Over the last two months I have been publishing the “Modern Moloch” series as a way of exploring the idolatrous nature of the State -the government- and how it uses religious symbolism, ritual, and actions to manipulate the beliefs and emotions of the public in order to secure their subservience and obedience. I chose the name of the series based on a comment from Apostle Boyd K. Packer where he compared the destruction and slaughter of war to the Old Testament pagan practice of sacrificing children to the god Moloch (a.k.a. Baal). Following that lead, I wanted to explore how the way the government functions aligns perfectly with all the warning signs of a dangerous and violent cult which requires human sacrifice to stay in power. Think of the ways that war require parents to send their children to kill and die so that the rulers can maintain their power over the country from some threat, whether external invasion or internal rebellion- is this not, in essence, a human sacrifice to the idol god of the government? It is. This combined with the way that the government valorizes and idolizes killing and dying in its name make it not only a cult but a death cult -hence the references throughout the Modern Moloch series to the government as the Death Cult of the State.
I took a detailed looked at the various religious forms of religious ritual, architecture, and symbolism that the governments of the world use to exploit the natural religious feelings and beliefs of the masses and turn those feelings and beliefs, both consciously and subconsciously, towards thinking of and treating the government as if it were a god that could solve all their problems. I investigated the idea of the Political Messiah, the belief among people that their chosen political leaders could save them from the problems of the world if they were but vested with all the authority and power of the government to force their vision upon the world and how this is not only deeply antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ but is, at its core, Antichrist itself. This led into my exploration of the way that modern day people will in one breath decry evils such as racism, sexism, rape, murder, and slavery while with their actions supporting and empowering corrupt and wicked leaders who have committed all these evils. This led into a discussion of how people think of politicians as secular saviors and leads to people idolizing them in a very literal way that causes people to ignore the evils their chosen political messiahs commit and perpetuate.
The links to the seven parts of the Modern Moloch series can be found below. After them is an addendum that includes a bit of poetry about modern day “Molochism” and summarizes my final thoughts for this series.
The Links
Part 1: Patriotism, Nationalism, Idolatry, and Human Sacrifice
- Wherein I explain the basic idolatrous nature of devotion to the State, whether you call that patriotism, nationalism, or something else, and how the government is like Moloch because it demands human sacrifice themselves and their children for its glory and power.
Part 2: The Death Cult of the State
- Wherein I use the academically accepted characteristics of a cult to demonstrate that the State is a cult because it displays every characteristic; further, through its demands for human sacrifice and its glorification of those who kill and die for it, the State is specifically a death cult.
Part 3: The Religion of Statism- Section A
- Wherein I look at the sacred texts, sacred symbols, common prayers, temples, deities, and saints of the Death Cult of the State.
Part 4: The Religion of Statism- Section B
- Wherein I look at the churches, religious leadership, mystic rituals, worship services, crusades/holy wars, and human sacrifices demanded by the Death Cult of the State of its adherent- i.e. everyone under its rule.
Part 5: The Political Messiah
- Wherein I look at origins of the False Messiah (the desire of people for someone other than Christ to save them not from their sins, but within them), the natures of the Great and Abominable Church, The Beast of Revelation, Babylon the Whore, the Antichrist, and how all these symbols are wrapped up in and apply to the way that people idolize and serve the nations of the world, as well as the great dangers thereof.
Part 6: Presidential Idolatry
- Wherein I look to explain how people can love, serve, and follow professed and known racists, rapists, liars, perverts, and mass murderers using the nominations of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris by the Democratic Party as examples of this phenomena in action and applying what we have already discussed about the way people idolize their political leaders as Messiah-figures who will save the nation from its sins.
Part 7: On Signs, Symbols, and Statist Sacraments
- Wherein I evaluate some of the ways that the government uses religious art, symbolism, and architecture to invoke and manipulate feelings of religious awe and worship for it from the people in order to better secure their belief in the omnipotence of the State and their duty to submissively obey it.
Addendum
The Modern Moloch series is about how those in power take the signs, symbols, hopes, and dreams of faith and the faithful and twist them, wrench them, warp them, and corrupt them, manipulating their ideas and truths to service the ends of those in power- convincing the public to love, obey, and serve the government system those in power depend on for their power, even when what it does and what they do is infernal; demonic; evil. The State does not exist to be beautiful or create beauty. It only destroys it. The State does not exist to be peaceful or create peace. It is endless war. The State does not exist to be prosperous or create prosperity. It thrives on theft and boundless blight. Its foundation are the bleached bones of those slaughtered in conquest and butchered in preservation of its rule. Its companion is the endless bloodshed and constant violence needed to maintain and assert its rule. Its scepter is one of sanguine steel and its dominion is one of unbroken oppression with it, like the grave, only demanding more and more forever and ever.
The American poet Allen Ginsberg completed the poem Howl in 1956. The first half of the poem is essentially an extend question – an emotional, manic outcry about what has destroyed those who Ginsberg saw as the best minds of his generation by driving them to madness and despair. The second half, most of which is quoted below, is his answer to that question. The answer is Moloch. Moloch, not as a person but as a culture that values domination, militarization, governmental violence and oppression – in other words, a culture dominated on and in praise of the State. Moloch is the State in Howl and this section of the poem, with its denunciation of the greed, violence, militarism, and insanity of the State and its idolatrous death cult serves as a fitting epilogue to the Modern Moloch series.
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!