Consider the Astarte Figurine. Found in the thousands in Ancient Israel, these amulets were commonly worn by women to connect them to the core function of women: sexual reproduction and nurturing new life. Note the placement of the hands. These ancient idol worshippers worshipped nature itself (and so they missed the importance of relationships beyond physical requirements), but they at least understood the value of reproduction and new life.
Today’s leftist women prefer Tramp Stamps: they make it clear that pleasure without consequences or responsibility of any kind is their goal. Indeed, these women go to great lengths to limit or eliminate their very ability to procreate, from birth control to abortion. Who needs men? The vast majority of American women own the mechanical means to satisfy their animal urges, no icky man required. Indeed, many boast about it!
Leftists want to enjoy the moment, and they’ll do so by abandoning the future. Conservatives, ironically, are invested in the future! That is why conservatives view sex as a way to bond a man and a woman, with a key benefit of having children and then in turn growing and preserving bonds between the generations. We took the ancient pagan obsession with fecundity, and altered it to make it much more about the underlying relationships, in both physical and spiritual forms.
In the ancient world, pagan or monotheistic, children were all-important. Fecundity was the measure of a woman, just as masucilinity was the measure of a man. Children were also support for the parents in their old age, when several generations of families lived together. Judaism altered this understanding, seeing children as more than merely economically useful presently and in old age. For anti-pagan pioneers like Avraham, children were meant to carry on his legacy, keepers of the ideological flame. But for everyone, children were understood to be essential. Hence, the Astarte amulets.
But that was when families were units, and children were assumed to belong to their families, a continuation of their parents.
But today, children no longer are products of their parents or family. All children are instead components of Hillary Clinton’s Village. The State. Nobody owns them. Joe Biden can claim “There is no such thing as someone else’s child.”
That is certainly the belief of those who wish to use our children to satisfy their own sexual peccadilloes. And it helps explain why women today are told to not have children, and why abortion is so central to Leftist platforms. For socialism and the Village to succeed, the family must be undermined and ultimately replaced. Your children are our children.
The family is the biggest threat to Leftism, which is why it has been undermined for decades. Leftism seeks instead to preserve the status quo (no children, and a culture of narcissistic hedonism). The fertility sought by women in the ancient world was, in a way, at least a hat-tip to the idea of change and investment in the future, in the value of populating the earth. Today’s leftist wants to depopulate the earth! They crave a mass orgy of licentiousness as a blaze of self-immolating glory before the lights go out on all of Western Civilization.
This is a core irony of the modern world. Fundamentalist Torah Jews (like myself) end up being obsessed by relationships (which are always in flux): marriage, children, and grandchildren. We are always trying to grow and change ourselves and the world around us. Which is pretty funny, because we are, in many respects as “conservative” as they come!
But secular leftists do the opposite! Modern progressives want to stop progress! This is even at the heart of their earth-worship: environmentalism seeks to preserve the status quo by stopping development of all kinds, by erasing the mark people make on the earth.
My interest in growth and change (both my own, and that of all those I come into contact with), is in direct opposition to the Leftist and pagan trope that people are essentially defined by their DNA and the group and culture in which they are raised. This innate racism comes from a common self-fulfilling belief: that we are only ever the product of our nature and nurture, and never the product of our conscious choices, acting through our free will.
That assumption feeds the self-fulfilling prophecy that we cannot grow, that we cannot change. On the contrary! We conservatives want to change ourselves: our own circumstances, our families, our relationships, our own behavior). Leftists reject the need to change themselves, insisting instead on making others conform to their wishes, their pronouns, their whims. In so doing, they seal their own eventual doom by demographics: no sane person wants to marry, let alone have children with, a selfish pig.
Leftists are the modern Shakers. They sell out the future to create a utopia today, much as unions erect walls around their profession and pull up the ladder. So they have no interest in the next generation except as playthings for their own pleasures. If it wrecks someone else’s family, so much the better.
The ancient pagans got a lot wrong. There is a reason the Torah forbids idols like Astarte Figurines. But those pagans at least understood that there was still a basic and fundamental value to be found in creating, nurturing, and growing new life.
[an @iwe, @eliyahumasinter and @kidcoder work]