Islam: When Ishmael Comes Marching Home: Passing by Nehusthan
Usually, a devout Christian who writes on comparative religion produces a polemic to some degree or another. Same for a Mulsim. Same for a Hindu. Same for anyone that has a deep belief in spiritual truth. Its expected, since although they can all be false, they all can’t be true. If there is anything I am certain about, it’s about my faith. But, although there are too many reasons to list, I’m not going to tell you why, at least directly. I will tell you not about what separates the claims of my faith from the others on the basis of creedal claims, but by what makes them radically different than mine on the basis of what is influencing their claims.
I am called a Christian because I am a follower of the Jewish Messiah. But, although I have a fierce faith in Him, I am not a Christian by the world’s standard of faith. There is a relatively small number of us with this same radical Christian faith, which is, by the way, the 1st century, not post 1st century. After that time, those who claimed followers of this Messiah slowly began to melt in a profound way back into the accepted paradigm of the religion of worldly people. Today, that meld and disintegration are almost complete. This is why my polemics is done here first through irenics, the distinguishing one religion from another by what they have in common instead of what separates, in an attempt to show what is different between little Passing by Nehushtan and everything else which is of monolithic size and influence.
In this spirit and by this strategy, we know that, with all the talk about the dangers of Islam to the Christian West, the fact is that the invasion of Islam began a long time ago to the delight instead of the horror of Cristendom’s stewards of its truths. And the degree that they are not aware of this truth is the degree to which it that truth will, in the end, be the coup-de-grace of the organized, common Christian confession ordained by God to be a light, not a bushel-basket, to the world.
For the first time since Sobieski faced the Ottoman hoards at the gates of Vienna, the Christian West finds it necessary to come to grips with truths about the Muslim religion, the outcome of which will either defeat us or make us stronger. This time, however, neither armies nor terrorists are the threat, but rather, the danger comes in the form of certain combatants of rational thought. This time, it is not weapons of steel, grit, and determination that will be used to preserve a way of life or tradition, but only a love of truth that will preserve an ancient form of thought that, if lost, marks the real end of the West. Forget worrying about the possible loss of the laws and carnal products of freedom when we are no longer able to identify or care about the much deeper and consequential wellsprings of all genuine freedom from which all true products of freedom come.
During that time of threat in the late 17th century was when the Christian West was busy transforming almost every sphere of academic, social, and political experience to something never seen before. It was the Christian West that invented the printing press in 1451, making possible the widespread distribution of every kind of knowledge, threatening to superstition and despotism.
It was the Christian West that invented the concept of the university: an attempt to understand all knowledge through one central philosophical hub.
It was the Christian West that brought science from the leisurely tinkering of bored nobility to a rational mandate and process enjoined upon every man: to critically take apart what was is known positively about the physical world to reveal something absolute about God and ourselves.
As a result, it is impossible to trace any broad social movement in helping the poor, ending slavery, universal education, the emancipation of women, religious freedom, and democratic social reform to any religion other than Christianity and any other place than the West. Morality meant applying the implications of the witness of a rational universe of physical evidence for God to its rightful place: all the way, no matter where it leads.
That is not to excuse Roman Catholic sins under a cloak of good intentions, nor ignore Muslim contributions to science. However, the problem with the Muslim religion is that its contributions become lost in a swarm of other problems very fundamental to the deepest truths of it and the kind of faith of its typical adherent. We must compliment it only by sticking our hand in a beehive to draw out a drop of honey, emphasizing its sweetness only by ignoring the tears. Those come as a result of its many spiritually homogeneous inhabitants that practice a kind of blind religious instinct that, if not unknown in Christianity, has certainly been treated among a majority of past Christian scholars as an epistemic evil.
If this offends Muslims because of the insinuation that reason is something shunned and feared in that faith, I am not making that point. Bear with me, because while I speak of Islam as a place where this problem is a virtue, also expected increasingly is that it should take root in the most barren of spiritual soil where Christianity is more morally selective. I don’t speak of a kind of person’s rational heart as that soil as much as it is a kind of place that represents naïveté and tendency toward classic religious disingenuousness that must exist for the historical anti-revelational faith of all bad religion to survive. That is increasingly becoming Christianity as well.
We must remember that Islam, at its inception or today, does not send out mild-mannered missionaries preaching the forgiveness of sins through the love of and faith in God. Talk all you want about Muslim scholarship, their evangelists do not have an SOP of rational persuasiveness, or even through the promise of peace of mind and an assurance of an afterlife with God. The Islam program is inseparable from its inception as an advancement of religion through bodily harm and death.
After Caliph Umar I in 642 AD burned the Library of Alexandria[1] and over 700,000 priceless scrolls, many of which were ancient even in the 7th century. The Muslim hoards conquered Syria (A.D. 636), Iraq (637), Palestine and Transjordan (638), Egypt (632), and Persia (642). India was subject to wave after wave of armies beginning in 642. Evangelism by the sword, which unarguably involved the murder of millions, has continued to the modern era.
