Babylon

What is Babylon? The Mesopotamian city-state once bearing that name has been used as a symbol for human folly, oppression, material worship, corruption, and moral depravity throughout history. It may have been the site of the infamous Tower of Babel, where mankind exercised the height of hubris and was securely humbled, at least according to tradition. The name "Babylon" has thus been appropriated to many lands that have fit these symbolic descriptors, including Rome, Europe, and the Americas--all places assumed at one point to have flown too close to the sun as Icarus only to burn in their own shame instead.

Probably the most severe charge leveled against this mythic pinnacle of human endeavor is that the people who inhabited it were not just morally bankrupt in their deeds, but the deeds and practices partook within its walls were contrary to nature itself. It is for these abominations that Babylon was torn asunder like Sodom and Gomorrah, and Rome in the following epoch, and perhaps our own high flying civilization in the near future. The western world, it could be argued, has decided to run its course contrary to nature in a multitude of ways, in clear defiance brought on by timeless human arrogance, but for the purposes of this dialogue, the most pressing appears to be the way it has decided to raise its children.

We are living in the midst of a new Babylon resurrected in the modern age to reclaim the same historical legacy. Our society has been gripped by an unnatural bureaucratic regime that imposes a skeletal will of its own on how children are to be dealt with in our age. For our purposes, we see this in the rise of "nanny state" politics, public education, and the Child Protective Services, to name a few sources. From these sources we observe widespread alienation in both society and it's children, and between society and children born from the paper trails and false pretenses strewn amok in the world. In this new Babylon a child becomes free to be secured so adults may not have to look at them, and little else, and it has ignored how nature has gifted them two arms and legs to go where they please. Babylon has forbade a child from bruising a knee where nature has equipped them capable of healing. This is an abomination.

From these sources we see how bold-faced corruption at the hands of the trusted few carries no horrified weight in the public heart when compared to the muted love felt by those the system deems superficially undesirable--the non-parents. The irony is that Babylon asserts Childlove is contrary to nature, when everything our society does in the raising of children at the "official" level can scarcely be found in the natural world. If Childlove is unnatural, then where does that leave the Child Protective Services? When was the last time you saw an animal, a mother tigress, have her offspring carried away to be wards of the animal state? In this confusion over what is natural and what isn't, Babylon creates a daily abomination out of what it calls modern childhood, and then goes on the hunt to purge that which is natural (loving adult/child bonds) by singling them out as abominations! To live in Babylon is to be an unwilling or unwitting slave to such illusion. That is an abomination.

We see bold-faced media moral depravity over children as we fret about outside sources of contamination on their so-called weaker minds. We see bold-faced consumerism regard children as personal corporate pawns to extort money from adults, and the constant bombardment of the developing mind with worshipful imagery of "me-first" gratification--an economically necessary self-actualization through material pursuits that has to "take root early" to grow as its planters desire. Within Babylon, children are not considered competent to resist the forces that seek to dominate them, cultivate them, and nurture them to fruition for the dreams of the powerful, so they are expected to be tame, passive, and to define their self worth and the worth of others through material things. Childlove is of nature because it teaches us to use things and love people. Babylon teaches our children to use people and love things. That is an abomination.

But because not all children are tame, they are subjugated where they deviate from what is expected of them from the corrupt culture. Within Babylon, they are expected to be sedated. They are expected to live an "ideal happy childhood" at all cost to their actual living human dignity. They are to be put under arrest for being young at the wrong place and wrong time (the definition of the "status offense" in juvenile law). They are expected to lay low in their bedrooms playing on their computers, buying into what is profitable for someone else, rather than out being human beings themselves, because home is where they can be easily monitored, easily controlled, and easily converted. Babylon is the residence of the downpresser. That is an abomination.

Babylon is wherever the soul has lost its way in its own arrogance and decadence. It is a metaphor for human folly--the slow destruction of the human being and spirit when its true passionate nature has been perverted, distorted, and separated from it. The modern world claims not only its children, but all those who choke up whenever it requires them to, who feel hatred for whom it orders them to feel hatred for, and sympathy for whom it reserves sympathy must be given. The modern Babylon controls its subjects (child and adult alike) through the subtle mind control of sentimentalism, inflated at ten times its natural size, until society can not tell what has been sensationalized from what is truth. In Babylon, phantom children (the idealized ones) take precedence over the real ones with faces and names, and whenever you have a civilization where imaginary child victims take precedence over the less visceral living and breathing ones, we have a civilization that has turned its back on nature.

We can save our society one child at a time, one person at a time, by reinstating the primitive values of personal responsibility, charity, and above all else, human-to-human love bonds--such things Babylon had no use for in its self-absorbed quest to build its towers to God. Who needs to worship children when you can simply respect them as human beings? Who needs a three-story chain link fence to keep our children safe in a world where children and adults were allowed to personally look out for one another? Who needs an all-consuming, expensive tower to God when we can bring Him to earth with just a friendly nod, or a loving embrace?

To get there, Babylon must first devour itself from the inside out, as it has before and will again.