The New Cannibalism

            G.K. Chesterton¹ made the observation that the societies who partook in the devilish acts of human sacrifice and cannibalism, were not, as one would imagine, the most crude and primitive peoples.  It took a certain amount of sophistication before a society would eat their fellow man or would kill them for sacrifice to their various idols in exchange for victory at war or commerce or agriculture.  Such acts of barbarism are not confined to the distant mists of history; they are acts that the world grows into as it grows sophisticated and Godless. 

            In the case of human sacrifice three things stand out:  a sacrificial offering must have innate value or else it is not worthy; the one doing the sacrifice does so without the consent of the one being sacrificed, otherwise it would be self-sacrifice; and it is done to curry some favor or to accomplish something.  One could say that when one buys a loaf of bread that they are sacrificing money for bread—that is, something of value for something of value, and the money is sent on its way for the bread monger to do with as they please.  The Carthaginians, and other societies in early history, sacrificed their infants to the demon Moloch, or at least they did before the Romans put an end to the Carthaginians.  The Carthaginians thought that such sacrifices would ensure good commerce and victory at war.  Even if that were true, and in the end it certainly was not, how callous to murder one’s infant for the sake of a higher standard of living for people who were already more comfortable than most. 

              Truly primitive people are faced with the hard realities of life and death constantly, and life is precious.  When people grow lazy and idle life and death, particularly the deaths of others, are weighed against the luxury and lucre that they know.  If there is some chance of someone else’s life being ended for their benefit, then why not if the proper justification is found?  The Carthaginians killed and then burned their own infants so a demon would be on their side in commerce and war.  They calculated that the value of commerce and expansion was worth some other people’s lives.  Today the demon Moloch still does a brisk trade, in abortion clinics where infants are sacrificed for money or for high sounding principals by someone else who does not feel their pain as they are slowly poisoned or forcibly ripped to pieces and then, as any sacrifice to Moloch should be, incinerated.  “Minorities are too poor to raise kids, better to abort them,” “abortion allows sexual freedom, and lets the would-be mothers have a career,” and “every child should be wanted [Moloch wants them, apparently better he than the people on adoption waiting lists]” are justifications for these human sacrifices.  Infants are not anesthetized before being torn to pieces and the infirm, in the case of euthanasia, are simply starved to death; today our advanced society does not merely end lives, it tortures them to death (although that may be a cynical plot to justify lethal injections and make the whole process more clinical).  As all deals with the demons go, there is always a poison pill in the bargain: some claim that abortion will prevent poverty, but in their old age they will wonder why there are not enough young workers paying social security tax and then they will find themselves put on a list for euthanasia, as society can no longer support the idle retirees’ medical bills.  Satan’s bargain is not to trade one thing for another; it is for one to trade something precious, more precious than is realized for a long time, for absolutely nothing. 

            Cannibalism, throughout history, was and is only practiced out of necessity in rare and sporadic cases.  When it was institutionalized it was practiced by a people who did it because they knew it was wrong.  They did it to curry favor with the demons and to shake their fists at Heaven.  To cannibalize something means to take it apart and make use of it.  In the usual sense of human cannibalism a human is taken apart and consumed for nutritional value.  There is cannibalism though, that which takes place not over a cooking fire amidst chants to the demons but in a glistening and sterile laboratory.  Humans are taken apart, or “harvested” as the euphemism goes, and then the pieces are consumed by other humans in the sanctity of the hospital.  That is not to suggest that there is anything wrong with organ donations from the truly dead—one can not kill that which is already dead, and that which would only be embalmed and buried otherwise—but modern society is moving to cannibalize organs from the still living for someone else based on a decision by yet someone else as to whose life is more important.  Whether it be the removal of organs from living humans or from cells removed from murdered infants, it does two things: it shakes a fist at Heaven, “I don’t care if this person was made in your imagine, I will do with them as I will for I am stronger than they and I refuse you,” and the body of the weak is supposed to benefit one who is stronger and more powerful and therefore more worthy.  If life is important at all then it is equally important for everyone, otherwise it is equal only in pragmatic degrees as people are very unequal in their usefulness to society.  

              What we have today is life at the expense of another’s death.   The more one fears their own death the more they will readily, and even gleefully, end someone else’s.  The euthanasia enthusiasts could practice their theories on themselves; but we are told that their life is worth living, it is the people who they decide are unworthy of life that they strive to “assist.”  To them dying is beautiful…so long as someone else is doing the dying.  To them it is peaceful…to watch someone else die.  Some hate the idea of a fixed and universal right and wrong, and state sanctioned murder, being able to write some high sounding euphemisms and lawyer-speak on a piece of paper to snuff out someone else’s life, the more innocent the better, is a perfect outlet for their hate for an impudent law giver.  No lurking in shadows and murdering the able bodied with a club, their acts of depravity are in broad daylight on the defenseless.

