Posted on 12/01/2006 6:11:01 AM PST by marshmallow
It is somehow appropriate that amid the confusions of the U.S. involvement with the sectarians of Iraq, Pope Benedict XVI, fresh from his own "engagement" with contemporary Islam at Regensburg, should come to Turkey, which has sought membership in the European Union for 20 years. The theologian Michael Novak said recently of Benedict, "His role is to represent Western civilization." I'd say Benedict is more than up to the task. What remains to discover is whether Western civilization is still up to it.
We have been in this spot before, and won.
When Stalin famously asked how many divisions the pope had, he assumed that the brute force of military power would be everywhere decisive. That belief led to a four-decade standoff between the Soviets' tank armies and NATO. Finally in the 1980s, John Paul II, the Polish pope, gave intellectual hope and heft to anticommunist dissidents. Ronald Reagan and his allies prevailed over Europe's marching pacifists and installed Pershing missile batteries in Europe. By decade's end, the long Cold War with communism was dissipating. The pope's engagement mattered.
One may assume that in some Himalayan redoubt, history's latest homicidal utopians, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, believe that coupling their ideology to Islamic suicide bombers--in New York, London or Baghdad--is more than a match for the will of a morally diminished West. Are they wrong?
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
The pope needs to hold frequent seminars to cut throught the ignorance of the islamic religion
Benedict is going to do to relativism what John Paul II did to communism.
They stayed with it for 300 years and we are impatient after only three. After conquest, everybody was converted. I think the whole story tells us a lot about what we are up against. Furthermore, I think it should make us wary of efforts to conquer us from within. You can see how far along that subversion is by noting that the two defensive atten\mpts of the past are routinely thrown out as dirty words, ie. crusade, inquisition.
May it be so!
The Libs of Europe and the USA ultimately have nothing to live for except their own hedonistic pleasures. Liberty is not a high virtue for them except for their own personal pleasure. They are selfish and willing to appease as long as it gives them more time to indulge themselves.
Their philosphical base of no absolute truths also cannot give them a reason to fight a long battle against Islam. The Libs will fight long and hard against Christianity because it is seen as an immediate threat to them, but the Islamic threat doesn't seem too urgent to them. We all will pay the consequences for their ignorance.
That's going to be a longer battle, a battle which began over 600 years ago with William of Ockham.
Great insight.
You must really be a joy to know! Enjoy your encyclopedia browsing and miss the point every time.
thanks, bfl
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When we have been cut off from our own history, and therefore our own roots; when we allow our enemies to dictate not only the language and terms used in discussion, but which items are presented; when our enemies are allowed to lie with impunity and yet reproach us with unfaithfulness--what else is to be expected.
We need to recapture the language first, as Orwell noted.
Cheers!
As for your tagline, try this:
Sola scriptura is the teaching of men. ;-)
Cheers!
Well. I put in my time in the trenches as a history teacher and professor, but I haven't been able to figure out how the crusades became a nasty no no in popular parlance. That certainly is not in the professional literature, at all. Must be from having the English teachers and activists doing multiculturalism based on myths they dreamed up.
I think it was that the sack of Jerusalem made such a convenient straw man for liberals.
That reminds me, if we're not supposed to regard the founding fathers because they're all "dead white men"; and if Thomas Jefferson is to be excoriated because he had slaves and used one of them as a mistress; why is it then that we should all kowtow to the mythical "separation of Church and State" when that phrase was coined by Jefferson? (...and in a private letter, which embraces "original intent"; and Jefferson wrote the Declaration, not the Constitution.)
Cheers!
You are giving into them when you say that. I know they killed everyone and took over, but that was the way they did things then. (Wouldn't we have saved ourself a lot of trouble if we had done that in Iraq?) The Western view is that the crusader states held off the Muslim aggression for 300 years. A Domino theory, as it were.
I didn't mean to give that impression. I did not mean to imply the liberals' views were valid, merely that the sack of Rome was the driver (or at least the ostensible reason) for their rejecting the crusades.
And don't forget the battle of Lepanto, when the Muslims nearly overran Vienna (!!!) took place *after* The Mayflower...
Hilaire Belloc has written a very good book on the Crusades, BTW.
Cheers!
So have I. LOL
Would you mind giving me the title or the ISBN for your book?
...if you don't want to, due to privacy concerns, never mind. :-)
Cheers!
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