Killing babies is a right???? Medieval times again??? Sacrificing babies to a pagan god!
Not even medieval; the Middle Ages were underrated, as CS Lewis famously pointed out with his concluding remark on medieval poetry, “And then the Renaissance came along and spoiled everything.” We can rest assured that, by the time of the High Middle Ages, Moloch Worship was extinct through the actions of the Roman Empire during the reign of Emperor St. Theodosius I, the first Christian emperor since the death of Emperor St. Constantine (recall that all subsequent Emperors from Constantius through Valens, with the exception of Julian “the Apostate”, were not Christians but members of the Arian heresy, which denied the deity of our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ, and rejected the Nicene creed, and which tried to pervert the Christian religion into something radically different. This was the result of the sinister bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, who supported Arius but managed to avoid outing himself as an Arian by not attending the Council of Nicaea, and not giving anyone a reason to suspect him, until such time as he had so thoroughly ingratiated himself with the Imperial court that he was able to convince an ageing and increasingly unwell Emperor Constantine that Arius had repented (he hadn’t) and should be admitted to communion at the Hagia Sophia, a request granted by the Emperor, but in the event Arius did not actually partake of the Eucharist that morning, as he expired in the lavatory before having a chance to partake of the Eucharist (perhaps because of his intentions do do so unworthily, as we are warned about in 1 Cornthians 11:27-34). At any rate, following the death of the last Arian emperor, Valens, St. Theodosius, a Christian, came to power, and in the following decade would push through legislation banning the Pagan religions throughout the Roman Empire, and to demonstrate that these religions were now prohibited, he caused quite a stir when he ordered that the Altar of VIctory (an altar dedicated to the demonic pagan goddess Victory, one of several demonic* goddesses that were central to the Roman state religion, such as Vesta, whose cult in Rome was also suppressed, by the co-emperor of Theodosius, Gratian).
By the middle ages, Moloch worship had been suppressed throughout the Byzantine Empire, even in those lands which had fallen victim to the expansion of the Islamic caliphates (which at times resulted in genocides, specifically of the Latin-speaking Christians of what is now Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, and also the entire Nubian Orthodox Church (an autonomous Oriental Orthodox church under the omophorion (great stole, but the meaning is akin to “umbrella”) of the Coptic Orthodox Pope of Alexandria, which would later expand, under Tamerlane and his descendants, to the genocide of most Christians of the Church of the East, including all of those in Socotra, Yemen and elsewhere in Arabia, outside the Fertile Cresent and adjacent areas in what is now iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey, and everywhere else in Asia except for the Malabar Coast of India (the Church of the East had previously stretched as far as Mongolia in the Northeast, and extended through China, particularly more culturally and religiously diverse areas such as Manchuria, down to Tibet, and included populations in various Central Asian cities on the SIlk Road such as Bukhara and Merv. Indeed, before the genocide, the Church of the East was the largest in the world at least in terms of geographical size, and possibly in respect of other metrics as well.
Meanwhile, the Byzantine Empire remained a major center of learning and human civilization, at least until Constantinople was invaded during the Fourth Crusade, which had ostensibly set out to retake the Holy Land, but which was really just a conspiracy by Venice to eliminate a rival, and also force the Orthodox into submission to the Roman Catholic Church, which is why it had status as an official crusade. Although the Venetian occupation of Constantinople would end, the Byzantine Empire never really recovered from that, and continued to decline, even as the Renaissance began in Western Europe, and after the Eastern Orthodox people of the Empire bravely decided to reject the Council of Florence, which had been approved by all of the Greek Orthodox bishops except St. Mark of Ephesus, which was basically a promise of military assistance in return for conversion to Roman Catholicism, it was only a matter of time before the Empire would fall and Turkocratia would begin.
