“Must read, I think you’ll agree” ~ Molly Pitcher
Sure do. bttt
“...it can surely be no coincidence that the most humane place in all of the Middle East is surrounded by barbarians who wish to extinguish it in the exact degree to which they systematically abuse their own children.
As a matter of fact, a couple of days ago a reader sent me this link to a piece in the Claremont Review on child sacrifice. In it, the author recalls Golda Meir’s famous remark about how “peace with the Palestinians will be possible when they love their own children more than they hate the Israelis. In saying so, she touched upon a fundamental difference between pagan and biblical religion: the presence or absence of child sacrifice.... Many ancient peoples believed in sacrificing a child to an angry god like Moloch or Baal in order to avert misfortune. Today, thousands of Muslims believe that sacrificing their children as ‘suicide’ bombers in a crowd of people pleases their God Allah. More, Islamic terrorists invite the death of children by placing their military and political headquarters in residential areas which they know their enemies will strike.”
Folks, is this not an obvious, if horrid and therefore denied truth about mankind in general and the Islamic world in particular? The author concludes his piece on a pessimistic note, speculating that “if the current intellectuals’ project of undermining the Biblical traditions of the Western world continues unabated..., rather than embracing some new, ‘enlightened’ philosophy which previous generations were supposedly too dull to conceive or practice, likely we will wind up with ancient paganism instead. ....” http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2157592/posts?page=7#7
More: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2156342/posts?page=4#4
Marking....
Outward show like good works without faith is useless. It is why individualism has until the crumbling of Christianity been so much stronger in the west.
Peters’ analysis fails because he (like the ‘well meaning Western commentators’ he faults) has not bothered to look carefully at the causes of the alternation between cosmopolitan ‘Golden Ages’ and barbarism in the Islamic world.
Invariably the ‘Golden Ages’ (I can think of four: the late Arab Caliphate when St. John of Damascus, the first Christian critic of Islam was, for a while, Grand Vizier to the Caliph of Damascus; the middle part of the Muslim occupation of Spain (when Averroes and Avicenna fourished); the later part of the Moghul occupation of India; and the period just before the Ottoman Empire became the ‘sick man of Europe’) had a common feature: the Muslim rulers were pragmatists, not particularly devoted to jihad, nor even to rigorously enforcing the disabilities that Mohammed called for placing on subject non-Muslims. The status accorded St. John of Damascus is a shining example; the Ottomans found the willingness of Greeks, Armenians and Jews to engage in ‘usury’ useful; the Moghuls got pragmatic enough to accord Hindus (manifestly idolaters, and not ‘people of the Book’) the status of dhimmis; and so forth—all of which are pragmatic violations of a strict reading of Islamic jurisprudence.
When, on the contrary, Islam is taken seriously, wars of conquest, and barbarous treatment of non-Muslims ensues— the decline of the Ottoman Empire coincided with pogroms against its Christian inhabitants, most notably the Armenian genocide, but less famously, violent presecutions that sparked Arab Christians to immigrate to the United States beginning about the time of the War Between the States; the Almohad dynasty’s ‘fundamentalism’ destroyed both intellectual life and the relatively mild treatment of dhimmis in Al-Andalus. And all of the pragmatic ‘Golden Ages’ were preceded by ages of blood when Islam, and its injunction, now famously characterized by Emperor Manuel II, to ‘spread the faith he [Mohammed] preached by the sword’ was taken seriously.
The Muslim apologetic attributing the ‘Golden Ages’ to Islam also overlooks the degree to which the intellectual life of those periods was shaped by non-Muslims. Many of the notable Arab intellectuals of the first ‘Golden Age’ were, in fact Arab Christians. More importantly, it was not Islam, but the fact that Islamic conquests had created access simultaneous access to the intellectual heritages of Greece and India that caused the flowering of intellectual life.
That flowering, however, was cut off by the reassertion of Islam over pragmatism in the intellectual sphere—the triumph of Al-Ghazali’s occasionalism over the proto-scientific views of Avicenna and Averroes was the death of Islamic science—even as the reassertion of strict Islam under the Almohads was the death of ‘cosmopolitan’ Al-Andalus.
Peters’ also overlooks the degree to which the barbarisms of Al Qaeda et al. are explicitly justified by examples of like barbarisms committed by Mohammed himself.
If Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the rest wanted to turn the world into a copy of Al-Andalus under the Almoravids, by force of arms, that would be obnoxious enough, but they would be far less vile, violent and dangerous in their goals, and most likely methods than they, in fact, are. Unfortunately, they instead want to turn the world into a copy of seventh century Arabia, the time and land of Mohammed, complete with mass beheadings, abrogations of peace-treaties for the convenience of Islamic conquest, and all the rest.
This qoute "but Islam (the faith of "submission") became so prescriptive that it blocked the Middle East from joining the modern world" shows clearly how badly Peters reads history. Those prescriptive behaviors are clearly in the Koran. They were there in the beginning, and not some later accretion.
Enlightened Western post-Christians are not pagans in the sense of noble Romans. They have regressed to Moloch-worship, offering their babies to Satan, in exchange for the liberty to hump anything that moves. It’s perfectly fitting that the post-Christian West be brought to ruin by the Satan-worshipping Islamofascists.
Islam is an Arab superiority cult that has little to do with religion, Mohammed’s hallucinations aside. His cult was a convenient unifying principal to be imposed on the societies that his Arab bandits conquered in those chaotic centuries following the collapse of Roman power.
Mohammed even tailored his hallucinations to the Arab conquest needs - he had a polytheistic hallucination, for example, that he thought would make his religion acceptable in polytheistic societies that he conquered (these are the “Satanic Verses,” which he later rejected when they didn’t serve his purposes).