The Return of Baal and Asherah

 

Anyone who has read the Old Testament is bound to have asked how the Israelites could have been so stupid as to repeatedly worship false gods. Couldn’t they see that these gods were not real, could not save them, and that their worship always had bad consequences? We may have our own problems, but we’re not stupid enough to commit actual idolatry with false gods in such a blunt fashion. 

There is a problem with this reasoning. Two of the most popular idols in Ancient Israel were Baal and Asherah. 

Baal was a Canaanite storm god. Asherah was a local fertility goddess. And in extreme cases, the Israelites slaughtered their own children as an offering to the Moabite god Moloch. 

In the contemporary West there are few causes that attract more devotion, and stifle dissent more, than climate change and sexual expression. 

I know many people at work who devote their whole public lives (career, politics) and much of their private lives (housing, diet) to climate change. Many people, from the height of western political and corporate power down to penniless college students insist that humanity must change everything about economic life, technology, and much of politics to resolve climate change. 

I know many people, including some in my own family whose sense of self is driven mainly by sexuality. I have an elderly relative who often has a book with him when I see him once or twice a year. Since the Windsor and Obergefell rulings though, the books I see him reading have mostly been driven by homosexuality. The recent books have focused on Barney Frank, Neil Patrick Harris, the emperor Hadrian, and Harvey Fierstein. 

The US Supreme Court has banned states from restricting contraception’s availability to people as young as 16. The US federal government has mandated that most employers provide contraception free to employees. No fault divorce is enshrined in the law of most US states. Planned Parenthood is the US’s largest abortion provider and is one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the country. 

Even the hint of a suggestion that certain forms of sexual expression might be restricted in some states in the US provokes a massive backlash, even among people like the current US President who aren’t personally interested in sex outside marriage, abortion, homosexuality, or alternative forms of sexuality.

As Maui says in the movie Moana: it’s nice to see that humans never change.