In 1916, 16,000 Greeks massacred in Thrace. An order for the evacuation of Pergamum came in 1914, its inhabitants butchered in Erythrea and Phocaia. 150,000 Greeks and Armenians were slaughtered in 1922. Genocide against the Turkish Armenians was carried out between 1915 and 1918, with at least 1 ½ million killed and the rest forced out or forced to convert to Islam. Turkish Armenia ceased to exist during this time. In 1974 Cyprus was invaded by Turkey, and half of the island remains occupied today. In Pakistan in 1950, ½ million Christians, Hindu’s, and Buddhists were murdered, and in 1971 Pakistani’s killed another 3 million in Bangladesh’s war of Independence. Massacred are over two million Sudanese Christians and animists over the past ten years.
But, you say, Christianity does the same thing. There is no doubt that leadership under a Christian pretext has committed atrocities in the past. Still, there has been no Christian theocracy, no government under “Christian law,” or anything like Sharia as its rule, or a Christian army, since long before the Protestant Reformation. Examples of self-identified Christian governments and armies committing these atrocities on the authority of a religion that preaches about the turning of the other cheek is a denial of its faith, not in accord with it. Face it. The Oklahoma City bomber was not an example of Christian terrorism simply because he came from a country that has a Christian majority, as Muslim apologists desperately claim to spread out the sin. No matter how much we wish to conflate all religions as evil at any cost, you cannot rationally deny that it is Islam and its priorities are the greatest geopolitical threat today as they ever were. Christianity had its reformation because a religion originally focused on Truth instead of worldly conquest is something a moral conscience cant sustain. Islam is digging in.
But we are missing the point about Islam as a threat if we restrict a study of its brutalities only to its savage cruelties against other religions, cultures, and societies. I do not impugn the entire faith by the past sins of any group. It may very well be that they are just taking the moral mandates of their scriptures the wrong way. There are far more vicious sins than what one body can do to another, and when they happen, they have to do with spiritual violence, not physical violence. It’s not what the representatives of Islam have done or are doing with a clash of bodies. Its what Mohammed did and the gaping black hole in the middle of his “revelation,” taken as something holy, which causes its problems and is giving birth to the Christian chimera that is just as dark and twisted.
What the West must understand is that what is crucial about Islam at this critical junction in history is not its amoral ability to kill 5-year-old’s and women simply because they are not Muslims. Its toleration of honor killings and widespread support female genital mutilation, nor its belief in a God who rewards its male faithful with sex in Paradise with a harem of ravishing young women. And Muslim conclusions about God are not the main problem. Rather, the heart of the problem lies in Muslim premises about all truth. And it is not only a Muslim problem anymore.
To the Christian West, the spiritual and the carnal have always been two distinct spheres of human activity (John 3:6: That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.) This duality is the reason why Christian nations tend to have more problems with alcohol, drugs, promiscuity and crime than Muslim ones: the dual nature leaves a space between them that is ruled by the free will of the individual.
In Christian societies, laws are usually written with that in mind, leaving the individual free to pursue spirituality or leave it. Therefore the laws of the land are more likely to define and punish criminal behavior on the basis of one person’s civil rights infringing on another’s, which are in place because they were voted on, not because of a strict reading of the entire Mosaic law. This also produces a tendency in its religion for intense personal introspection to honestly examine oneself to assure that one is not practicing self-deception in respect to their faith.
But with Islam, there is no difference between the spiritual and the carnal world except their time/space coordinates[2]. Therefore, there is to be no functional separation between external and internal spiritual government either. Under such conditions, one is sinful, not righteous, in privately and independently using reason to decide the merit of spiritual truth claims for oneself because we are still in a quasi-spiritual world, where truth first must be taken as manifest in the pronouncements of the religion a-priori before its theology is systematized and explained. What is rational does not matter. Only submission, Islam, matters.
“The claims of Islam do not depend on historical origins, but on an inner knowledge of God, the accompaniment and reward of piety. What makes Islam true is the spiritual life of Moslems, not religious history but a religious experience.”1
That, my friends, is the problem.
All real Christians, however, take the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth and his acts as facts upon which Christianity should rise or fall. If the Bible is not a reliable historical document, then Christianity should be destroyed. You can’t worship the One who calls Himself “the way, the truth and the life” when his truth is not rationally testable to a degree honorable to the degree that he requires people to love it rationally. Despite Islam’s insistence that Mohammed must also be a historical figure and the Koran an accurate record, Islam is not dependent upon whether or not any historical investigation or process of unbiased thought can shed reasonable light on the truth of whether or not Mohammed was speaking by an angel or a devil. Islam and its claim of supernatural authority are self-existent, like God Himself.
Driven home must be that the major difference between the Scriptures of Islam and Christianity, at least original Christianity, is that Christianity rests entirely upon the accuracy of the promises that God made to the world and fulfilled. Islam has a “prophet” that did not predict anything.
