|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The Enlightenment project to diminish faith––or as the late Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI said, “to see God eradicated once and for all from the public life of humanity and shut up in the subjective sphere of cultural residues from the past”––has nearly succeeded in the West.
Even in the U.S., long mocked by Europeans as a hotbed of religious irrationality and bigotry, the younger generations are increasingly alienated from traditional religion. This estrangement, reinforced by the Christophobia and chronocentrism of schools and most of our culture, has gotten worse over the last two generations. According to an American Enterprise Institute report, 34% of Gen Z, and 29% of Millennials are unaffiliated with any religion, compared to 18% for Boomers, and 9% for the Silent Generation (1928-45).
The wages of this historical sea-change are legion, but nowhere more deadly than the long, profound misunderstanding of Islam, gruesomely obvious in the commentary and protests concerning the current savagery of Hamas’s terrorist attacks against Israel. One effect of our diminishment of faith is that our political leaders, charged with protecting the interests and security of we the people, have failed to understand or even know the doctrines of Islam, its history, and the intensity of its adherents’ faith that all inspire and motivate the attackers.
As a consequence, policies and strategies are based on a materialist calculus that emphasizes Western goods like “national self-determination,” democracy, prosperity, or political rights like freedom and equality. Religion, a Freudian “illusion” or a Marxist “opiate,” is either ignored or, in the case of Islam, refashioned in terms that gratify the West’s parochial prejudices like identity politics based on a historical victim status.
As long ago as the Thirties, this historical amnesia and its dangers were pointed out by Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc:
Millions of modern people . . . have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past. . . . The final fruit of this tenacity, the second period of Islamic power, may be delayed —but I doubt whether it can be permanently postponed.
Our ignorance and indifference reflect the long retreat of Islamic power and influence since the 17th century, and its increasing domination by the West. These have had two effects in our times: the West became uninterested in Islamic nations other than as Cold War allies and sources of the fossil fuels that have powered our rich economies; and the deep sense of grievance on the part of Muslim nations, especially after the “disaster,” as Osama bin Laden put it, of the 1923 dismantling of the Ottoman Caliphate.
That historical development, along with Kemal Atatürk’s secularizing reforms, marked the end of the last Islamic great power, and the marginalizing of the faith that once dominated the infidel West. The Christians who for a thousand years were prey for Allah’s armies and their depredations, now possess the global hegemony rightfully belonging to Islam, the “best of nations,” as the Koran put it, destined to rule the world.
These disasters have spurred a religious revival, for as Bernard Lewis has written, “From the beginning of Western penetration into the world of Islam until our own day, the most characteristic, significant, and original political and intellectual responses have been Islamic. They have been concerned with the problems of the faithful and the community overwhelmed with infidels.”
And not just restoration, but global dominance is Islam’s aim: “The last great Muslim empire may have been destroyed,” Efraim Karsh writes, “and the caliphate left vacant, but the imperial dreams of world domination has remained very much alive in the hearts and minds of many Muslims.” The jihadist aggression that created the Islamic empires, which once occupied two-thirds of the old Roman Empire, would also be the doctrinally sanctioned instrument of its recovery. This goal required that the Muslim faith and Islamic societies be purged of the infidel accretions from Western civilization.
The most important and influential modern jihadist organization is the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in 1928, five years after Atatürk ended the Ottoman caliphate. This organization has significantly influenced and supported modern jihadism, including outfits like al Qaeda and Hamas. Its founder, Hassan al Bana, in his writings confirms Karsh’s analysis: “It is the nature of Islam to dominate not to be dominated, to impose its power to the entire planet.” And his colleague Sayyid Qutb made it clear that force would be necessary to achieve Islam’s restoration: “Those [Western infidels] who have usurped the power of Allah on earth and made His worshippers their slaves will not be dispossessed by words alone.”
However, the biggest victory of neo-jihadism was the Iranian revolution of 1978-79, a religious movement inspired and directed by the revered Shi’a cleric, the Ayatollah Khomeini. But the revolution was misinterpreted by our foreign policy establishment, who downplayed the role of Islam and emphasized instead the Western goods of national self-determination and human rights. The Shah was caricatured as a neo-imperialist stooge of the U.S., who thwarted his people’s aspirations for political freedom and national sovereignty.
