We have not progressed out of the ancient days of superstition and blood religions. We hold ourselves out as sophisticated people, but the populace calls for blood sacrifice.
In the days of the prophets of Israel, the people demanded modernity, and for them, being modern meant following the religious practices of the people around them, who worshipped several gods represented as carved idols, the baalim, or just as Baal encompassing them all. The religion of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob was portrayed as old, as out-of-date, eccentric in the modern world. This was a theme throughout Biblical times. The priests of Baal looked sophisticated in rich gowns, no doubt with high-flown language and mysterious words that sounded as if they had authority beyond the understanding of man. These things impress the weaker mind, which is all of us really.
The priests of Baal called for blood. They sacrificed children alive on burning altars. At that everyone should have turned with revulsion, but it was made to seem logical, or as a proof of how powerful the priests and their timber gods were. Once they had established the power of life and death, resisting them became very hazardous. The Kings of Israel, that is of the rebel northern kingdom, succumbed often to these foreign blood-thirsty religions, but it may have been because of the feelings of the people pushing them there. Other kings remained nominally attached the Law, but permitted baal-worship, and even patronised it.
The words of the prophets of Israel weep for the children.
We are not so different in our day. We expect our rulers, and their political advisers, to be held to different rules, which we can never bear ourselves, and to sacrifice their own children in the name of the fashionable practices invented from our own heads. We think we are the modern ones, but behave no differently from the ancients.
To the general crowd, the rulers of the people are just more wooden gods, to be tolerated in the hope of another harvest, but like the baalim, they can in reality do no magic. The when the harvest fails, we want to cast them onto the flames of their own altars. When the paint chips away and the common people see that these are not gods in Whitehall but fallible men like us, the fury knows no end – they must be cast out, burned, insulted before their families, besieged in their houses, condemned as the worst deceivers, until they in turn can be burnt as a sacrifice to the unseen forces.
The rulers fallen from worship were just personae, a concept embodied in a wooden statue, are not are not seen for what they are: flesh and blood men and women, trying their best, sometimes failing, sometimes misunderstood, with real families and children. They are your neighbour and mine. That will not convince the mob, convinced that they have been deceived, unable to accept that faces on the screen have families and children they love unconditionally above all else, as any father and mother love their children, who act accordingly. That is not enough for the fury of the crowd – plaster gods should not be any more then the face on the screen and should not have wives or children: to enter into public life they must sacrifice their own children. The priests of the baalim are waiting.
See also
- Propitiating the gods, like the Romans
- Politics makes screaming madness
- Oh the things we said in dark corners….
- Man to Man is an arrant Wolfe
- Praying for Boris
- Mill, Calvin and Hobbes
Books
- The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion by Sir James George Frazer (1890)
- The Borisaurus: The Dictionary of Boris Johnson by Simon Walters
- By Thomas Hobbes:
- A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
- Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKay (1841)
- 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, by Jordan B Peterson
- By Boris Johnson:
- By Aristotle:
- By Anthony Burgess:
