The bits of Poem are from Howl by Allen Ginsberg. You should smoke some Neckercube and watch this YouTube video of Part 1. Click here.
The Image of Moloch is by John Singer Sargent and is part of his monumental Mural Series: The Triumph of Religion which has just been restored at the Boston Public Library. Click here and take a VR Tour of this brilliant work
"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!"
"What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?"
Daniel Dennett wants to put Religion under the microscopes of Science. "It is high time that we subject religion as a global phenomenon to the most intensive multidisciplinary research we can muster, calling on the best minds of the planet. Why? Because religion is too important for us to remain ignorant about." In his book: Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon - Dennett, like Dawkins, and Hitchens, and Harris - the 4 Evangeli of the New Atheism - is finally pissed-off enough to ask the dirty little question about Religion: Why does everyone give Religion a Free Pass when it comes time to logically look at it thru the prism of Science? His book is - at least in subject/theme - a twin of Dawkin's bitter tome: The God Delusion. But Dawkins comes at these questions from Biology while Dennett sees the argument from Philosophy. So they agree pretty much on everything but they take their evidences and examples from divergent sources. Religion, Dennett says has us under 2 Spells. The 1st is that it is somehow Taboo to talk about Religion in the same way you would discuss the origins and the purposes of the Semantic Web for instance - treating Religion as a human behavior which needed a forensic examination. The 2nd Spell is Religion itself - the stuff it talks about - it's view of life and its hold on people. Should that Spell be broken too?

For example: regard, Dennett says, this ant in the meadow. He keeps climbing up a blade of grass until he falls. Then he rolls over and climbs the blade again. Falls. Rolls over. Climbs the blade again. Science says that animal behavior is designed to somehow benefit the behaver. So what's the gift here? Huh? Turns out there's a parasitic lancet fluke which has attached itself to the ant's brain and it has "commandeered" the ant and is forcing it to keep climbing that fucking blade of grass. The fluke has to get itself into the stomach of either a cow or a sheep or some ungulate so it can complete its reproductive cycle. It needs a ride so that it can get laid. Powerful motivation. By making the ant keep climbing it will give the fluke better odds that a passing grass eater will graze on the ant and Poof! Afterglow for the Fluke. So the behavior of the ant was self destructive but it wasn't really about the ant at all. An ant's just the back seat of a Chevy to a horny Fluke. Parasites cause behavior which benefits them and not their host. Has a Parasitic Meme - in the form of a Religion - commandeered man's brain? Because that's what Religion is - an idea, a Meme. And like their biological counterparts, the genes, we look for ways that Memes benefit their owners. Dennett and Dawkins are claiming that Religion is a Natural Phenomenon and not a Supernatural thingy. Hume declared that Religion originates in human nature. How? Why? Why should Monkeys believe in gods and prayers and miracles and wonders? Why should Monkeys hoard Relics and perform elaborate time and resource draining rituals and ceremonies designed to influence a Supernatural realm which has no objective existence whatever? What does god benefit us?

The Catholic Encyclopedia will tell you that Moloch was "a divinity worshipped by the idolatrous Israelites" and that the chief feature of Moloch worship was that children were sacrificed to him. Or in him as one account describes a huge iron statue with 7 drawers: one filled with flour, the 2nd stuffed with turtle-doves, a ewe crammed into the 3rd, in the 4th a ram, the 5th a calf, and somehow the apostate priests wedged an ox into the 6th, while in the last - the "7th Room in Moloch's Mansion" - was a living child of man. The name of this Sacrifice was: Passing Thru the Fire. The gifts of the Earth given back to the gods. Costly shit for the tribe. Though Skippy knows an Etic who has argued that this type of human sacrifice has a Sociobiological payoff: Agri-communities are nearly always on the edge of starvation. Getting rid of young eaters removes an enormous strain on the resources over time. It costs a bunch to feed a little mouth for 20 years as it grows. Giving a few to the Fire now and then does wonders to improve the bottom line. But fuck the Etics. Because it doesn't matter whether Moloch was Phoenician/Canaanite/Ammonite,Edomite, or Moabite - hell, Moloch is much older than any of that. Moloch had the head and sometime the entire body of a Bull - and Bull worship is 11,000 years old in its organized form and does indeed begin and blossom in the biblical middle east. So Moloch's got pedigree & cred and yah, from time to time, I imagine "the Old Dragon," devoured some Kinder - all nicely roasted in a 7 Piece Stew. But the other Etics - the Language Geeks - they will wax triumphant about Hebrew Consonant Triplets and how Moloch would be written M-L-K which is the root for words in earlyjew as 'melek' = king. And Malkuth in Kabbala = kingdom. So that maybe in those few places where 'scripture' refers to Moloch it should be translated kinda like = to the king, or for the king. And all that Fire and the Bull in the Zodiakos Kyklos - hell, that all adds up to Ba'al and he's a Sun and Fire god. Most of the biblical references to Moloch never describe a god at all but instead use the word M-L-K only to mean: "passing children thru the fire." Which is all too much like Thetis and when Demeter camoes in as the nurse of Demophon. Lots of little heroes are held to the fire - but they are not consumed.
Click on Der Gotte Moloch above and YouTube Ginsberg reading the "Moloch Rant' part of his poem Howl.
From the Bull Headed Man to the Horned Man - it's all Moloch - just like Ginsberg says: "Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog? Moloch whose smokestacks 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." Moloch whose name is the Mind. Now we know what Web 3.0 will be Named when the Folksonomies are done winnowing. The Semantic Web - when it 'pops smoke' and camoes in underneath the WWW will be Moloch. "Moloch whose name is the Mind." Cronos, Saturn, Kali, and Moloch all eat their children. Dennett and Dawkins would argue that the Ritual of Eating your Kinder is a Meme or maybe even a Memeplex - a social-hive of connected Memes, all working in consort to reproduce the Meme in other Minds. A Memeplex will often behave as if it is self-directed, and always behave for the benefit of the Memeplex. Kids will have to be cooked - it's a cost - but the host pays, not the Memeplex - like the Buddha, it crosses over into China. Breeding itself in the embers of the Innocents.
Plutarch and several others ran with the Urban Legend of Apostate Jewish Child Sacrifice and they too - like the shifted vowels of Moloch and his decaying consonants SnowBalling over time - elaborated and twisted the narrative until it produces a dramatic Mise-en-Scene with Wagnerian flourishes. With Plutarch there grows up the myth of the Band - the priests who would play flutes and beat drums in discordant and cacophonous rhythms at the site of the flaming Sacrifice. The purpose of the band was to drown out the cries of the flour and the doves, to mask the bleatings of the ewe, the ram, the calf, and the ox - and to cover the screaming of the baking child. Let the Devil out of the Music! Get the crowd moving into ecstasy and orgy so that their mirror neurons will stop repeating the pain. Religion has many purposes but very few of its hosts are aware of them. Monkeys cut the heads off their own dicks but none of them could tell you why.
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