Yet Khomeini had for decades resisted the Shah and his father before him not for their brutality, corruption and illiberal policies, but for their liberalizing policies such as the secularization of society, securing rights for women and religious minorities, and reducing of the power and influence of clerics. In 1962, when the Shah proposed a law that emancipated women and Jews, Khomeini said that the law was actually the creature of the “spies of the Jews and the Zionists,” and that “the Qur’an and Islam are in danger.” In 1963, Khomeini added that the clerical establishment “have come to the conclusion that the regime also has a more basic aim: they are fundamentally opposed to Islam itself and the existence of a religious class.”
In other words, the revolution was not about liberalization and reform of the regime, as Western analysts claimed, but about resisting the Shah’s programs aimed to provide secular improvements like the freedoms and rights enjoyed by the West. And for Khomeini’s revolution, jihad would be the means of thwarting these developments.
In his sermons and writings, for example, Khomeini defended this traditional Islamic response to the incursions of modernity: “Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says, Kill all the unbelievers as they would kill you! . . . Islam says, whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword! The sword is the key to paradise, which can be opened only for holy warriors! . . . . Islam is a religion of blood for the infidel but a religion of guidance for the people.” So much for Western apologists who claim jihad is about personal self-improvement.
Finally, foreseeing the role of Iran today in nurturing global jihadist terrorisim Khomeini promised, “We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry ‘There is no God but Allah’ resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle,” meaning jihad––promise we have seen fulfilled by 44 years of America and Israeli blood on the Mullahs’ hands.
The failure of imagination displayed by our foreign policy technocrats––who dealt with Iran in terms of Western materialist and political ideals–– is a consequence of the secularism that has marginalized faith into a primitive superstition. This diminishment has borne bitter fruit, most obviously in the current savage murders of Israelis by Hamas, one of Iran’s jihadist creations.
Iran is the key to the ongoing mayhem in Israel, Syria, and Yemen, and remains the challenge to our power and influence in the region. Indeed, the prophecies of Hilaire Belloc are growing closer to realization: “Islam is the most dynamic force today because, unlike other major religions, it hasn’t succumbed to secularism. It doesn’t divide human life between the religious and the secular, the spiritual and the totality of human existence. Only Islam is the route to victory,” for “In Islam, there has been no such dissolution of ancestral doctrine—or, at any rate, nothing corresponding to the universal break-up of religion in Europe.”
Given this resurgence of traditional Islamic jihad over the last century, we in the West need to start taking more seriously religious motives and the beliefs that inspire them, and stop rewriting Islamic doctrines to suit our own anodyne conceptions of Islam’s precepts and 14 hundred years of brutal conquest in the service of Allah. Feckless rationalizations of Islamic terror like “nothing to do with Islam” and “religion of peace,” are mere delusions that signal the weakness of those who have lost their faith, live only for today’s material pleasures, and for whom there is “nothing to kill and die for.”
Most importantly, when an enemy tells you he wants to kill you, believe him. Iran’s Mullahs already have 44 years of American blood on their hands––that should tell us they mean what they say.
Socialism is NOT secular. Communism is NOT secular. Globalism is NOT secular. The moral code of altruism and self-sacrifice is NOT secular. They are all derived from religion. From mysticism, from unreason, from magical thinking.
Atheistic socialism in whatever form it takes (communism, Nazism) is religion in disguise. Magical thinking pretending to be rational thought. Judaism prepared the ground for Christianity, and both prepared the ground for Islam and Marxism.
Socialism, communism, collectivism, totalitarianism, and Nazism are all based on faith, on unreason, on magical thinking. The Aryan Race is as much a supernatural mythology, is as much magical thinking, as is 72 Virgins In Paradise.
“Socialism is really helping religion. The bigger the statism, the more people are accustomed to government rule over everything. The more people are ready for religionists to take over the lead away from the more secular side… the socialists are building the basis for totalitarianism but only the religionists are going to cash in on it and take over….
I believe that the Medievals understood much better than the Moderns on what basis to build a totalitarian society that would last and not collapse in less than a century. They did it. And the people in the rising religious movements today know that full well. They’re the ones who have millions, upon millions, upon millions, of followers and a real insight into the fact that economics is not the crucial factor in history, but philosophy and culture are….
