… not the solution.

As if the world were not being rocked by a war of religion, Dennis Prager writes at Townhall that there is not enough religion in America:

The most profound thinkers in America are conservative. There are, of course, bright liberal and leftist thinkers, but I can’t think of one who approaches the depth and wisdom of the best conservative writers and thinkers. What liberal historian, for example, approaches the understanding of life and history that author Paul Johnson has exhibited in his many works of history? Who on the left matches psychiatrist/writer Theodore Dalrymple’s insight into the underclass? What left-wing columnists understand human nature, the state of mankind, or contemporary America as do George Will, Charles Krauthammer and Thomas Sowell, or many of the leading columnists at publications such as National Review, City Journal, Commentary Magazine or the Wall Street Journal?

I write this to make it clear that my admiration for the leading conservative writers, columnists and thinkers is deep and abiding.

Ours too. We have no quarrel with anything he has said so far (though we admire the Catholic writer, Paul Johnson, with a little less enthusiasm than he does).

There is, however, a “but.”

The vast majority of leading conservative writers, just like their liberal colleagues, have a secular outlook on life. With few exceptions, the conservative political and intellectual worlds are oblivious to the consequences of secularism. They are unaware of the disaster that godlessness in the West has led to.

Maybe because it is not “godlessness” that has led us to disaster, but godfulness – most obviously the godfulness of Islam.

Most leading Republicans and most of the wealthy donors to the Republican Party — in addition to virtually all libertarian politicians and think tank scholars — are either uninterested in the death of Judeo-Christian religions and values in America and the West, or they’re OK with it. They think that America can survive the death of God and religion, that fiscal and other forms of conservatism without social conservatism can preserve America.

First, to use the hyphenated term “Judeo-Christian” is to link two things together that are opposed to each other; an ideology of justice and an ideology of anti-justice.

Judaism’s highest value is justice, usually called “righteousness” in its bible. Unfortunately, many an instance of what the pious men of old considered to be “righteous” or “just”, is not easy to reconcile with the idea of justice that we, the heirs of the Enlightenment, understand it to be. But as an ideal it could not be bettered, or even matched – except by the ideal of freedom.

Christianity was a revolt against Judaism. It substituted love for justice as the highest ideal. It commanded “Resist not evil”. It preached forgiveness, self-sacrifice, self-abasement. It condemned “the sin” but “not the sinner” – absolving him of responsibility and rewarding him with love and forgiveness. Anti-justice. Anti-Judaism.

Our ideals – freedom, reason, justice – were bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment; that brilliant dawn that dispelled the terrifying intolerant rule of religion. Why do Christians pretend that Christianity does not have a cruel and bloody past?

Dennis Prager seems to think of those old religions as really nice, sensible, polite, well-dressed, well-spoken, well-washed, well-exercised, clean-cut, all-American, common-sensical codes of morals. They are not, and they never were.

It shows how effective the secular indoctrination in our schools and media has been, that even the majority of conservative thinkers are not only secular themselves, but seem to have no idea how much of the American civilization rests on religious foundations.

We wish we could believe him that “the majority of conservative thinkers are secular”. Maybe the majority of the best of them are, but there are dozens of opinion writers in the conservative ranks who write continually about God. This Christian Conservative website, Townhall, provides endless examples. (We read it every day and find sound conservative views in it too.)

They don’t seem to understand that the only solution to many – perhaps most – of the social problems ailing America and the West is some expression of Judeo-Christian faith.

Which expression would that be?

He finds one.

Do the inner-city kids who study the Bible and go to church each week lead wasted lives, join gangs, bear children out of wedlock or commit murder? …

Probably not most of them. Which is good, of course. But the implication that there is no way other than by religious instruction they they could be raised to live their lives well, is not defensible.

And why do secular conservatives think so many affluent and well-educated Americans have adopted left-wing dogmas, such as feminism, socialism, environmentalism and egalitarianism as their religions? Because people want to – have to – believe in something. And if it’s not God and Christianity or Judaism, it’s going to be some form of Leftism. Why are evangelical Protestants, theologically conservative Catholics, Orthodox Jews and practicing Mormons almost all conservative? Because they already have a religion and therefore don’t need the alternate gods of leftist faiths, and also because Judeo-Christian religions have different values than leftist religions.

We agree that “feminism, socialism, environmentalism and egalitarianism” are religions. But not that “if it’s not God and Christianity or Judaism, it’s going to be some form of Leftism”.

It doesn’t have to be. We are living proof that one can be an atheist and believe in all the values of conservatism: individual freedom, the rule of law, small government, a free market economy, strong defense, and the political wisdom of the Constitution. But freedom to us means freedom from the tyranny of any orthodoxy – which excludes every church. And we add reason to our high values – and that excludes every religion.   

When these conservatives – people who revere the Founding Fathers and the Declaration of Independence – read the founders’ assertion that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”, do they believe what the founders wrote? Or were they just echoing the irrational religious beliefs of their time, as people on the left believe?

Although on this point we might be in agreement with something the left believes, yes, we do think they were “just echoing the irrational religious beliefs of their time”. Well, not exactly echoing them – more modifying them. They were (at least some of them) skeptical men, men of the Enlightenment, who thought that though a god must have created the universe, he thereafter declined to have anything more to do with it (which is what “deism” means – and they described themselves as “deists”).

When these conservatives see the components of what I call the American Trinity – the words “liberty,” “In God We Trust” and “e pluribus unum” inscribed on every American coin – do they regard “In God We Trust” as no longer necessary?

Yes.

President John Adams warned: “Because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion … our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Do secular conservatives think he was right or wrong?

Partly right, partly wrong. Moral, yes. Religious, not necessarily at all.

The problem is not that most leading conservative thinkers are secular; it is that they don’t seem to understand that a godless and Judeo-Christian-free America means the end of America, just as a godless and Judeo-Christian-free Europe has meant the end of Europe.

If Europe had not been marinaded in the self-destructive morality of Christianity for two millennia, would it now be letting in hordes of its worst enemies in the name of “compassion”? Would it be accepting the prospect of its subjugation by Islam without resistance? Would it let its young girls be turned into sex slaves by Muslim criminals without objecting for fear of hurting the Muslim criminals’ feelings? Would it be abandoning freedom of speech (an Enlightenment value) out of deference to a dogmatic, intolerant, savage religion?

No. Europe is dying of Religion, not of Reason.

And yes, America could too.

For a little Sunday fun, here’s a video demonstrating that Jesus Christ was one of the ancient sun-gods.

Though it was published in 2008, we found it only recently.

We cannot vouch for every “fact” asserted in it being true, but we enjoyed watching it.

(For our own view of “Jesus Christ” see the essay by Jillian Becker, The Birth and Early History of Christianity, listed under Pages in our margin.)

In an article on the suicide of Europe, containing much we agree with, the excellent and erudite Victor Davis Hanson writes at the National Review:

Like atheism, childlessness reflects the assumption that ego-driven rationalism and satisfaction of the appetites are all there is and all that there ever will be.

And it is that point in particular that we want to discuss.

But first – the important points he makes:

Because of what Europe has become, it now has few viable choices in dealing with radical Islamic terrorism. Its dilemma is a warning to Americans that we should turn away from a similar path of national suicide. 

After suffering serial terrorist attacks from foreign nationals and immigrants, a normal nation-state would be expected to make extraordinary efforts to close its borders and redefine its foreign policy in order to protect its national interests.

But a France or a Belgium is not quite a sovereign nation any more, and thus does not have complete control over its national destiny or foreign relations. As part of the European Union, France and Belgium have, for all practical purposes, placed their own security in the hands of an obdurate Angela Merkel’s Germany, which is hellbent on allowing without audit millions of disenchanted young Middle Eastern males into its territory, with subsequent rights of passage into any other member of the European Union that they wish. The 21st-century “German problem” is apparently not that of an economic powerhouse and military brute warring on its neighbors, but that of an economic powerhouse that uses its wealth and arrogant sense of social superiority to bully its neighbors into accepting its bankrupt immigration policies and green ideology.

The immigration policies of France and Belgium are unfortunately also de facto those of Greece. And a petulant and poor Greece, licking its wounds over its European Union brawl with northern-European banks, either cannot or will not control entrance into its territory — Europe’s window on the Middle East. No European country can take the security measures necessary for its own national needs, without either violating or ignoring EU mandates. That the latest terrorist murders struck near the very heart of the EU in Brussels is emblematic of the Union’s dilemma.

As far as America is concerned, a fossilized EU should remind us of our original and vanishing system of federalism, in which states were once given some constitutional room to craft laws and protocols to reflect regional needs — and to ensure regional and democratic input with checks and balances on statism through their representatives in Congress. Yet the ever-growing federal government — with its increasingly anti-democratic, politically correct, and mostly unaccountable bureaucracies — threatens to do to Americans exactly what the EU has done to Europeans. We already see how the capricious erosion of federal immigration law has brought chaos to the borderlands of the American Southwest. It is a scary thing for a federal power arbitrarily to render its own inviolable laws null and void — and then watch the concrete consequences of such lawlessness fall on others, who have been deprived of recourse to constitutional protections of their own existential interests.

Europe’s immigration policy is a disaster … Europeans — for a variety of 20th-century historical and cultural reasons — often are either ignorant of who they are or terrified about expressing their identities in any concrete and positive fashion. The result is that Europe cannot impose on a would-be newcomer any notion that consensual government is superior to the anarchy and theocracy of the Middle East, that having individual rights trumps being subjects of a dictator, that personal freedom is a better choice than statist tyranny, that protection of private property is a key to economic growth whereas law by fiat is not, and that independent judiciaries do not run like Sharia courts. It most certainly cannot ask of immigrants upon arrival that they either follow the laws of a society that originally made Europe attractive to them, or return home to live under a system that they apparently rejected.

All good so far. Then:

I omit for obvious reasons that few present-day Europeans believe that Christianity is much different from Islam, and apparently thus assume that terrorists might just as well be Christians.

But he hasn’t omitted it, has he? A bitter regret has stepped quietly into the article and lingers by the door – a regret that Europe has (broadly speaking) abandoned its religion.

He goes on, cogently again:

… In Europe, immigrants are political tools of the Left. The rapid influx of vast numbers of unassimilated, uneducated, poor, and often illegal newcomers may violate every rule of successful immigration policy. Yet the onrush does serve the purposes of the statist, who demagogues for an instantaneous equality of result. Bloc voters, constituents of bigger government, needy recipients of state largesse, and perennial whiners about inequality are all fodder for European multicultural leftists, who always seek arguments for more of themselves. …

Which is the case in America too. As he says:

The same phenomenon is with us in the United States … [where] importing the poor and the uneducated expands the Democratic constituency. …

The Western therapeutic mindset, which maintains that impoverished immigrants should instantly have what their hosts have always had, trumps the tragic view: that it is risky, dangerous, and sometimes unwise to leave one’s home for a completely alien world, in which sacrifice and self-reliance alone can make the gamble worthwhile — usually for a second generation not yet born.

Demography is Europe’s bane. One engine of unchecked immigration has been the need for more bodies to do the sorts of tasks that Europeans feel are no longer becoming of Europeans. …

Again that is also true of America.

But more curious is the reason why Europe is shrinking — the classic and primary symptom of a civilization in rapid decline.

Europeans are not having children for lots of reasons. A static and fossilized economy without much growth gives little hope to a 20-something European that he or she can get a good job, buy a home, have three children, and provide for those offspring lives with unlimited choices. Instead, the young European bides his time, satisfying his appetites, as a perpetual adolescent who lives in his parents’ flat, seeks to milk the system, and waits for someone to die at the tribal government bureau. After a lost decade, one hopes to hook up with some like soul in her or his late thirties.

And –

The last eight years in the U.S. have seen an acceleration of the Europeanization of America’s youth.

Socialism … insidiously takes responsibility away from the individual and transfers it to the anonymous, but well-funded, state. … Why seek children and the honor of raising and protecting them when the state can provide all without the bother and direct expense? Why have a family or invest for the future, when the state promises a pleasant and politically correct old-age home?

Without a Second Amendment or much of a defense budget, Europeans not only divert capital to enervating social programs, but also have sacrificed any confidence in muscular self-protection, individual or collective.

Even postmodern nations remain collections of individuals. A state that will not or cannot protect its own interests is simply a reflection of millions of dead souls that do not believe in risking anything to ensure that they are safe — including their own persons and those of their family. Finally, Europe is Petronius’s Croton. It does not believe in any transcendence as reified by children or religion. If there is nothing but the here and now, then why invest one’s energy in children who live on after one dies? Like atheism, childlessness reflects the assumption that ego-driven rationalism and satisfaction of the appetites are all there is and all that there ever will be.

Europe’s perfect storm is upon us. A shrinking, statist, and agnostic society that does not believe in transcendence, either familial or religious, is now in a war with near neighbors of a very different sort. In the Middle East, the fundamentalists are growing in numbers, and they most certainly do believe that their own lives are nothing in comparison to the Phoenix-like resurrection of their Caliphate and the sensual pleasures in the hereafter that will reward their martial sacrifices in the here and now. Of all the many reasons why immigrants to Europe so often dislike their generous hosts, the simplest may be because they so easily can.

… It would take another St. Jerome (“All were born in captivity and siege, and do not desire the liberty they never knew. Who could believe this?”) to chronicle the Western tragedy.

As a general rule, whatever Europe is now doing, we should do the opposite — for our very survival in an increasingly scary world.

So, an article saying much that needs to be said.

But we come back to this: Europe “does not believe in any transcendence as reified by children or religion. If there is nothing but the here and now, then why invest one’s energy in children who live on after one dies? Like atheism, childlessness reflects the assumption that ego-driven rationalism and satisfaction of the appetites are all there is and all that there ever will be.” And: ” A shrinking, statist, and agnostic society that does not believe in transcendence, either familial or religious, is now in a war with near neighbors of a very different sort.”

His argument is that Europeans now do not think, or feel, or believe that there is any larger purpose to be served than the achievement of their own private personal ambitions and pleasures; no goals beyond their own individual lives worth putting their energies into. Previous generations believed they had a posterity in their children, the continuation of their families; and/or in the immortality of their nation; and/or in a spiritual afterlife.

And that is true. They did.

Then their nations were taken away from them, blended into a monstrous political entity called the European Union. What Frenchman, or Italian, or Englishman will ever say: “Breathes there a man with soul so dead/ Who never to himself has said/ This is mine own, my native … European Union”?

And what of their losing the desire for descendants? That’s harder to explain. In addition to the fading away of marriage, the dread of the expense of children, the shrinking from the emotional risk of entering into the responsibilities of relationships, there is a much larger source of discouragement; what one might call a cosmic despair: our knowledge of global doom. By “global doom” I don’t mean “global warming”, but the certainty that this world in which we exist and act, will one day itself cease to exist. It may be only in about 3 billion years that the final doom will come upon it, but go it will, for sure.

Whether or not those explanations are the right ones – perhaps among many others  – it is a fact that Europeans are not having enough children to ensure the survival of their nations, even if they were to take back national sovereignty from the bureaucratic dictatorship of the EU.

This means they are discarding the future, as individuals and as a bridging generation between their nation’s yesterday and tomorrow. And because they have no future to work or build for – what have they to defend? So when another culture, a savage culture that arose and remains in the ignorant Dark Ages and knows nothing of the physical destiny of this planet, invades their continent, and increases with many children, and believes that making war ensures their endless and dominant continuation on earth and immortal happiness after death, there is nothing effective standing in its way. No one to bar the gates. No one to fight back. The imaginary spokesman of the dying European culture with no stake in the future says, “Come in, if you want to. Take what you want. Do as you will. I won’t be around much longer to know or care what happens here.” (“A shrinking, statist, and agnostic society that does not believe in transcendence, either familial or religious, is now in a war with near neighbors of a very different sort.”)

Hanson suggests that the Europeans’ discarding of the future, and consequent abandonment of the greatest civilization the human race has ever attained, is not only tragic – which it is – but also immoral. He implies this by adding to the causes – familial, national – that kept European Man going for centuries, the cause of religion. He plainly considers it a highly desirable thing that human beings should believe that their time on earth is not the whole of their existence. He believes in an afterlife as formulated in Christian doctrine. The quality of that afterlife for each individual may depend on how the individual Christian behaves in his earthly life. Hoping for heaven, he will be good according to the precepts of his faith. (Now that is true of Catholics, whose church allows that good works as well as “the grace of God” can bring one to heaven. But many Protestant sects, most notably Calvinists and Lutherans, teach that only God decides your eternal destination, and he does that even before you are born, so what you do can make not a jot of difference to the iron ruling. The only encouragement such churches offer the faithful is that if you live dutifully, obedient to the commandments of your God, you will be perceived as a person destined for heaven, and thus perceived, you may live in hope.)

One way or another, Christianity – Hanson seems to assume – helped Europeans be strong in defense of their inheritance, prolific in procreation to ensure their posterity, and above all continent in their appetites for the hope of heaven.

And that may very well have been true. But we deny that lack of religious belief now is a cause of the self-inflicted doom of Europe. It seems plain to us that lack of interest in this life  – beyond personal attainment and pleasure – is at work.

Atheism does not assume that “ego-driven rationalism and satisfaction of the appetites are all there is and all that there ever will be”. Some atheists might assume it, but there is nothing about atheism that logically involves any such assumption.

Atheists are more likely to strive harder in this life to know, to achieve, to build, to love and hate, defend and attack, as well as to think and enjoy, than those who believe that their final, greater, and possibly happier destiny is in another world. Atheists who learn and build are very likely to want descendants to continue their discoveries, further their achievements, and add to their works, since only those they beget and what they bequeath will survive their death.

By that reasoning, atheism could have been the salvation of Europe. We might propose that far from the loss of Christianity dooming the European nations, it is the legacy of Christianity as self-abasement, non-resistance to evil, the choice of self-sacrifice, and the love of martyrdom that has primed Europeans through their inherited moral culture to let this death happen to them. And if that is so, what we are seeing is the logical end of Christian history in the age of science.

But as the Christian religion peters out in disbelief, its acolytes perish unresisting at the hands of other – passionate – believers. 

Now if only Muslims could be persuaded to abandon their faith, their belief that they must conquer and subdue all others and gain an afterlife in paradise …  what then? Europeans might still be dying out, but at least not in agony and  terror.

Seems it’s too late to stop fear by marching against it! Who would have thought?

The Belgians, being full of love for all mankind, planned to do it – and then realized it might not work. It might even attract more terrorism.

The Pope says use love to stop terrorism. But the Belgians are not totally convinced he is right.

Katie Hopkins writes at MailOnline:

So let’s just get this straight.

A peace march in Belgium was cancelled over fears ISIS could use it to launch another attack on Brussels.

Belgium security forces decided a March Against Fear, however topical, would be ill-advised because the fear is grounded in truth, and marching isn’t going to make it go away.

This is a bit like the people who say they are standing up to terror by continuing to use the underground. They are not actually standing up to anything. There is no real show of defiance. Everyone is scared to death.

In truth, they are gambling on the old adage lightning never strikes the same spot twice. Or for a more modern twist, suicide bombers never target the same subway twice in a week.

But if you live in jihadi central, that’s a pretty risky bet to place.

In place of the March Against Fear, a few pro-migrant groups turned up at the Old Stock Exchange in Brussels to watch mourners light candles for the dead, and shove a bit more leftie clap-trap down their throats, reminding them that irregular migrants are good people at heart and the last suicide bombers were actually home-grown, so not technically migrants at all. So that’s ok then.

In response, a group of anti-immigration protestors gathered at the Place de la Bourse to unfurl an anti-ISIS banner and vent their frustration at the direction in which the self-styled capital of Europe appears to be heading. …

The March Against Fear was cancelled because there was too much fear, and a riot broke out because the police objected to a peaceful protest.

There are a few things I notice around these incidents in Europe;

• Firstly, the anti-immigration protestors are always referred to as thugs. The language around them is universally ugly, despite the fact they are protesting against the very people who think it is acceptable to detonate themselves next to small babies wearing suicide vests filled with nails and shrapnel.
• They are called the far-right and lazy associations are made between them and Hitler. Even though in the UK it appears to be Labour supporters who have issues with Jews.
• Clearly Nazi salutes have no place in modern Europe. No one wants to see violence against the police, stones thrown or graffiti. But if you look carefully, trouble-making groups on the left such as No Borders build a far more subversive brand of trouble.
• The dreadlocked gangs of migrant-lovers, turning a blind eye to the destruction of Europe, are never referred to as the far-left. They are affectionately called anarchists, as if they are teenage boys, experimenting with Death Metal and living raw vegan.
• Despite absolutely no police response to terrorists … or marauding migrants … their rapid reaction to the presence of a handful of PEGIDA [Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West] overwhelming.

In Cologne, 150 officers were sent to police the migrant attacks on women on New Years Eve, resulting in 676 criminal complaints being filed. In comparison, 1700 riot police with water cannon were sent to stop a subsequent PEGIDA march through the city.

Whilst it seems perfectly acceptable to turn the water cannon on nationals, determined to stand up for their country and culture, it is never acceptable to criticise migrants, terrorists or extremists planning attacks.

It seems to me there is a yawning gulf between the treatment and reporting of the far-left and the far-right, and and even bigger chasm between nationals and migrant populations, who lack respect for the culture they have joined.

The left are so busy kowtowing to the rights of those who have chosen to join our culture, the right has lost the freedom to defend the culture they have chosen to join.

The police have an almost magnetic attraction to events which offer predictable policing – such as a PEGIDA March through a city centre, but are incapable of defending people from the actual threat of terror we all feel. …

People talk about the rise of the far-right. I fear the dominance of the smug, self-centred left  … is far more threatening and far more real.

And the Pope is one of that company.

The Christian Churches are doing nothing to save Christians from the persecution, enslavement, torture and murder they are being subjected to by Muslims in North Africa and the Middle East. Sometimes deprecating statements are made by church authorities. But the atrocities continue, and the Christian powers remain passive.

What is wrong with Christianity?

The answer to that question is easy to see here. We quote almost the whole article. All emphases in bold are ours.

Factually, the account of what is happening to Christians in Asia and Africa is accurate. It is the response to the facts that concern us.

Responding in Christ to Islamist Violence Against Christians and Other Minorities in the Middle East

Wednesday, March 02, 2016

Introductory Note 

For the past decade, mainline Protestant churches have largely failed to speak up on behalf of Christians (and other minorities) in the Middle East. Below is the text of a model resolution that members of these churches can rework and submit to the national assemblies of their churches. This text, attempts to address the issue of Triumphalist Islam in an irenic, authoritative and comprehensive manner. It follows the model of resolutions used by the General Synod of the United Church of Christ.

Please feel free to distribute this text as you see fit.

Theological Rationale

“If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.”

– 1 Corinthians, 12: 26-27

“For God did not give us a spirit of fear, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-control.” –  2 Timothy 1:7

“If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God.” –  1 John 4:15

Christ summons us to partake of His life, His suffering, His death and resurrection. As part of this summons, Christ calls us to stand in solidarity with our fellow Christians during their times of trial. He calls for us pray for and end to the oppression they endure and to actively struggle against it.

Wherever and whenever anyone suffers for the same [sic. name?] of Christ, we are called to witness to both the injustice they endure and to the steadfastness they exhibit: the injustice suffered by Christians thwarts the will of God; Christian steadfastness in the face of this injustice brings glory to God.

Christ also calls us to proclaim liberty to the captives, whether their captivity is the result of physical or spiritual oppression. (Luke 4:18) He also calls us to proclaim justice to the nations (Matthew 12:15).

Background: The Roots and History of anti-Christian Violence in Muslim-Majority Environments 

The Body of Christ is under attack in Muslim-majority countries throughout the world, particularly in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Christians are being killed, imprisoned, held for ransom, forcibly converted and sold into slavery as part of an ongoing campaign of oppression and ethnic cleansing that began in the early part of the last decade. Christians are not the only targets of this campaign. Other religious minorities such as the Yazidis in Iraq and adherents of the Bahai faith in Iran are also subject to atrocities. Muslims are also the victims of oppression perpetrated by their fellow Muslims.

The overriding impulse behind these acts of aggression is an ideology of Muslim supremacy that holds that Islamic doctrine and jurisprudence should rule every aspect of life in Muslim-majority countries. This ideology causes the life of non-Muslims to be devalued and sets the stage for violence against religious and ethnic minorities (and dissident Muslims) in Muslim-majority countries.

Violence perpetrated against non-Muslims, and the ideas used to justify it, are not new phenomenon [sic], but date back to Islam’s founding. The mistreatment of non-Muslims in Muslim-majority environments and the oppression of apostates has been a persistent aspect of the Muslim faith since its founding in Seventh Century A.D.

The Curse of Dhimmitude

Under Shariah, or Islamic law, which was codified in the years after Muhammad’s death, Christians and Jews were accorded a second class status which in the modern era has been described as dhimmitude. Dhimmitude is derived from the word “dhimmi” which is itself derived from the Arabic word “dhimma” which describes a pact that was thrust upon Christians and Jews who wished to maintain their faith practices when the countries they lived in came under Muslim rule.

As part of this dhimma pact, non-Muslims agreed to pay a special tax for the privilege of practicing their faith in a Muslim jurisdiction. Oftentimes, this tax was collected in a ceremony that included a ritualistic blow to the head or the neck to remind dhimmis that they were paying for the privilege of keeping their head on their shoulders. The goal was to humiliate non-Muslims into submission.

Other rules associated with dhimmitude varied from one location to another but they included a prohibition of building homes or houses of worship higher than that of their Muslim neighbors.

Dhimmis were also prohibited from riding horses, and were deprived of the right to defend themselves against Muslims when physically attacked. Public displays of religious symbols (such as the ringing of church bells or singing of hymns) was prohibited. In some instances, Jews and Christians were required to wear a colored patch indicating their religious identity.

Dhimmi testimony was not accepted in Muslim courts, rendering them vulnerable to mistreatment and oppression. Criticizing Islam or agitating for one’s liberty and equality was out of the question. The first line of enforcement for these rules was the leaders of the dhimmi communities themselves. Jewish and Christian leaders were obligated to make sure that the people in their communities did not get out of line and obeyed these rules.

The ultimate goal of these rules was to demean and humiliate non-Muslims and to encourage them to convert to Islam. These rules also had the tendency of making non-Muslims low cost, no-cost targets of violence and oppression.

If a dhimmi or dhimmi community agitated for its rights or appealed to help from outsiders, they abrogated the right to claim protection from the authorities under the dhimma pact, and as a result, rendered themselves legitimate targets of jihad. This happened a number of times under the Ottoman Empire.

For example, when the Ottoman Empire abolished dhimma laws in 1860, Muslims in Damascus murdered 5,000 Christians because they were no longer behaving in a submissive manner toward the Muslim neighbors. Men were killed and women and children were raped and abducted; some escaped these fates by converting to Islam.

Similar massacres took place in what is now known as modern-day Turkey in the 1870s, 1890s when thousands of Armenian, Greeks, and Assyrian Christians were murdered in response to European interventions on behalf of the rights of Christians in the Ottoman Empire. 

The Armenian Genocide, which resulted in the death of 1.5 million Armenians (and thousands of Greeks and Assyrians) between 1915 and 1922, was, in part, a response to the efforts of Armenians to achieve freedom and equality in a Muslim-majority environment. …

Living as a dhimmi has political consequences … In the latter half of the 20^th Century, Christian populations in the Middle East protected themselves by supporting brutal dictators who would protect them from the violence and hostility directed at them by their Muslim neighbors in exchange for support. Oftentimes Christians would serve as spokespeople and advocates for regimes to the West.

This strategy was particularly evident in Iraq, where Christians supported the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein and in Syria, where Christians supported the Assad regime, which brutally repressed the Sunni majority in that country. Egypt’s Coptic minority was also a bulwark of support for the Mubarak regime in Egypt, because it kept radical Sunnis, known as Salafists, out of power.

This was not a strategy available to all religious minorities. Adherents of the Bahai faith for example, are brutally repressed in Iran with no chance of obtaining help from the theocratic government in Iran. Christians are brutally mistreated in Iran as well, especially those who seek to convert their countrymen to the Christian faith.

It must be remembered that Christians in the Middle East are being oppressed in their homelands. Their existence pre-dates the arrival of Islam by centuries. They are not interlopers.

It should also be noted that Muslims are also victims of oppression in Muslim-majority countries. Where Sunnis are the majority, they oppress Shiites and vice versa. Ahmadiyya Muslims, who are regarded as heretics and apostates, are oppressed in Pakistan.

Shariah, or Islamic law establishes a system of structural violence that renders non-Muslims, dissident Muslims and women, legitimate targets of oppression.

In an effort to prevent discussion of the impact of dhimmitude and Shariah as a human rights issue Islamic organizations and leaders have worked to silence criticism of Islam through a variety of means. In particular, they asked the United Nations to promote blasphemy laws and statues that prohibit the defamation of religion. Such laws are already in force in Muslim-majority countries, making it dangerous to discuss issues of human rights under Islam.

Recent History 

Anti-Christian violence in Muslim-majority countries faded from the world’s consciousness in the decades after the Armenian Genocide.

Things began to change with the 2003 removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq when Christians in that country found themselves without a protector and subject to terrible acts of violence. Churches have been bombed, clergy kidnapped and murdered, and lay Christians have been regularly killed. Christians used to number approximately 1.5 million in Iraq. Credible estimates indicate there are less than 300,000 Christians in the country today.

Christians in Syria found themselves vulnerable to similar acts of violence as president Bashar al-Assad lost control of large sections of the country as a result of a civil war that began in 2011 and rages to this day.

Coptic Christians were also subjected to terrible attacks beginning toward the end of Hosni Mubarak’s tenure as president of Egypt, which came to an end in 2011. Fortunately, the situation for Christians in Egypt has improved substantially under the leadership of Egyptian President Abdel Fatah Sisi who has taken a tough line with the Muslim Brotherhood, which was removed from power in 2013, but the hostility and violence directed at Copts in their homeland remains a problem.

The recent kidnappings of hundreds of young women in Nigeria by the Islamist organization Boko Haram and multiple massacres of Coptic Christians by ISIS in Libya demonstrates that radical Islam threatens Christians in North Africa. Violent attacks against Christians in Pakistan indicate that it is a problem in Asia as well.

Something must be said and something must be done about this rising tide of Islamist violence.

Signs of Hope

We must acknowledge unequivocally that not every Muslim adheres to the notion of supremacy over non-Muslims; to fail to do so would be false witness. There are some resources within Islamic tradition that can be used to justify a more tolerant and peaceful attitude toward non-Muslims. For example, there is a passage in the Koran that states “there is no compulsion in religion.” Unfortunately, many Muslim scholars assert that this passage and others like it, which came early in Mohammad’s career, were superseded, or abrogated by a number of other passages (which came later in Mohammad’s life) that call for the violent oppression of non-Muslims and the execution of people who would leave the faith.

Nevertheless, some Muslim intellectuals appeal to these earlier passages to convince their co-religionists to refrain from acts of violence against their non-Muslim neighbors, but they are not in the majority. This is a consequence of a decision made by Muslim scholars to close the “door of interpretation” or (bab al-itjihad) in the 11^th Century. Writing in 111 Questions on Islam, Samir Khali Samir, S.J. reports that as a result that once this door was closed, it was “no longer possible to interpret the text.” He continues, “Hence today, even the mere attempt to understand its meaning in a certain context is regarded as a desire to challenge it. And it is a true tragedy for the Islamic world…”

Moreover, Samir writes that in modern times, “efforts have been made” to interpret the Koran in context, but that they have “almost always [been] in vain.” He continues: “The weight of the tradition and, above all, the fear of questioning the acquired security of the text have created a taboo: The Qur’an cannot be interpreted, nor can it be critically rethought.”

Still, there are signs of hope.

Recently, Egyptian President Abdel Fatah Sisi spoke to scholars at Cairo’s Al Azhar University, the most important center of learning for Sunni Muslims in the world. He told the scholars “We must revolutionize our religion” adding that by embracing the ideas it does, “the Islamic nation is being torn apart, destroyed, and is heading to perdition. We ourselves are bringing it to perdition.” That Sisi made such a speech at Al Azhar, which has traditionally been a source of Islamic supremacism is remarkable. It remains to be seen if scholars at the school will take up Sisi’s challenge.

One group of Muslims in the United States, the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD), has worked to promote discussion of the topics delineated above. In a recently published statement, AIFD has condemned the push to create “Islamic” states where non-Muslims are oppressed. The organization has also called on Muslims to “promote reforms where necessary, including an honest and critical reinterpretation of scripture and shariah law used by Islamists to justify violence and oppression.”

The AIFD also declares “Neither jihadism nor Islamism permit the equality of all humans irrespective of their race or religion and should therefore be rejected.”

Hopefully, Muslims in the Middle East will start to address these issues, sparking the “revolution” within Islam that Egyptian President Sisi was calling for when he spoke to scholars at Al Azhar in Cairo.

We must remember that Islam does not have a monopoly on religious violence. Christians have struggled with their faith’s historical hostility toward the Jewish people, which has had catastrophic consequences. They have also confronted the role their faith played in the destruction and oppression of indigenous peoples throughout the world. 

The fact that we as Christians are not without sin does not preclude us from lifting up our voices about the mistreatment of our fellow Christians and other religious and ethnic minorities in Muslim-majority countries throughout the world. 

To remain silent at a time such as this would only add to our sin. 

We must pray, we must discern, we must act.

Resolution: A Call to Prayer, Discernment, and Action 

WHEREAS violence against Christians and other religious minorities in Muslim-majority environments is threatening the destruction of people groups in the Middle East; and

WHEREAS massacres, kidnappings and the enslavement of Christians and Yazidis in Syria and Iraq has reached epidemic proportions; and

WHEREAS violence against Copts in Egypt remains a threat and the murder of Copts in Libya has become an undeniable outrage; and

WHEREAS this violence is not a new phenomenon, but has its roots in Islamic doctrine, jurisprudence and tradition dating back centuries; and

WHEREAS Shariah law as it is applied in Muslim countries throughout the world represents an undeniable manifestation of structural violence and a defamation of the name of God; and

WHEREAS dhimmitude renders non-Muslims low cost, no cost targets of violence; and

WHEREAS some Muslim leaders have attempted to place discussion of these problems beyond the pale of acceptable discourse by promoting the passage of laws that prohibit “blasphemy” and the “defmation of religion;” and

WHEREAS a growing number of Muslim leaders and intellectuals are struggling to re-open the “door of interpretation;”

WE WITNESS AND LAMENT the ongoing destruction of Christian communities in the Middle East, the region of our faith’s birth, and the oppression of our Brothers and Sisters in North Africa and Asia; and

WE PROCLAIM that as Christians we are called to pray on behalf of those who are dying for the name of Christ and that we are called to speak up for the principles of religious freedom; and

WE RESPOND to this call by condemning violence against people of all faiths throughout the world and by standing in solidarity with the victims of Islamist violence wherever it takes place; and

WE PRAY for the violence against Christians and other religious minorities to end; and

WE PRAY that God manifest His presence the decisions of political leaders of all faiths and countries as they confront the rising tide of Islamist violence throughout the world; and

WE PRAY that world leaders of all faiths and ideologies be given the wisdom, the strength and confidence to stem the violence through the application of justice, mercy, and restraint; and

WE PLEDGE to educate ourselves, our congregations, our neighbors, and our community leaders about Shariah law, its impact on Muslims, non-Muslims and women and to discern and counteract the impact of dhimmitude on our fellow Christians; and

WE PRAY that Muslim leaders acknowledge the rights of their followers to convert to other faiths and work to encourage their followers to acknowledge the dignity of women, for they too are created in the image of God; and

WE PLEDGE to work for the safety of religious targeted communities throughout the world; and

WE PROCLAIM Christ’s liberty to the captives of religious violence and oppression, whether they be its victims or perpetrators. We are glad to see principled Muslims confront Islam’s legacy of hostility and violence against non-believers. We pray that their numbers may grow and that their efforts become more effective; and

WE ACKNOWLEDGE violence and sin perpetrated by Christians throughout history; and

WE PLEDGE to not let our guilt over these events to be used to silence us over the mistreatment of our co-religionists and other victims of religious violence in Muslim-majority countries; and

WE PRAY that God will embolden the faith of our fellow believers, soften the hearts of their tormentors and enliven the intellects and consciences of those who have been bystanders to this violence for far too long.

posted by Dexter Van Zile, Wednesday, March 02, 2016

So what is the “action” these Christians are resolving to take? 

