Jihad, the Lord's Supper, and eternal life
By Spengler

Jihad injures reason, for it honors a god who suffers no constraints on his caprice, unlike the Judeo-Christian god, who is limited by love. That is the nub of Pope Benedict XVI's September 12 address in Regensburg, Germany. It promises to be the Vatican's most controversial utterance in living memory.

When a German-language volume appeared in 2003 quoting the same analysis by a long-dead Jewish theologian, I wrote of "oil on the flames of civilizational war". [1] Now the same ban has been preached from St Peter's chair, and it is a defining moment comparable to Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. Earlier this year, Benedict's elliptical remarks to former students at a private seminar in 2005, mentioned in passing by an American Jesuit and reported in this space, created a scandal. [2] I wrote at the time that even the pope must whisper when it comes to Islam. We have entered a different stage of civilizational war.

The Islamic world now views the pontiff as an existential threat, and with reason. Jihad is not merely the whim of a despotic divinity, as the pope implied. It is much more: jihad is the fundamental sacrament of Islam, the Muslim cognate of the Lord's Supper in Christianity, that is, the unique form of sacrifice by which the individual believer communes with the Transcendent. To denounce jihad on theological grounds is a blow at the foundations of Islam, in effect a papal call for the conversion of the Muslims.

Just before then-cardinal Ratzinger's election as pope last year, I wrote, "Now that everyone is talking about Europe's demographic death, it is time to point out that there exists a way out: convert European Muslims to Christianity. The reported front-runner at the Vatican conclave ... Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, is one of the few Church leaders unafraid to raise the subject." [3] The Regensburg address oversteps the bounds of dialogue and verges upon the missionary. A great deal has changed since John Paul II kissed the Koran before news cameras in 1999. The boys and girls of the Catholic youth organization Communione e Liberazione that Ratzinger nurtured for a generation will have a great deal to talk to their Muslim school-fellows about.

No more can one assume now that Europe will slide meekly into dhimmitude.
In that respect [I wrote during the conclave] John Paul II recalled the sad position of Pius XII, afraid to denounce publicly the murder of Polish priests by Nazi occupiers - let alone the murder of Polish Jews - for fear that the Nazis would react by killing even more. It is hard to second-guess the actions of Pius XII given his terrible predicament, but at some point one must ask when the Gates of Hell can be said to have prevailed over St Peter.
Specifically, Benedict stated that jihad, the propagation of Islam by force, is irrational, because it is against the Reason of God. Citing a 14th-century Byzantine emperor to the effect that Mohammed's "decree that the faith he preached should be spread with the sword" as "evil and inhumane" provoked headlines. But of greater weight is the pope's observation that Allah is a god whose "absolute transcendence" allows no constraint, to the point that Allah is free if he chooses to promote evil. The great German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig explained the matter more colorfully than did the pope, as I reported three years ago in the cited review:

The god of Mohammed is a creator who well might not have bothered to create. He displays his power like an Oriental potentate who rules by violence, not by acting according to necessity, not by authorizing the enactment of the law, but rather in his freedom to act arbitrarily ... Providence thus is shattered into infinitely many individual acts of creation, with no connection to each other, each of which has the importance of the entire creation. That has been the doctrine of the ruling orthodox philosophy in Islam. Every individual thing is created from scratch at every moment. Islam cannot be salvaged from this frightful providence of Allah ... despite its vehement, haughty insistence upon the idea of the god's unity, Islam slips back into a kind of monistic paganism, if you will permit the expression. God competes with God at every moment, as if it were the colorfully contending heavenful of gods of polytheism.
It is amusing to see liberal Jewish commentators in the United States, eg, the editorial page of the September 16 New York Times, deplore the pope's remarks, considering that Rosenzweig said it all the more sharply in 1920.

Benedict's comments regarding Islam served as a preamble to a longer discourse on the unity of faith and reason. "Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?" Benedict asked, and answered his own question: "I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God." It is not, however, the reasoned side of Benedict's remarks to which Muslims responded, but rather the existential.