Religion was the root of [totalitarianism] from the beginning. It has ruled in disguised forms and still is. And now the disguise has to be stripped off if there is to be a lasting totalitarianism. For a lasting totalitarian state, religion is the only means.” – Leonard Peikoff
Objectivism is NOT secular. Objectivism is NOT secular. Objectivism is NOT secular.
And you have shown us the Objectivist doctrine which you repeat ad nauseum:
Basically your Objectivism For Dummies course consists of the following:
Altruism…bad.
Self-sacrifice…..bad
Jesus…..bad
Christianity…………bad
Judaism…….bad
Judeo-Christianity is Leftism……bad
Judaism and Christianity are oriental…..bad
Christianity prepared the ground for modern totalitarianism….bad
Medieval Christianity was a totalitarian system…..bad
God and magical thinking…….bad
Atheism….good
Greeks……good
Christian Dark Age….bad
Renaissance and enlightenment …..good
Greek philosophers……good
Christian philosophers…….bad
selfishness “properly defined”, rational selfishness….good
Objectivist reason and reality….good
Altruism…bad.
THX’s List of Horribles
Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden with a Talking Snake and a Fruit of Knowledge. Eve Made From Adam’s Rib. An Immaculate Conception. A Virgin Birth. Noah’s Ark. The Parting of the Red Sea.
Repeat ad infinitum. The Big Lie in practice.
And there we have the simplistic world according to our rezidentura fraud…..THX
Objectivism is a religion.
Well,
Christianity is not considered a religion among Christians.
You fail to see you are the most religiously zealous poster at FPM. There is no such thing as religious neutrality. You correctly see the religious elements in every movement, but fail to see it in Objectivism.
Your religion is man’s mind, which you rather stupidly define as “reason.” Having no transcendence, no law, and no understanding of human nature, your religion promises only chaos, violence and degradation.
If there is no Law Giver, then there is no law. Where there is no law, every man does what is right in his own eyes.
If your God does not exist does that mean that you can drink cyanide because you feel like it and face no consequences from the facts and laws of reality?
If there is no Jehovah does that really mean that “anything goes”? That without God a man can jump off the Golden Gate Bridge and face no consequences? That without a belief in your Jehovah a man can escape the facts and laws of reality?
The Law of Identity and its corollary the Law of Causality are the basis of reason, logic, and objectivity. They cannot be escaped or wished away.
If you choose to live long-range and not just for the whim of the moment you must obey the laws of reality, you must obey the facts of reality. That’s not supernatural religion or Divine Law, that’s natural reality and Natural Law. And that’s Objectivism.
“You can evade the laws of reality, but you cannot evade the consequences of evading the laws of reality.” – Ayn Rand
“Life or death is man’s only fundamental alternative. To live is his basic act of choice. If he chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course….
“The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts to negate man’s rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is anti-life….
It is not society, nor any social right, that forbids you to kill—but the inalienable individual right of another man to live. This is not a “compromise” between two rights—but a line of division that preserves both rights untouched. The division is not derived from an edict of society—but from your own inalienable individual right. The definition of this limit is not set arbitrarily by society—but is implicit in the definition of your own right.
Within the sphere of your own rights, your freedom is absolute.” – Ayn Rand
So where do the individual rights come from? How did we get an objective moral order in the world? Did Adam or Eve think that one up? If not, who?
Where do our morals come from? You? (It wasn’t me, I swear.) We can have a horrible reality or a good one. We have FREE WILL. But the bounds to it were set in stone – literally.
The socialists and commies live to create chaos. They appropriate and then they corrupt Judeo/Christians principles to put on a positive veneer that seduces weak, vain people to their “holy” cause. They don’t want you to see reality.
People of the Bible are very much acquainted with reality, both its joys and its horrors, and how many have infiltrated our people to create evil and hate toward God. We get that. It will never go away. But we persevere.
“You can evade the laws of reality, but you cannot evade the consequences of evading the laws of reality.” I’m scared now. The wicked witch of the west hath spoken.
Very deep dude. Here’s your reality. No one wants to be lectured each and every day. Here’s another reality. You are a comment board hog. More reality: Your beyond stupidest comment ever.
