In ancient times, pagans sacrificed children to propitiate angry, erratic, and inscrutable gods, hoping that giving up their most precious possessions would save the entire community. Leftists are still doing that, not just with abortion, but with their COVID policies and the madness of their decriminalizing crime.

Child sacrifice was normative across the ancient world. It was only the combination of the Torah’s proscription against human sacrifice (The Binding of Isaac, Genesis 22), combined with Jesus Christ offering himself as the ultimate sacrifice, that pagan societies eventually abandoned the practice.

Their reluctance was understandable. From one pagan culture to the next, their gods were motivated by the basest human emotions and, when triggered, were likely to visit drought, flood, earthquakes, hurricanes, famines, and disease on unwary humans who, somehow or other, offended these prickly deities. Whether as a preemptive bribe or an ex post facto apology, the offering had better be big, and what could be bigger than one’s children?

But we in the modern West are better than that, right? We’ve abandoned child sacrifice. We wouldn’t dream of killing children to appease a god. After all, most on the left don’t even believe in the capital “G” God and they’re probably materialists who don’t believe in small “g” gods either. Or do they?

Image: Aztecs sacrifice a child to appease angry gods (1499). Public domain.

A few stories got me wondering if leftists are quite the rational atheists they think they are.

Abortion. I suspect most American Thinker readers recognize that abortion is a death cult. After all, Americans have killed some 61,000,000 babies since 1973, when the Supreme Court first found that imaginary right to abortion hidden deep within the Constitution. In the beginning, though, women were embarrassed about what they were doing. It was shameful.

Now, though, things are different. Women shout their abortion. They’ve made goddesses of themselves and willingly sacrifice babies to satisfy their own emotional needs. In addition, the cult of climate change says that humans are killing Mother Gaia, another goddess who must be propitiated. And that’s how we end up with this story:

A live segment Sunday on WJBK in Detroit was shaping up to be a standard debate between two advocates from the abortion rights and antiabortion camps.

“Let It Rip” host Charlie Langton opened the discussion, asking abortion rights advocate Jex Blackmore about the Food and Drug Administration’s decision in December to allow abortion pills to be prescribed via telehealth and shipped to patients in the mail.

After explaining how the mail-order system worked and arguing that the drugs are “incredibly safe,” Blackmore held up a white pill. She explained it was the first of two that a person would take to terminate a pregnancy. “I want to show you how easy it is, and safe it is, by taking it myself,” she said.

Blackmore then popped it into her mouth.

Appearing bewildered, Langton asked: “You’re not pregnant, are you?”

“I would say that this is going to end a pregnancy,” Blackmore replied. “This would be my third abortion.”

Cold. At least in pagan times, there was some ceremony.

It’s not just abortion, though. What we’ve seen in the last two years is that large numbers of Americans are willing to destroy their children if it will keep the grown-ups safe from a disease with an average mortality rate of less than 1%. This is a complete inversion of the biological urge to save children.

For two years, Democrats have forced parents to isolate, mask, and inject experimental drugs into their children—and this is despite it’s being known for almost two years that children do not spread the virus, are unlikely to sicken from it, and are being destroyed at every level—developmentally, educationally, physically, and emotionally—because of policies intended to assuage adult fears.

A Reason article reports that there is no good evidence supporting the “universal masking” policy in schools. Even if you don’t read the article, just look at that tragic photograph of children cut off from what makes us most human: our mobile, expressive faces.

There’s one more photo for you, and this one results from the leftists’ completely insane crime initiatives:

Melissa Ortega. GoFundMe.

Melissa Ortega, 8, was the most recent victim of the crime spree that followed the leftists’ orgy of George Floyd worship. You remember him: Armed robber, felon, drug addict, and an all-around loser.

But having elevated Floyd, along with a rogues’ gallery of other criminals to the status of racial, secular gods, leftists ritualized destroying the criminal justice system across American cities. The result is that, in the last two years, almost 300 children died in Chicago alone, with Melissa just the most recent. You’ll find obscene numbers in other cities as well. But clearly, George Floyd’s vengeful spirit requires blood.

Leftists may claim to be secular but that’s not true. They just worship different gods—themselves, Gaia, criminals, etc. And their gods are hungry gods who demand young blood, which leftists seem awfully glad to provide.