Continue here:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JC11Ak04.html

abu_rashid wrote on Sep 18^th, 2008 at 11:28am:


Well, we don't all agree, can't agree, on the basis of historic evidence:

The Crusaders are being presented in schools as the original terrorists. As a Year 8 textbook in the Australian state of Victoria has it: “Those who destroyed the World Trade Centre are regarded as terrorists … Might it be fair to say that the Crusaders who attacked the Muslim inhabitants of Jerusalem were also terrorists?”

Why the Crusades took place
No it wouldn’t be fair. Nor would it be true. In the story Paul Stenhouse tells, the 463 years between the death of Muhammed in 632 AD, and the First Crusade in 1095, were extremely dangerous for Christian Europe. Instead of peace there were unrelenting Islamic wars and incursions; Muslim invasions of Spain, Italy, Sicily and Sardinia; raids, seizures, looting of treasure, military occupations that lasted until Saracen forces were forcibly dislodged, sackings of Christian cities including Rome, and desecrations of Christian shrines. And be it noted: all this went on for 463 years before any Christian Crusade in response to these murderous provocations took place.
Sixteen years after the death of Muhammed, in 648 AD, Cyprus was overrun. Rhodes fell in 653, and by 698 AD the whole of North Africa was lost. In 711 Muslims from Tangier crossed into Spain, set their sights on France, and by 720 AD Narbonne had fallen. Bordeaux was stormed and its churches burnt in 732. As Gibbon emphasised, only the resistance at Poitiers of Charles Martel in 732 saved Europe from occupation, and arrested the Muslim tide.
From 800 on, incursions into Italy began. In 846 a Saracen force of 10,000 landed in Ostia, assaulted Rome, and sacked and desecrated the Basilicas of St Peter and St Paul. In 859 they seized the whole of Sicily. After capturing a fortress near Anzio, Muslim forces “plundered the surrounding countryside for forty years”. In southern France at the end of the ninth century they held a base near Toulon from which they ravaged both Provence and Northern Italy, and controlled the passes over the Alps, robbing and murdering pilgrims on their way to Rome. Genoa was attacked in 934 and taken in 935. In 1015 Sardinia was taken, occupied, and held my Muslim forces until 1050.
In 1076 the Seljuk Turkish capture of Jerusalem finally exhausted the patience of Islam’s victims in Christian Europe. Only then were concerted moves begun to drive back the infidel, launch the First Crusade, and retake Jerusalem.

On deeps and detritus
Which best nails the canard that “religion poisons everything” and that it is the main cause of “violence”? A scholarly examination of Islam’s fierce military expansion that eventually, after 463 years, provoked the counter-militancy of the Crusades? Or a philosophical trawl through the oceanic deeps and limitless intellectual detritus of the anthropology of religion? The answer seems fairly obvious. So why would anyone choose the latter in the British journal Prospect?
Various reasons suggest themselves, but none so much as the fact that it is now impossible, in Britain, to state plain truths about the nature of Islam on the one hand and the contrasting nature of Christianity on the other. Martin Amis’s suggestion that no-one can any longer “say anything is better than anything else” is to the point. A hierarchy of value is ruled out. Everything exists on a level plain. And no religion is better than any other.
The result being that one cannot even state plainly that where Islam spread by the sword, Christianity mainly spread by precept and example and the peaceful proselytising of missionaries—many of whom contributed through their notes, journals, and correspondence, to what has become known in our time as “the anthropology of religion.”

Roger Sandall, February 2008

Quote:


How about the Saxon wars of Charlemagne? And the Massacre of Verden?
How about Clovis' constant wars which he used to spread Catholicism?
How about the numerous wars waged by the trinitarians against the unitarians (arians)??
How about the Baltic Crusades in which the Scandanavian pagans were forcibly converted to Christianity at the tip of the sword?