              So here is our sophisticated and advanced society, so sophisticated that it has no need for fixed and universal right and wrong.  Ours is a nation of lawyers, whose profession is to tell one what they can get away with, not with what they should do…that is not even relevant as far as some of them are concerned.  No one asks a minister or a priest what they should do, and if they were asked some of them would have no answer but simplistic psychobabble that had nothing to do with the religion they represent, as some of them now think that the spirit of the age is what is to be worshiped.  The language has been contorted out of recognition: to “allow to die” is some how not the same as to kill, as though “failing to aim else where with a gun” would be a way of saying that someone shot someone else in the head, or “failing to feed” an infant is somehow different from murderous neglect.  “Life support” becomes mere food and water.  “Dignity” means that an inferior is now dead and need no longer be embarrassed over how inferior they were to others.  The “right to die” is now a right tossed about like candy at a parade to who ever reaches out for it; it can be mere hearsay, or it can be made “on their behalf, because they would want it.”  It really means the right to kill, as they are no longer of use or even more useful dead than alive. 

              The Supreme Law giver was driven underground decades ago (we were all too sophisticated for thousands of years old laws and Darwin’s missing links would soon be found we were told), and without fixed and steady right and wrong it becomes might makes right, and the strong prey on the weak.  Our society is more than willing to kill the defenseless if there is any benefit, real or imagined, even if it is simply to shake their fist at God.  The unborn and the invalids are defenseless, so they were the first to be sacrificed and cannibalized.  The mentally retarded will no doubt be next on the list, along with the sick elderly who will be too much of a burden on Medicare; some day maybe it will be those who hold dangerous opinions and are therefore a potential danger to the public; maybe it will be a person or a whole race that has low IQ scores²…as ordinary factory jobs disappear what better to do with the lower class when a declining population can not support them with welfare?  The only question will be who gets their organs.  The eugenicists suggested that the supposed inferiors be sterilized.  The modern bioethicisits say why prevent conception when there is so much useful material and organs to be harvested later on from the inferior products of that conception, whether as unborn infants or feeble minded children or adults who become feeble minded through misfortune.  Helen Keller’s liver would have ended up in someone else’s body, perhaps a celebrity drunkard, had the modern ethicists been dispensing their prattle back then and if the technology to do so existed; or more likely the ethicists would have been ridiculed and tarred and feathered by a society that still held God in high esteem and had not traded common sense for the asinine opinions of self-proclaimed experts.  How does one become an expert on when to kill others for someone else’s benefit or for the sheer joy of it?  Is that not the definition of a psychopathic serial killer?  Apparently it only depends on whether it starts or ends in a courtroom; judges really do not mind murder, as long as one asks for their permission first.  

              If we do not follow God we follow Satan; if we hide from the light then we are in the dark.  Materialism is a joke, like trying to remodel a house where the roof is held up by supports left over from religion and when they succeed in breaking down the last support, or liberating themselves of the support as they would say, the roof will fall³.  Satan does not—I am convinced, contrary to popular belief—think that humans should just loosen up and party in some hedonistic fantasy land or just practice some sort of self-determination.  Satan hates humans, and hates it even more when they enjoy themselves.  He despises the half-breed that humans are, being half spirit and half animal.  He does not want humans to enjoy forbidden fruit, although it may be a means to an end; he does not want them to enjoy anything; he wants them to suffer and die, and so far as he is concerned when one is conceived their only use is to be tormented unto death.  To join his side, as the demon worshipers explicitly attempt or as the materialists do by default when rejecting God, is not to curry favor, but is instead to become pathetic useful idiots, whose time too will come.  So long as humans have free will he wants that will to be dedicated to the suffering of themselves and everyone else.  The spectacle of humans rushing about killing other humans, the most innocent and defenseless ones at that, and even cannibalizing them while putting on pious airs about it must give him a really good laugh.  “You made them in your image, and look what they do with it!  You claim your only begotten Son allowed himself to be a perfect and everlasting sacrifice, and yet they still sacrifice the weak and their infants to me, to me whose only wish is for them to suffer and die.”         

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¹ The Everlasting Man, 1925.

 ² Under this world-view, the arguments of slave owners about how it was of benefit to the inferior slaves (and convenient for the slave holder too) really would have been valid.  Was it a coincident that it was not philosophers of the enlightenment that ended slavery, but religious “fanatics” like Wilberforce and Garrison?  As well, if the Jews really had been an inferior race, and as Germany needed funds for the war effort, Hitler would have been merely been doing his duty, under this weltanshung, to gas them and pry out their gold fillings.

 ³ C.S. Lewis’s Book The Abolition of Man, 1943, is a devastating indictment of the modern “relativism” that is supposed to replace absolute right and wrong.  It is a short book, because it does not require a long argument to annihilate such stupidity.  It also makes the point, which exists in his other writings, that moral law is written on the hearts of men and is evidence of a lawgiver.

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