Posted on 12/25/2002 5:52:13 AM PST by JohnHuang2
townhall.com
Pat Buchanan (back to story)
December 25, 2002
End of the christian era?
Two thousand years have elapsed since the Birth of Christ in Bethlehem, the event that engendered Western civilization. But for Christianity, the sun has begun to set in the West.
Born in Judea, Christianity spread swiftly across Asia Minor, North Africa and on to Rome, where it was persecuted for 300 years. Then, for the three centuries after Constantine, though riven by heresies, Christianity was the faith of the Roman Empire.
With the death of Muhammad in 632, however, a fighting new faith arose. In a century, Islam had seized Arabia, captured the Holy Land, swept over Africa and conquered Spain.
The armies of Islam were only stopped at Tours in France in 732 by Charles Martel, the Hammer of the Franks, in one of the decisive battles of history.
Europe was saved for Christianity. Islam retreated back over the mountains into Spain, where it retained a foothold until Isabella drove the Moors out in the year she sent an Italian navigator named Columbus to find the western sea route to the Indies.
In 1492, all Western Europe was Christian and responsive to Rome. But with the 1500s came Luther, Calvin, Henry VIII and the Reformation, the sundering of Christendom into a Protestant north and Catholic south. The same division prevailed in the New World. Protestant England colonized the east coast of North America, as Catholic Spain colonized most of South America. Yet, Christians all professed the same God and believed in the same Savior.
With the Enlightenment in the 18th century, however, came a revolution to overthrow Christianity as well as the Church. French priests were among the first butchered in the September Massacres, even before Louis XVI and his queen ascended the scaffold.
In the 19th century, a greater challenge to Christianity arose in the intellectual realm: Darwinism. Among elites, the belief took hold that not only was Christianity a fraud, God did not exist. God is dead, said Nietzsche. And if He is dead, and there is no life after death, one must build the best of all possible worlds here on earth. And if we must sacrifice a few million of the species to build that world, so be it. For the masses have no more worth than the animals we kill for food. Survival of the fittest. Let the Devil take the hindmost.
Marx was among the first to accept the logic and urge men to act on it. Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin did. But as Hegel might have predicted, communism called into existence an antithesis, fascism. And the war they fought far eclipsed in savagery all the old religious wars.
But in winning World War II and, later, the Cold War, it was the economic, technological and military power of the United States and the ideas associated with America that men said were decisive. The Americans had delivered on the promise of Marx -- without paying the price Marx prescribed, wholesale and bloody revolution.
"I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have strange gods before me," God said to Moses. But since the Reformation in the West, that God has given way to one strange new god after another: The king, the state, the nation, the race and, finally, the self.
Architecture is a mirror of what men worship. The first great buildings in Christendom were cathedrals: St. Peter's in Rome, Notre Dame in Paris, St. Paul's in London. After the Reformation came the palaces, with Versailles the greatest of all, as befit the Sun King.
In the 19th century came the monuments and museums exalting the achievements of nation and race. In the 20th, the American century, the United States built cathedrals to commerce, skyscrapers like the Chrysler and Empire State buildings. An envious Hitler enlisted Albert Speer to erect monuments and public buildings to his 1,000-Year Reich to dwarf anything the West had ever seen.
In the late 20th century, the tallest buildings in the world, the twin towers of the World Trade Center, arose. Last year, they were brought crashing down by 10 Muslims who hated America.
In the West, the God of Christianity has been superseded by the gods of modernity: money, sex, fame, power. These gods give a good life, but they cannot sustain life. As Christianity is a dying faith in every Western nation, every Western nation is dying. Not one has a native-born population that is reproducing itself. At present birth rates, all will be changed utterly or pass away before century's end.
It is in the Third World, where populations are still growing, that Christianity still challenges Islam. Indeed, as the battle for the future is decided in this century, a once-Christian Europe will view the struggle from the windows of its nursing home. But as He told us, He did not come into our world to make us rich or powerful, but to die to give us the hope of eternal life. Merry Christmas.
©2002 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
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townhall.com
A small item called THE DARK AGES intrudes. For the most part we really don't know what was going on in that period. But whatever it was, we end up with a land dominated by monasteries filled with warrior monks!