To “witness and lament”.

To proclaim “Christ’s liberty”. 

To acknowledge Christian violence and sin. 

To pray.

To pray especially for the Muslims to change their beliefs and the actions they take because of those beliefs. This frail hope … no, this baseless, entirely chimerical hope is their plan of action. “Whereas” the cruel treatment and mass murder of their fellow Christians is proceeding unabated to their certain knowledge, they will “act” by praying for the Muslims to change their beliefs and their ways!

The worst place among all the killing fields where the Christian populations are being depleted, the very worst country for Christians at the mercy of Muslims, is Nigeria. They mention only the abduction and enslavement of one group of young girls. But there is much more that should be known to the world. According to a report titled Global Terrorism Index 2015, published last November by the Institue for Economics & Peace, the affiliate of ISIS in Nigeria, Boko Haram, killed 6,644 Christians. Many were babies and small children. A favorite way of killing them among the Muslim savages is by throwing them onto fires. See our post, Why Muslims are butchering Christians in Nigeria, February 24, 2014.

A Christian child burnt alive by Muslims in Nigeria 

A particularly appalling fact is that Boko Haram was protected by Obama’s State Department during the time that Hillary Clinton was in office as Secretary of State; and the Obama administration actively interfered in Nigerian elections to get their preferred candidate into power. See our post, Obama’s Nigerian candidate wins, April 6, 2015. 

Because the churches used violence evilly in the past, these Christians are reluctant now to use it at all – or so their text implies, acknowledging Christian “violence and sin”.

Fact is, the Christian powers INTEND TO CONTINUE TO DO NOTHING to rescue or avenge the Christian victims of Islam. They will not lift a finger, let alone launch armies, to stop the slaughter, the torture, the enslavement, the terrorizing, the elimination of whole communities of their co-religionists. A large portion of Christendom itself!

Except of course pray, and proclaim, and pray, and confess, and pray, and witness, and pray, and lament, and pray, and endure …

Truly, Islam and Christianity suit each other perfectly!

More Christian children burnt alive by Muslims in Nigeria

Many stories like this one (dated April 19, 2012) can be found on the Internet:

A Sri Lankan woman is currently facing decapitation by sword on a witchcraft charge in Saudi Arabia …

Who brought the charge, and why?

A Saudi man complained that in a shopping mall his 13-year-old daughter “suddenly started acting in an abnormal way, which happened after she came close to the Sri Lankan woman,” reports the daily Okaz.

After the local man denounced the Sri Lankan for casting a spell on his daughter, police in the port city of Jeddah found it sufficient cause to arrest the woman.

She was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death by decapitation.

For witchcraft.  

Witchcraft and sorcery imply only one measure in Saudi Arabia – beheading. And it works this way in practice: last year in the kingdom at least two people – a woman in her 60s and a Sudanese man – were beheaded on witchcraft charges.

Hugh Fitzgerald writes today at Front Page:

From Saudi Arabia comes the news that the mutaween, the feared religious police under the control of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, who patrol the streets and regulate the daily life of the populace, are now being given five-day courses in how to recognize, and then how to neutralize, a small army of wizards, witches, ghosts, demons, fortunetellers in the Magic Kingdom. Apparently it’s a big problem. Why, there have even been reports of leprechaun-like creatures – possibly they’ve wandered down from the Old Sod to end up in the Empty Quarter – who find it great fun to persuade innocent Saudis to break the rules of Sharia. All these dealers in the magical and supernatural will be hunted down, and dealt with sternly, by the Saudi religious police — “sternly” can mean anything from long prison sentences to decapitation.

Such worries are not new to the Saudis, however — the official anti-witchcraft unit within the Ministry of the Interior was first formed in May 2009.

The reason the Saudis are so worried about wizards and witches is that the Saudi people, like other Muslims, are especially vulnerable to the appeal of the occult. Muslims learn from the Qur’an that there exists an intelligent creature (the only other intelligent creature in the universe, according to Islamic doctrine, aside from humans and angels), called the Djinn (or Jinn), whose meddling with humans explains Evil, as well as health and illness, wealth and poverty, that Man as a creature of fate – where everything may be inshallah but is not necessarily hunky-dory — may enjoy or endure.

Evil djinn — not all djinn in Islam are bad – can take possession of people and cause them to behave in wicked ways.

This is not foreign to, but part of, orthodox Islam. Fortunately, there are those who, after appropriate training, can become qualified exorcisers of the evil djinn, using special Qur’anically-approved healing methods. There are also those who have not undergone training to be exorcists and who use methods which have not been approved, and this gets them into trouble with officials even if their methods prove effective. The Saudi witchcraft-hunt offers us a glimpse of the Bizarro-World that we enter whenever we penetrate the world of Islam.

In the West, we hardly bother to denounce those who claim to be witches and wizards, exorcists and fortunetellers, that is, all who lay claim to supernatural powers, because we know, as rational creatures, that they are frauds and fakes, they cannot possibly have these powers. And because we don’t believe any of that stuff, we don’t worry about them in this, our Western world, the dutiful child of the Enlightenment and rationalism. If we punish any fortunetellers or magicians at all, it’s only because they have charged for services we know are worthless and we want them to disgorge their ill-gotten gains. Witchcraft has not been taken seriously, i.e. as effective, since Salem, when outside it was 1692.

But in the Islamic world, magic (bad or black magic and good magic) is everywhere and taken very seriously – i.e., thought to be effective – indeed. In the Islamic world, belief in witchcraft, magic, sorcery of all kinds, is widespread. Fear of black magic is pervasive. Fortunetellers, witches and wizards, exorcists of bad djinn are to be found everywhere. And this is because Magic and the Occult are very much a part of Muslim teachings and Muslim life.

The Occult – the Djinn – transmitted by the Qur’an, helps to explain the widespread belief in other kinds of sorcery and magic in the Muslim world. But it is not the whole explanation for that belief. The heightened vulnerability of Muslims to the promise and threat of assorted wizards, fortunetellers, sorcerers, and exorcists, as compared to the sturdy resistance of rational Western man, is to be explained also by the more general effect of Islam’s encouragement of the habit of mental submission, and its punishment of skepticism. A good Muslim never questions any of the teachings of Islam, and the observant Muslim state (as Saudi Arabia certainly is) punishes those Muslims who dare to demonstrate the least display of skepticism (the end-point of that skepticism is apostasy, punishable by death). The result is that Muslims, even without the whole business of the Djinn, inhabit a mental universe of encouraged credulity.