Please understand that no one here particularly cares about your beliefs and your doctrines. And they are simply your beliefs recycled from a neurotic woman and that limp wristed blind follower of hers, both of whom who had the audacity to believe they were actual philosophers.
Ah yes, The Law of Identity and its corollary the Law of Causality are the basis of reason, logic, and objectivity. The what and the what?
And if I may once again quote Greenfield:
“Daniel Greenfield says
September 29, 2023 at 9:14 pm
The idea that you and your particular belief system, for which you are an absolutely terrible representative, represent ‘reason’, is as much of a fallacy as the idea that Fauci represents science.
You are only as good as your arguments.”
In other words he thinks your arguments are flawed as does most everyone else.
You speak of the “law of reality.” Sounds nice, but means nothing.
There is, in truth, NO “law of reality.” All laws have a source, and reality is not one of them.
Your vision is chaos, moral decay and destruction, and you are blind to it.
THX,
My advice is stop posting, your posts make little sense. Also, maybe keeping a journal would work for you.
K.H.,
A little harsh? However,
it does appear, that THX is angry at God, and is pontificating. Also, your mentioning the time period of Judges in Israel’s history. A recommendation, read the account of Abraham and Melchizedek (King of Salem).
“Judaism prepared the ground for Christianity, and both prepared the ground for Islam and Marxism..” Did you collect this fruitcake notion, or did you make it up yourself?
Actually,
Christ prepared the ground for Christianity. Or, if you prefer, the Trinity (the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). By the way, Christians are the most persecuted people of faith in the world.
*Sigh* “There is nothing new under the sun.”
“You are probably wondering here: “What about Communism? Isn’t it a logical, scientific, atheistic philosophy, and yet doesn’t it lead straight to totalitarianism?” The short answer to this is: Communism is not an expression of logic or science, but the exact opposite. Despite all its anti-religious posturings, Communism is nothing but a modern derivative of religion: it agrees with the essence of religion on every key issue, then merely gives that essence a new outward veneer or cover-up.
The Communists reject Aristotelian logic and Western science in favor of a “dialectic” process; reality, they claim, is a stream of contradictions which is beyond the power of “bourgeois” reason to understand. They deny the very existence of man’s mind, claiming that human words and actions reflect nothing but the alogical predetermined churnings of blind matter. They do reject God, but they replace him with a secular stand-in, Society or the State, which they treat not as an aggregate of individuals, but as an unperceivable, omnipotent, supernatural organism, a “higher unseen power” transcending and dwarfing all individuals. Man, they say, is a mere social cog or atom, whose duty is to revere this power and to sacrifice every thing in its behalf. Above all, they say, no such cog has the right to think for himself; every man must accept the decrees of Society’s leaders, he must because this is the voice of Society, whether he understands it or not. Fully as much as Tertullian, Communism demands faith from its followers and subjects, “faith” in the literal, religious sense of the term. On every account, the conclusion is the same: Communism is not a new, rational philosophy; it is a tired, slavishly imitative heir of religion.” – Leonard Peikoff, “Religion versus America”
Do you mean to tell me that Lenny wrote something other than the Ominous Parallels? I had forgotten about this screed. It’s been a while since you burdened us with this steaming pile.
Excellent article. Grab a leftie, strap he, she, or it into a chair and make them read this.
Satan is now writing sermons for the world. And his minions on Earth –
the Pope and most clerics – preach them. All we hear is that we must
warmly embrace subsumed individuality via the dual acceptance of
Communist collectivism and Islam. God is nowhere to be found.
If the clergy has abandoned God and our own government while
paying God lip service, is attempting to enslave us – where will we
find Him?
Recognizing that church pews are empty across the Western world,
clerics should be preaching – first and foremost – an understanding
of God for the modern, secular mind. Maybe such things as what
insidious acceptance of wrongdoing throughout one’s life – however
big or small – can do to a person and how God factors into this. Or
maybe preach how we are all designed emotionally to get in our own
way and must learn to understand and overcome destructive emotions
for spiritual growth. And how God fits into that – why are we designed
like that? Clergy should be leading us to Jesus God who became
human and lived among us to show God’s infinite love for us and His
understanding of our suffering on our spiritual road to return to Him.
