sacrifices.

Moloch was a gigantic bronze statue.  Inside of his gigantic belly was a hot furnace.  Mothers threw their own live children into that red hot, flaming caldron, the belly of Moloch.  In effect, then, with his waiting open arms, he devoured his little victims in the flames.

The priests surrounding Moloch would blare trumpets and beat drums when a child was thrown into his flaming belly.  The reason was not one of piety, rather it was to drown out the screams of the tiny victims.  Today there are no Phoenician priests.  Rather, we now have unscrupulous profiteering abortionists.  The belly of Moloch has been replaced by the mother’s womb.  Today there are no drums beating or trumpets playing.  Now there is only the silence of the cold operating room.

The mother, ordained by nature and by God to be the one who most loves her child, today immolates him, not on a flaming altar, but rather on an operating table under the cold knife of a hired killer—a licensed doctor, once trained to save, who now uses his skill to kill.  Further, the state, charged to protect the lives of those who live within its borders, also flips and now permits and even pays for the killing.

Back then, it is easy to see that the sacrifices to Moloch were a sign of moral decadence, of violence, of dehumanization.  But isn’t abortion the same today?  The Phoenician world was a violent one, and this made it more so.  Today’s world is a violent one, and abortion makes it more so.

Violence begets more violence.  The children who have survived abortion knowing that their siblings have been killed by their parents—knowing the reasons why their parents killed their little brothers and sisters—those same children someday will look at their aging parents.  Will they then be more merciful to their parents than their parents had been to their little brothers and sisters?  I doubt it.

I’m afraid that today’s abortion culture in another 30 years will lead to a euthanasia culture tomorrow.  “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” I’m afraid will become “Do back to others what they did to you.”

[04/04/03]