Well, not all of that is true. While it is important to remember that the Enlightenment was confined to the West – and that it did not touch Islam – it did not abolish Western superstition. Christians continue to believe the impossible. They believe that a virgin gave birth; that God is both One and Three, and all-human at the same time as being all-divine; that “Jesus” walked on water, brought a dead person back to life, and performed various other impossible feats; that he himself came back to life after being dead for three days; that he now lives eternally in a physical heaven … The list of magic events and conditions in which Christians believe could be very long.

In addition to which, many Christian denominations, including Catholics, do practice exorcisms. So do most of the organized religions. Commonly, a ritual is performed, a priest says this and that, and at the end of it a claim is made (often if not always ) that “an evil spirit” has been expelled  from a person who was “possessed” by it.   

Christianity and Judaism draw a firm distinction between “magic” and “miracles”.

We fail to see the difference.

This is a revised version of an essay by Jillian Becker first posted on February 6, 2011, under the title A cure for religion:

*

Is religion one of the most frequent causes of death after heart disease, cancer, and road accidents?

To take just one religion, the most lethal at present: Islam kills uncountable numbers of people every day. (See here and here.)

Surely this is a disease that is curable?

We have heard of Muslims who went to a university in the West and there encountered Enlightenment literature. They were stunned by what they read. They became secularist, possibly atheist. The rumor may be untrue, yet it seems highly possible. Even probable.

If  the West only took the trouble to teach its values to the peoples who live in darkness – those billions of Others – it might in time achieve what wars have failed to: the subduing of the barbaric hordes, the ending of their persistent onslaught.

During the Cold War, America spoke to the Communist bloc through Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe. The effort was made to tell the enslaved peoples that what their masters would have them believe was not true. Those broadcasts helped to bring the Wall down. Why is no such effort being made to give new ideas to the Muslims? Vast numbers of them are taught nothing but the Koran – or rather, have it beaten into them. For many of them it is in a language (Arabic ) that they don’t understand. And even if they know the language, much of what they learn to recite by heart is incomprehensible. Those suras that are intelligible are full of evil counsel and absurdity: “kill the infidel…”,  and a lot of solemn drivel about Djinns. Why doesn’t the secular West give them something better to think about?

Teach them to question ideas rather than dumbly accept them.

Teach them that freedom makes for a happier life, tolerance for a longer one.

It might be argued that many Muslims who live in the West are aware of Western values and ideas and still reject them in favor of Islamic dogma. True. And we may assume that there will always be some who cannot be cured of religion. But the probability is that there are many who can be, if only they were better informed.

Yes, we are urging “proselytizing” and “conversion” on a massive scale: not from one religion to another, but from religion to reason. (To oppose one religion by another – to think of Christianity, for instance, as a cure for Islam – is to misdiagnose the disease.)

It must be worth trying. A start could be made with young Muslims who are already in the West with a positive program of teaching the utility of doubt and moral necessity of critical examination.

No more giving in to Muslim demands for the separation of the sexes, for special facilities in schools and work-places, for courts to take account of their “cultural traditions” such as honor killings and wife-beatings and the sly deceptions involved in “sharia compliant finance”.

We have arrived at our ways for sound reasons, so let’s stick to them. Away with “multicultural” sentimentality and hypocrisy!

We’d like to teach the world to think. We’d like the Western powers to have a shared policy of continually lecturing the billions who live in darkness.

Okay, hectoring them.

Let’s seize them by the ears and say, “Now listen here … !”

But who will do this? Those who are in a position to do it, political leaders, educators, the media, prefer to denigrate Western values. They despise the world-shaping, civilization-advancing achievements of their own culture. Many of them not only scorn their inheritance, but hate it.

They hate and mock the “dead white men” of the great “patriarchy” who bequeathed it to us. 

Jillian Becker   February 15, 2016

For Valentine’s Day we choose this video, in which Christopher Hitchens comments on Christian “love”.

He also tells a good joke about a Buddhist and a hot-dog vendor.

This is a repeat of an essay by Jillian Becker, first posted on April 29, 2011.

The rise of enthusiasm for Socialism in America, demonstrated by the great numbers of enthusiasts flocking to hear Bernie Sanders, the Democratic candidate for the presidency, preaching it, prompts us to post the essay again.

*

It is human nature to be selfish. If we weren’t selfish we wouldn’t survive. If we didn’t eat when we were hungry, warm ourselves when we were cold, seek cures for our illnesses, defend ourselves (and our children and our life-sustaining property), we’d die out pretty damn quick. Or rather, we would never have come into existence as a species at all.

We are most of us capable of sympathy with others, and we often willingly give away a thing we own to another person. Some are altruistic. A few will even give up their lives to save the lives of others. Nevertheless, we are all naturally and necessarily selfish.

Christianity and Communism require human nature to change. As it can’t, Christianity’s commandments to love our enemies and forgive those who do us harm turn many a person of good will and high aspiration into a hypocrite if not a corpse. Communist theorists have never settled the question of whether human nature must change so that the Revolution can take place, or whether the Revolution must take place in order for human nature to change. Of course it will never change, but there’s no stopping the collectivist dolts arguing about it.

Capitalism works well because it is in tune with our nature. Adam Smith called it “the natural order of liberty”. Everyone selfishly desires to provide for his needs. To pay for what he wants from others – services and goods – he has to provide something that others will pay him for. Millions do it, and the result is prosperity. Capitalism is an abstract machine most beautiful to behold in the wonder of its workings. When individuals have the incentive to achieve, acquire, and enjoy something for themselves, they’ll go to great lengths to afford it. They’ll compete with each other to provide what others want, toil to make it the better product, and set the price of it lower. The best is made available at the least cost. Everyone is both a taker and a giver, and everyone benefits. True, not everyone’s effort always succeeds, but nothing stops anyone from trying again.

Of course capitalism isn’t a remedy for every ill and discontent. But a capitalist society offers the best chance to an individual to make the best of his condition – being alive – which presents him with a tough challenge – to stay alive for a few score years, and make those years as good as his energy, cunning, and adaptability to conditions outside of his control (plus his statistically likely share of luck), can help them to be.

In a capitalist society no one has a fixed place, whether below, in the middle, or on top. A person can rise, sink, or stay. A truly capitalist society is necessarily a free society in which no one is prevented, by some ruler or ruling clique, from bettering his lot, striving, succeeding, or failing.

Capitalism is the enemy of that God of whom all the children in the British Empire used to sing at morning prayers in school assemblies before the Second World War:

All things bright and beautiful,

All creatures great and small;

All things wise and wonderful,

The Lord God made them all.

Each little flower that opens,

Each little bird that sings,

He made their glowing colors,

He made their tiny wings.

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate,

He made them high and lowly,

He ordered their estate.

The children were being taught to be content with everything as it was, trusting that God the ruler up there, all wise, permanent and unchallengeable had ordained how everyone had his fixed place and should stay in it, and because He had ordained it, it must be perfect. The recognition that such a God was an indefensible authoritarian, a whim-driven cosmic dictator, an unjust and arrogant tyrant, came – perhaps unconsciously – to the choosers of Anglican hymns only after a few of the earth’s dictators had been trounced in a prolonged and terrible blood-letting.

