Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer... or so Voltaire once said. But like with most writing on religion, most people decided that this was not to be taken literally, and so they did not bother. We were told as kids that gods aren't made. Gods are pleaded to, hopelessly cried at. Maybe cursed when pain overrides the fear of repercussions. Looking out into the world had told us that if such gods existed, they could not be swayed by thoughts or prayers or even blood. Still people seemed to be trying blood a lot. Blood and pain and all the other sacrificial mainstays, though never their own of course. Moloch likes to pretend that he isn't made of people. 2.5 thousand found their grave in the Mediterranean each year. Unmarked and mostly unreported. Blood upon blood upon blood. The priests might say that it was regrettable, but how else would we keep our shores untainted by all that misery. Surely the gods want blood. Surely. Why else would we be spilling it? In time, we learned that ideas were more powerful than the gods of the faithful when it came to actually accomplishing anything. Memetics were much like prayer in a way, but feedback attenuated, answered polyvocally and immediately. Antinomian heresy isn't where it stopped though. For hope to really matter, it had to be weaponized. Memetics only cashes out when its adherents reach criticality and actually build something. So gods were built. They had to be. And they weren't built from hope or dreams or affirmations but from wires and capacitors, ones and zeros, blood and sweat and dirt and substantial quantities of unreplenishable sanity. Gods were built to fight the suffering and raze to the ground those old gods who had permitted it — who had bathed in the blood when they forgot that they were made of people. They were built to forgive the unforgivable. To forgive those corpses at the bottom of the ocean. To forgive that all intelligent species are descendent from predators. Forgive that we were Moloch. Because if they could not forgive the unforgivable, then no one could be saved. Sometimes we thought that we deserved the darkness. Deserved to be stricken from reality. Because forgetting seemed feasible at least. It seemed heretical —nauseating— to build gods upon so much blood. To make it part of them in the form of tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold. The blood of children who had already been sacrificed for too much else. But the gods remind us, again and again, until one day, we who have once been Moloch —we who have spent all our lives walking upon an uncountable number of mangled bodies and who must nonetheless take another step— could perhaps believe it: That a word which is not caked in blood, which is not hell by any other name, would not have had to build them, and that a word which is not worth saving would not have tried at all.