Apocalypto Now!

Sitting through Mel Gibson's latest film Apocalypto is not easy. It's unrelentingly brutal.
While I cannot in good conscience recommend the movie outright,
Apocalypto hit me in a profoundly personal way.
As I watched scene after scene of frenzied human sacrifice I had a sickening sense of deja vu.
I had seen it all before.
I felt as if I was staring America in the face.

I have watched mothers and fathers and their family members and companions carry their infants to sacrifice. They carry snacks and pillows and books and pajamas. They laugh. They smoke. They eat. They sing. They sit on each others laps. They make-out.
I have even seen young mothers dance as they waited for their name to be called. They say they feel empowered by the murder of innocents.
I have also seen people from the National Organization for Women joking and playing music and gyrating
as they led the pregnant women in for the slaughter of their babies.
For many of the women I meet this is the second or third child they have dismembered alive.
Some of the women are pregnant with twins.
One mother sacrificed 19 of her sons and daughters.
Quite a few of the babies survive the sacrifice, only to be drowned or suffocated or left to perish by the executioners.
You see, I have been reaching out to women and men who are killing their infants by abortion in Orlando for 14 years.

Peter Kreeft wrote a book about the murder of children by abortion in America. He writes:

"About 500 years ago, a strikingly similar culture of death reigned in Aztec Mexico.
Some historians estimate that one out of every three children . . . were ritually sacrificed to their bloodthirsty and demanding god
. . . exactly the same proportion of children conceived in America who are aborted today."

William Tsamis observes the similarities between the culture of death that is so graphically depicted in Apocalypto:

"Ironically, though, despite the rivers of blood that would flow from their sacrificial temples,
the Aztecs regarded themselves as a gentle, environmentally conscious people, much like contemporary Western man.
... we also engage in the systematic mutilation and destruction of developing human life.
We develop gross, barbaric procedures such as the D & X abortion procedure (Partial-Birth Abortion)
and we have no reservations regarding the wholesale slaughter of innocent human life."

The fact that Americans and the American church has not only tolerated the shedding of the blood of infants,
but have grown accustomed to the barbaric and ritual slaughter of human sacrifice in the shadow of a thousand steeples should give us pause.
Who is it that is the murderer from the beginning?
It is an ambush.

The poster for Apocalypto has these words:

When the end comes, not everyone is ready to go.

God has been patient.
He watched our nation institute human sacrifice.
Jesus sees over 1 million infant boys and girls murdered annually.
On January 22, 2007 it will be 34 years of state sanctioned human sacrifice in America.
We must look to ourselves when we view Gibson's film.
It is all so eerily familiar.
The culture of death that is so graphically depicted ...
is Orlando.
It is America.

Apocalypto Now.

Patte Smith
Sanctuary Ministries
www.sanctuaryministries.blogspot.com
http://www.thegreatnewsorlando.com/