But then Socialists took over from God. They decided what was best for humanity. They established the Welfare State. No rich men in castles, no poor men at gates. The State would provide every citizen with depressing accommodation, dull food, health care if he were judged worthy of being kept alive, indoctrination in schools. Though the Socialist State is a slave society, the citizens are not called slaves but Social Security Recipients, National Health Patients, Students, Workers. The belief of their rulers is that they’ll be content because the State provides them with “everything”; they’ll be grateful for the food however poor, the unit in the tower block however depressing, the bed in the hospital however filthy, the indoctrination however boring. The great thing about it, to the collectivist mind, is they won’t have to strive to keep alive. And no one will have cause to pity or envy anyone else, since no one will have less or worse, or more or better – except of course the rulers up there, all wise, permanent and unchallengeable who ordain that everyone else has his fixed place. They reserve plenty, choice, comfort, luxury, information, and power to themselves.

The recognition that such a State is counter to the human instinct for freedom – call it “selfishness “ if you will – should have come to every sane adult the world over when the Soviet Empire crashed. The idea of Socialism should have died then. But if it did, it was only for a short time. Like the Christian God, it rose again, and lives now in the White House, an administration indefensibly authoritarian, whim-driven, unjust, and arrogant.

Selfish human nature with its instinct for liberty, its impelling desire to possess what is good for it materially and mentally, is the force that can and must defeat it.

Today in our Pages section (see the top of our margin), we post a review by Jillian Becker of How Jesus Became God by Bart D. Ehrman.

Here is part of it.

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Bart D. Ehrman’s book How Jesus Became God is a formidable challenge to Christian belief. It stands to his credit that he pursued his researches to the point where he changed from a believing Christian into an “agnostic”. (I put the word in quotation marks because I think the word as applied to religious belief is a cop-out, an intellectual bromide. If you do not believe there is a god, whether your unbelief is weak or strong, you are an atheist.)

An enormous amount of what he says fits with what is known and makes good sense. But in one vital area he goes wrong. He goes wrong because his perspective is Christian – even though he no longer thought of himself as a Christian when he came to write the book. He was not able to free himself sufficiently from the Christian viewpoint because he could not totally shrug off his Christian indoctrination.

Where is it that he goes wrong? ? He traces the vital beginning of the process of Jesus becoming God to the first, Jewish, followers of Jesus. That is the core of his thesis. And, interesting as his book is, generally well-researched as it is, it fails to make its case; because the author has not understood who the earliest followers of Jesus were and what they believed about him.

There is convincing evidence that the man whose Greek biographers called by the name Jesus (and we must call him that for want of knowing what his birth name was) did exist in the province of Judea between the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, and that he was a rabbi with a burning (fanatical, even insanely fanatical) desire to bring about a new Kingdom of God, like the one he and his nation believed had been the free and glorious kingdom of David and Solomon. He prophesied that the “Son of Man” – or the Messiah, the Annointed One – would come and effect this wonder, and he even came to believe that he was that “Son of Man”, that Messiah, himself.

Now let’s look at more of the probable story from a non-Christian (and unbelieving) standpoint.

Jesus’s gesture of attacking some Roman soldiers, along with a couple of his followers armed with two swords – one of them used to slice off a Roman’s ear – did not bring the result he expected. He had convinced himself such a move on his part would be the signal to God to start the series of earth-transforming miracles that would destroy the Roman Empire and bring back the freedom and glory of the Jewish people. The Romans arrested him, brought him to a cursory trial, and condemned him to death by crucifixion – the punishment prescribed for insurrection by Roman law. The punishment was duly carried out. (As Ehrman says, the body was probably flung on the ground somewhere to be devoured by birds and worms and scavenging beasts.)

His little circle of close followers, shocked, terrified, and grieving, fled from Jerusalem to save their own lives, but returned after a while and were to be found among the numerous sects and factions of perfectly orthodox Jews who lived there and carried out their obligations under the law in and to the Temple. They could not bear to give up their idea that Jesus was the Messiah. And as he had not succeeded in doing what a Messiah had to do, they trusted that he would soon return and complete his task. They even sent out missionaries to preach to dispersed communities of Jews and their hangers-on of “God fearers” that Jesus was the risen Messiah and he would return in glory to save the Jewish nation.

Now we come to the tricky bit. Did they then believe that Jesus had come back to life after his execution? Yes. So to them he was still alive? Yes. Did they believe that he had suspired not just in spirit, but in his body? Seems very likely that they did. And this would not have been strange among the Jews of the time. Every sect and party, every faction and movement, religious and political,  except one – the Sadducees, the party of the royal priests – believed in the bodily resurrection of the dead. The general resurrection (the dogma ran) would occur at the end of days. But Jesus’s resurrection, his disciples believed, would be sooner than that – very soon. And they might well have pictured him returning in clouds of glory, descending from the sky and instantly causing the political liberation and resultant spiritual renewal of Israel.

Did they then believe that he was, or became after his death, or perhaps had always been God, or a god, or “the [unique] Son of God” – no. If they had believed any of that they would no longer have been Jews. But doesn’t the idea of his return in clouds of glory and descending from the sky imply divinity? Yes. And Ehrman argues well that there was precedent in the Jewish religious annals for an orthodox belief that (a) there were beings other than God himself in the divine sphere who were thus themselves divine – angels, seraphim, cherubim; and (b) that men had been raised to the sphere of divinity and – it could be argued – shared in the aura of the divine. It is even true that the Hebrew word for God – Elohim – is a plural. And that Psalm 82 speaks of creatures on earth being “gods”. He cites the (apocryphal) books of Enoch and The Wisdom of Solomon for the strongest evidence to support his contention that, while Jehovah was believed by the Jews to be the chief God, there were many lesser gods in Jewish scriptures.

Fine. But now we come back to what the followers of Jesus believed. First of all, who were they? At one point Ehrman calls them “illiterate peasants”. Well there he is probably wrong. For one thing, Jewish boys (most if not absolutely all) were taught to read so that they could read aloud a portion of the law when they turned thirteen. Secondly, there is nothing to say that either Jesus or his followers were uneducated men or even poor men. (The Christian tradition that Jesus was a carpenter and the apparent son of a carpenter has no basis in any discoverable historical fact. The family could have been well-to-do. There were means to support him as a rabbi – a voluntary teacher of the law – in his last year or two.) The disciple Matthew (not to be confused with the name attached to one of the gospels) was certainly literate, being a tax collector.

If Ehrman is right that they were mostly illiterate peasants, then the chance that they would have known anything of the apocryphal books of Enoch are remote, and virtually nil that they could have known of The Wisdom of Solomon – written in Greek – or the works of their contemporary Philo of Alexandria in Egypt.

And even if they were literate, as they almost certainly were, they were not scholars or theologians. There is no way they would have been able to argue for the existence of lesser gods, even if they knew Psalm 82 off by heart. They would have been taught that “God is One” – the central tenet of Judaism. So Ehrman’s sophisticated arguments from esoteric and academic sources for the possibility that they could believe Jesus was or became a god, are inapplicable to them. …