The fact is that Christianity was spread by the sword, probably much more than Islam was, and the evidence of this is the complete obliteration of all pre-Christian religious traditions from the entirety of Europe. Even competing sects of Christianity like Arianism were completely obliterated. Today you can't find a single Arian Christian, because they, and their belief were considered heretical and were obliterated. And how about the Reconquista? Not a single Muslim from Andalusia exists today in Spain. They were all forced to convert or were expelled, as were the Jews. And even those who remained and converted, the Moriscos and Conversos, were later mass executed during the inquisitition. Contrast this to the Muslim conquest of Spain, which was actually facilitated by Christians, who invited the Muslims there to assist them in their battles amongst one another. During the entire 700 years of Islamic rule in Spain (Andalus) Christians and Jews lived inside the Islamic lands of Andalus. They weren't forcibly converted en masse, they weren't executed or expelled to Christian lands.

In all the lands that came under the dominance of  Islam, Christians continued, and continue to this day to remain present. Their churches are there, they've lived amongst us for over 1000 years. Christianity cannot say the same about any other religion it found in a land it conquered...

abu_rashid wrote on Sep 18^th, 2008 at 9:08pm:


yeh churches like the Hagia Sophia which is oh yeh the Ayasofya Mosque...



muslims and christians have always treated each other badly, which is quite sad, as along with judaism they are all very similar

abu_rashid wrote on Sep 19^th, 2008 at 2:40pm:



The point of the article is precisly this 'to an extent'. There is a deep and essential difference betwen the Judeo-christian (including modern secular) view of the world and the muslim way of seeing. There is no bridging of the gap. There is coexistence but no convergence. There is no room for soppy 'they are all the same'.

Very very importantly - secularism, modern western secularism, is the fruit of the Judeo-Christian world view. It is fertile for jews and chrisians,atheistss, agnostics, freethinkets and all who have come out of the Judeo-Chrisstian history. For all of them the ideas of freedom of conscience, freeedom of religion, speech, equality of human worth, and human rights 9hencee, democracy)  are 'god-give', to coin a phrase. Not sot for Islam. For islam, secularism and all its works is poison.

The article's point is that jihad is a Muslim 'sacrament'. There is no reforming or changing Islam, there is no moderate islam that denounces jihad because that would be like a catholic denouncing mass. There is only fighting in the way of Allah until there is nothing else left on earth.  Submit or be made to submit.

Here's the end of the article:

You very nicely illustrate the political nature of the Islamist outlook.
Judeo-Christian is a simple expression of the jewish and greek  origins of Christianity and western secularism. One cannot ccompreheend the west without knowing Christianity (Judaism for geentiles) and the classics.

Ethnic, political relations are not the same. Europeans to a large extent are as pagan at heart as the Arab Muslims. And so they have pursued ethnic hostility for centuries.
The same cannot be said for America or Australia - new world - and to some exteent Britain.
Disraeli was British PM twice under Queen Victorias reign in the 19th century. Sir Isaac Isaacs was the first Australian-born Governor General. America opened its arms to migrants, including jews, for centuries.

At any rate, the western, judeo-christian tradition is resilient andd lasting because it is self-correcting and able to learn. This is not the samee as saying that it is perfect or everything about it is gloriouss. But it does mean that it examines itself, it lerans from mistakes and always working towards thee beetterment of its people, both materially and spiritually.
Islam, on the other hand, wants to fit everything into a 7th century Arab pagan framework. It is doomed because it cannot change without denying itself.

There is always, of course, the option of subterfuge, dissembling and double talk. If the mountain does not go to Mohammed, then Mohammed will go to the mountain. The legend goes that when the founder of Islam was asked to give proofs of his teaching, he ordered Mount Safa to come to him. When the mountain did not comply, Mohammed raised his hands toward heaven and said, 'God is merciful. Had it obeyed my words, it would have fallen on us to our destruction. I will therefore go to the mountain and thank God that he has had mercy on a stiff-necked generation.'

Almost Yiddish.