God is that teeny point of light in the complete darkness in which the
world is now enveloped. We can’t help but look to it for a way out.
While never forgetting that Islam is indeed a “religion of blood for the
infidel” – get to know Sharia, its place of primacy in Islam, its backward
and barbaric laws, its deadly threat to the idea of a loving God and
individual freedom.
And keep looking toward the light. That spiritual purpose for our life
on Earth – to choose right over wrong to learn to love one another.
Keep looking towards God.
As a practicing, believing Christian in my 60’s, and based on many biblical texts, we Christians found some prophetical verses hard to grasp for many years because we couldn’t fathom the change that would be required in mankind to see them through to fruition.
We don’t think that way any longer. It’s all very easy to understand now.
Once the Nazis gained control of Germany WW2 was always going to happen, so all that Munich did was delay it for a year . Something similar is going on with the Iranian Mullahs, insomuch, the West have tried to restrain them, even tolerated them, but their messianic urge to gain Nukes is the final red line and no one appreciates this more than Israel who are the obvious target .
As such there needs to be a war of nuclear prevention, to destroy the evil, apocalyptic regime in Tehran before it’s too late . Ideally, the Israeli’s should launch a surprise nuclear attack that destroys the Mullahs when they are in their parliament to decapitate the regime, followed by attacks on their suspected nuclear installations ,military concentrations and even the shrine of the Imam Reza in the holy city of Mashhad for symbolic effect . It would be a horrific gamble but one worth taking for the future of Israel
Who dares often wins as luck is not neutral but can be courted by firm decisive action as Jewish folk already know by their pre-emptive attack on their hostile neighbours in the Six Day War, their brilliant hostage rescue at Entebbe, Uganda in 1976, and their later air raid on the unfinished Iraqi nuclear in 1981. Israel must seize the moment and strike while they still can as they learned two horrific lessons from the Holocaust, insomuch, never trust anyone else for your own security, and secondly, when people say they want to destroy you, then BELIEVE THEM !
Being able to assess risk, then move with confidence and decisiveness is one of the greatest of masculine virtues, but it takes courage and self belief in spades to resist the paralysing effects of fear that can turn a person into quivering jelly
One of my favorite Khomeini quotes from the late70s was “The Americans worship Coca-Cola. We worship death.”
Most Leftists are not really secular.
They are ANTI-Christian.
Leftists generally adhere to earth worship, feminism, Communism and pan-sexuality.
These are the COMMANDMENTS of modern secular humanism.
Leftists are really the modern manifestation of ancient pagan barbarians and the cults of Baal.
Reasoning with them is quite impossible.
And while there is a solution to their problem……….modern yuppies are not quite ready for it(but they will be…..soon).
They have been trying to get IN GOD WE TRUST removed from our Coins and Currency for years
Boy, that sure ignored a WHOLEEEEEEEE lot of history. That was the biggest bunch of bullocks I have heard in a really long time. If this guy is NOT a Muslin, believe me Islam will kill his Infidel arse right after that irradiate the Jews.
There’s no vacuum in peoples hearts. When empty, something else rushes in to fill the void–including fawning gullibility.
It’s that G0d-shaped hole in man’s heart. It can be filled with the Real Thing, or it can be filled with nonsense. It’s up to us which we choose, but only one plug will fit it properly.
Thornton is giving us a clear perspective here. Where are those who understand and know that the US, Europe and the West are largely apostate from their glorious foundation of Judeo-Christian faith, laws and culture? This faith in the true God, the Creator, built the countries we live in. It is faith in the God of Israel that brings freedom! The cult of Mohammed is a miserable counterfeit. This should be obvious to all after these atrocities, but it is sadly not.
Sorry we don’t want your Sharia Laws forced upon us we have our Law of the Land the U.S. Constitution which the Democrats/Globalists are always violating
If we had an “End of the West Clock” what time would it be?
It would be very, very close to midnight. But not too late to reset the clock if we will it.
Sounds like terrorist cleansing to me. The Paleosimians elected and support Hamas and want to murder and displace Jews. FUCK them. They’re invaders anyway.
You couldn’t pay me to listen to Scott Ritter.
The Secularists Humanists are a big time threat as are the Terrorists