The Arabs and their conquests under the black flag of Islam in the 7th, 8th and 9th centuries look positively peaceful in contrast.
It's a stretch to turn the various Islamic Arab dictatorships into the successors of the Ottomans. They are more properly the successors to the English and French puppet states set up after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Other Islamic states such as Pakistan and Indonesia have as their immediate progenitors European colonial governments!
Now just exactly why did you want to leap ahead 800 years?
You might read the letters of St. Boniface,b 675. Boniface was no warrior. The spread of Christianity did not stop with the Roman Empire and suddenly start up again in the 10th century. It did not stop at all, neither did learning thanks to the monks.
No doubt he did massive missionary work on the East Bank of the Rhine, and brought many existing Christian, but Arien, churches into line with Rome's standards, but no one really knows when he was born, or where he was born, or what year it was when he died, or what year it really was when he did anything that he did!
The mid 700s were THE DARK AGES, and the problem was threefold - first, virtually everyone was illiterate; secondly, there was virtually nothing to write anything on even if you were literate, and thirdly, all Hell was about to break loose as the Angles and Saxons invaded England driving the Britons to Brittany and Carvajal.
I think the Mongols were ready for another foray into the West, and the Middle East. Other things were going to happen that would drive Christian fortunes into the gutter for a while, with an advance here and there into the Levant, and finally a great flowering of monasteries with their own private armies of warrior-monks.
Bonifice didn't need to be a warrior, and he lived 4 and a half centuries BEFORE the period I pointed to.
The pope can admit that people within the church do wrong; I'd be interested in hearing about an instance where he admitted that the church itself had ever failed on a matter related to faith and morals.
I consider a belief in Santa Claus a by-product of the innocence of children. Long may it live!
And when we tell them it's not true, we are telling them not to believe anything they can't touch. Bad news all around.
Yeah Pat..to hell with Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Holy Land...suffering the brutality of the Ottoman Turk Muslim yoke to this day all under the respectable guise of a "secular" Muslim state. What a laugh..
Mohammed's boys talk a line of trash that can be condensed to: 'Once moslem, always moslem'.
But it sounds to me like the Europeans (of days gone by, at least) spanked their sunburned asses and sent them back home.
Now, 1000 or so years after the Europeans kicked their butts and turned their mosques into honest whore-houses, allah's punks are back.
Today's euro-wieners had better suck it up if they want to avoid the fate of goats and young boys in desert lands...
The Wide-Spreading of Bible Based Christianity ended about 250 AD, then didnt really start again until the 1600's.
A small item called THE DARK AGES intrudes. For the most part we really don't know what was going on in that period. But whatever it was, we end up with a land dominated by monasteries filled with warrior monks!
The Dark Ages were when the state churches denied the Bible to people. When the Printing Press was invented, and the Word Of God was put in printed form, in a common language for all the people to read for themselves, the Dark Ages ended, and the general time of this was the Reformation.
But, I do not believe the Monks were the warriors, those were the peasants that were ordered to fight, Monks just stayed indoors mostly.
The Arabs and their conquests under the black flag of Islam in the 7th, 8th and 9th centuries look positively peaceful in contrast.
Slaughtering Christians and Jews in Ancient Palistine was peaceful? Institution of the dhimmitude is peaceful? Forced conversions under the threat of the sword was peace?
That's when we start talking about the Middle Ages, and then the Renaissance in the 1400s. The invention of paper in the Far East made the printing press possible (and that, too, was invented in the Far East as was gunpowder and the cannon).
Western Europeans clasped all these marvelous new inventions to their collective breasts and stepped out to conquer the world.
I hope the Holy Spirit enjoyed his 1350-year vacation. Where did He spend it? The Greek Isles? Majorca?
Maybe he was "otherwise occupied" in the New World refereeing the ongoing tiff betwixt the Lamanites and the Nephites (the good guys eventually lost!), and the Book of Mormon has it right.
Or, more possibly, the Christian church of the New Testament just kept on growing and spreading, and the Holy Spirit never took any time off at all.
Boniface received letters from Pope Gregory II and Charles Martel himself as well as several friends. These people date their letters. We know the general time frame that he lived. I don't think the so-called "dark ages" were all that dark. Literacy is only one part of culture.
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