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View Full Version : The Children of Moloch vs. People of the Center



keehah
22nd January 2011, 09:54 PM
I used to read Sharon Astyk's blog a lot before, several years back, she became a 'complete raving loon on the subject' of global warming (that she now calls climate change) (her words not mine) swallowing the elite lie whole a few years back and it infected too much of her writing like many other formerly free thinking progressives.

However this writing transcends her recent blinders. Its in response to another's article written around the CO2 control meme that is not worth reading (too far blinded).

People of the Center, that is awake humanity. needs to recognize that what divides us is less important than what unites us. I'm going to keep an eye out for more thought and insight on this topic.

And I look forward to reading more signs that Sharon is waking from her recent elite heat induced slumber.


PS, for those who don't know me, I'm no child of Moloch as I slag the global warming meme. Even though I don't buy much of the global warming meme (and none of the political solutions offered), its not that I'm not an environmental fascist in thoery. I'd tend to bigger one than you warming sheep I'll bet. Its just that this elite control meme takes away from the real more direct environmental protection fascism that is needed and I'm awake to the fact that our current crop of elites are too corrupt for any such real protection. 8)

http://sharonastyk.com/2011/01/05/why-you-should-care-a-lot-about-christian-environmentalism/


I don’t believe that people can be easily and accurately divided into enlightment categories – I think they are mostly a distraction. Nor do I think that the climate change debate exists in the terms that most climate activists frame it, between skeptics and activists/scientists. There are certainly some people on both sides who come to this with a single, all-encompassing worldview that could be described that way, but mostly, I don’t think that’s accurate. Instead, I would frame the distinction differently – that the populace is roughly divided into two groups – but not the ones you think they are. The first, I’m going to call “Moloch’s Children” – which isn’t a very nice name, but it is, I think, accurate. By this I mean that like Moloch, they devour their own young. I do not claim that the Children of Moloch do so intentionally – at worst, their seeming god is Mammon. But the reality is that the worship of consumption leads to the cannibalizing of our future and our children.

Who are these people? The children of Moloch consist of the great mass of Americans and other rich world denizens whose central ideology is technological progress and consumption – Moloch is their god, the overarching center of their world is the urge for more and more comfort, more and more possessions, more and more wealth, more and more technology in complete disregard of the fact that these things are not possible. They do not realize that they devour their own future as they consume. I realize that most of the people I am describing would fervently deny that this is true of them – but they would mostly be wrong. At the center of their value system is something empty and deeply wrong, and that emptiness stretches out and empties their world. They do not know what is missing from their lives, so they seek out more to fill the empty space.

The Children of Moloch cross political, religious, cultural and ethnic lines. That is, there are plenty of climate skeptics who believe that the climate probably isn’t changing and even if it is, we can just fix it with more free enterprise. But there are equally many people in the same camp who believe that yes, climate change is a big problem, and someone really should do something about it, but not me, and nothing that impacts my mutual fund statement. It is possible to be a devout Christian and still hold prosperity, comfort and your game cube at the center of your world in practice, while going to Church on Sundays. It is possible to be a radical leftist athiest and still hold those same values at the center of your world. Every shade of middle ground runs through the center. Moloch knows no political bounds.

The truth is that if you could meaningfully divide the world up into climate skeptics and climate believers and use that information politically, then we’d already be acting on climate change. The fact is that you can’t – the vast majority of people who believe we should do something about climate change believe that we shouldn’t do anything very difficult, expensive or inconvenient – pretty much what the skeptics believe. They are different in that if it doesn’t cost them anything substantive, they’d be happy if the problem went away.

The second group I’ve called several things over the years – anti-modernists, sustainability folk (before that term came to mean “people who buy green prada”)… For this purpose, though, I call them “People of the Center” – that is, anyone who has something other than Moloch at the center of their world: a hope for the future, an investment in the past, the love of a G-d, the love of humanity in general, an ethical paradigm that actually trumps the desire for more – and thus perceives, sometimes instinctively, sometimes after long study, that we cannot go on this way, and must find something else.

And this category too crosses all political, cultural and religious lines. There are devout Christian homesteaders in this group, and indigenous native farmers, radical leftists and radical rightists. There are aging hippies and crunchy cons. There are Quakers and Amish, Hasidic and Liberal Jews, Moslems, Buddhist Nuns and Catholic Nuns, Neo-Pagans and Athiests. There are people who believe that climate change is no problem at all, or not their problem, but who deeply and profoundly believe they are called by their faith or taste or commitment to another principle to live ethically. There are people who believe that climate change is everything and come to the same conclusions. And in the end, what matters here are the ends- the conclusions and the life that follows them.

Here, then, I see the people who are already beginning to live the life necessary. They may think I’m a complete raving loon on the subject of climate change – but they recognize the need to grow their own food. They may not care at all about peak oil, but they know they need to cut their energy use and energy budget. They could be, on the right political grounds, supportive of far more radical political changes than most of the moderate people who accept climate change, because their basic premise is that the future is worth preserving.

The truth is that even without acceptance of climate change, tens of thousands of people recognize the essential emptiness of our center and are looking for a better way. The truth is that even if we disagree on peak oil, or on the face of the financial collapse, we have things to speak about. Even if we fight over important (I do not claim they are not important, just perhaps not as important as preventing the worst outcomes of our future) issues that are simply secondary – the traditional battleground issues of left and right, for example, we can recognize their secondariness.

Even if we have nothing in common except our commitment to creating a future for human beings in the world, we can work together at least in some measure – and I would argue that the People of the Center have more in common with one another than they do with the Children of Moloch, regardless of their opinions on gay marriage and health care funding.

Christians whose primary ideology is Moloch or Mammon and those who recognize that the way of life they live cannot go on are now associated with each other, but there’s nothing ideologically necessary in that association, and the emergence of the Christian Center and a language of Christian environmentalism is part and parcel I think of creating a culture in which it might be possible for those anti-modernist people of the center to ally. It won’t be easy or simple, but it may well be the best bet we have.

This is why even if you don’t think Christian environmentalism has anything to do with you, even if you have thought up to now that all evangelicals are alike, you should rethink. It is important that we begin to explore the common ground held by middle peoples – and provide aid and support to those beleaguered by blowback – our lives depend on it.

Sharon