And Turkocratia was horrible, but it lasted for less than 400 years in Greece, although Constantinople and Asia Minor remain occupied to this day by a country which has never even apologized for its more recent genocides in 1915 of the Armenians, Assyrians, Syriac Orthodox, and Pontic Greeks, and subsequent ethnic cleansing of the remaining Pontic Greeks with the 1920 population exchange with Greece, and for the 1950s pogrom against the Phanariot Greeks in the Phanar District of Constantinople (the small Cathedral of St. George, which is the cathedral church of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, has never been fully repaired following that incident, which, in my opinion, demonstrates that the Patriarch does get the respect he deserves from the Turkish government despite the prestige and international influence he brings to the country having demonstrated his loyalty - he even completed honorably a tour of duty in the Turkish military, as Turkey had at the time compulsory conscription of all males), and to add insult to injury, the Hagia Sophia has recently been turned back into a mosque in contravention of the instructions of Mustafa Kamal Ataturk, who desired that it be a secular museum owing to its history as both a cathedral and a mosque, as a symbol of the new post-Ottoman Turkey he was trying to build. And there are other issues as well, such as North Cyrpus, and the support of the Azeri genocide in Azerbaijan… But all of the horrors of Turkocratia were preferrable to the loss of Holy Orthodoxy among the Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians, Serbians, Albanians and other Orthodox Christians living within what was at the time Turkish territory, who would have been affected by the Council of Florence, and of course there is no guarantee that the military support provided by the West would have been adequate to repulse the Ottomans to begin with, considering that even despite the miraculous naval defeat at Loreto, the Turks continued a land-based offensive, and their armies reached as far as the outskirts of Vienna, before being stopped by heroic armies of Poland, Germany and Austria in miraculous victory against Ottoman forces more than twice their number, under the command of the gallant St. Jan Sobieski, rightly hailed as the savior of Western Civilization. I suspect that Western forces would not have been able to pull off such a victory 230 years earlier, given the problems of logistics, especially in terms of supporting an expeditionary force on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, increasing Turkish naval capabilities, and the decrepit state of the Byzantine military (which had been given centuries of extra time through the medieval pyrophoric superweapon known as “Greek Fire”, but this was quite obsolete by 1453 due to the use of cannon and firearms).
Another bright spot of Medieval Europe was Kievan Rus, the ancestor of the Ukrainian, Russian and Belarussian civilizations of the present, as well as a great influence on Slavic culture throughout Europe and also the culture of the Baltic States and Finland, which upon its conversion to Christianity under St. Vladimir the Great, became a country that was entirely pro-life, with no abortion, euthanasia or capital punishment. Many people might think of the idea of a state in the Middle Ages not engage in capital punishment as unthinkable, given that we associate the middle ages with an excess of capital punishment, with the extremely harsh laws of England, where one could be hanged or beheaded even for theft, and of the Islamic countries, which were similiarly brutal, and also of the Spanish Inquisition. And when it comes to Russia, people think of the brutal forms of execution and corporal punishment that existed in the 18th and early 19th century, such as flogging with the knouth, which was often fatal, but many people are unaware of how Russia was damaged by the Westernization of Peter the Great, who uncanonically seized control of the Russian Orthodox Church and sought to impose what he regarded as the technologically and culturally superior Western civilization, modelling St. Petersburg after Amsterdam and various German cities, and even giving it, and the nearby naval base in Kronstadt, German names, and banning the wearing of beards, traditionally worn by the Rus of Muscovy and Kiev as an aspect of their iconological form of life - since our Lord wore a beard, Orthodox Christian men wore a beard, and so Peter “the Great”, unable to comprehend this traditional way of life, tried to suppress it, but wound up settling on imposing a tax for those wearing a beard, and attempting unsuccessfully to, with violence, suppress the Russian Old Rite Orthodox, who preserved the older form of the liturgy (which had been modified to make it more like the liturgy as it was then celebrated by the Greeks of the former Byzantine Empire), but fortunately, a large number of Old Rite Orthodox were later reconciled with the canonical church, and an open invitation exists for the rest, and there is a trickle in the right direction, for instance, in the 1980s, most of the members of the Church of the Nativity, a priestless Old Believer parish in Erie, Pennsylvania, decided to join the canonical Orthodox church (the priestless movement being particularly problematic, much more so than the Old Rite hierarchies that are not in communion with the canonical church, since they believe that all authentic bishops and priests had died by the mid 18th century, and thus there is no way to ordain any more bishops, priests, or deacons, and this results not only in their failing to celebrate the Eucharist, but also, in some cases, not even engaging in proper sacramental marriage).