Islam abhors democracies, abhors freedom, when criticized is thin-skinned and, yes, despises the truth because its “truth” is anti-human. Islam can’t be reasoned with because you can’t enjoy it and love it through what reason and independent investigation and discovery can reveal about its historical and spiritual claims. It is an attempt to excise all things which make humans uniquely human from all spirituality unless it is anterior to blind faith.
The reason why democracy in the West has been so successful is that the injunction of the Christian worldview is firstly a responsibility to all those who seek truth to think critically. That they might be wrong.
The original Christian worldview claims that one may be right or wrong only because the evidence says so. That secular and religious populist movements must be held accountable not by competing movements, but by absolute truths to which all men’s consciences are held accountable. That is why in Christian nations the devout can as deeply believe in their Bible as they are willing to openly identify and protest Christian abuses now and in the past, such as the justification of slavery, the abuse of women, the persecution of other faiths, and the discouragement of free speech. The idea is that the truth of the historical and scriptural evidence for Christianity is more important than what people say about it or may wrongly do in its name. As being foremost an independent system to investigate and sort out spiritual truth claims and a platform to declare what is found as something to which everyone is obligated to attend, Christianity is supposed to be simply a historical claim independent of people and the religious ambitions of those who seek personal righteousness apart from truth.
The problem in democracies is not radical Islam, but the liberal, “peace-loving” Islam that everyone seems to want in its place. And not Islam, the attitude it carries. The Islam that does not even so much care about the truth that it’s too much trouble to read the Koran critically to earn their misplaced spiritual duty to defend it. It is this type of Islam that will appease and support anyone coming into the U.S. wanting to throw out the Constitution for a Muslim theocratic police state.
It is the Islam that not only never appears outside the Saudi embassy protesting the attacks on the WTC, but the Islam that never protests governments in Muslim countries after the frequent jailing and execution of Muslim converts to Christianity. The Islam that never thinks something might be wrong for sympathetically looking upon their violent demonstrators of foreign nations, condemning others for the indigence and political corruption in their countries, but never their own. The Islam that can celebrate female genital mutilation, and respect the brother who killed his sister because she was raped, and it brought dishonor to the family. The Islam that stands by and watches as Christians are beheaded only for beveling that the Jewish and Christian accounts of Bible history are true. The Muslim who stays a Muslim and joyously celebrates its traditions because it is a badge of faith that one can believe signifies virtue without one ever having to think about it or look at it too closely. The Muslim that believes the Koran is inspired and the better of the Old and New Testaments, yet a book that gives no evidence for its truth claims, only passionate exhortations that are worthy of lifelong trust because of their literary beauty.
If the reader senses an odd similarity to our present-day Christians on that last one, those who believe for no reason honorable to Christ and to our atheists and agnostics, or those who do not disbelieve for any reason honorable to reason, then my expositional Trojan Horse is working. We have left the Christian west and its historically fanatical insistence since the Renaissance that any spiritual pontificating must connect with truth beyond the pontiff himself.
Today, Christianity is true because of our “feelings” about it. It is true because prayer was answered. It is true because we were impressed by a charismatic preacher’s performance. It is true because we believe that the blood of Christ cleanses from all sin and that Jesus died, was buried, and rose the third day, all true, but believed whether or not we know care about how these are distinguished in their proof of reliability from the empty religious sentiments of any pagan religion or atheist deontological priority.
Here is not one of those self-contained, stand-alone posts. You have to read into this website to really know what the heck I am talking about. For now, all I can say is that when I’m asked where I think America is heading, I give the same answer to those who deny the faith and dare me to tell them where I think they will end up after death: I say, if you rightly believe, as a result of real honesty and reason, as a result of a genuine, non-hypocritical search for the truth, grace means that you will get what you do not deserve. If you don’t believe, you will get exactly, and that with supernatural precision, what you do deserve.
Islam is not coming into a culture hostile to it that it must gradually influence before it finally caves into accepting a new Dark Age. Islam is coming home.
[1] Muslims and even some Christian scholars adamantly deny this, most noteworthy being Bernard Lewis. But the ancient sources from which this comes are Muslim, and there are not just one but several. The urge to destroy sites that are thought antagonistic to Muslim thought is still palpable today, most recently the destruction of the world’s tallest Buddha’s in Afghanistan. See http://www.islam-watch.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=370:did-caliph-omar-order-burning-of-alexandria-library&catid=59:kammuna.
[2] Note that when authorities opened the checked baggage of Mohammed Atta’s (the lead WTC terrorist) that by mistake never made it to his plane, they found a pressed suit neatly laid out flat with a necktie, as if it had contained a body that dematerialized. Cologne was carefully placed nearby. This was meant to be worn at his first meeting with the 72 heavenly concubines that will pleasure him for all eternity. To Christians, this seems strange, but Muslims can praise this as an act of strong faith, and considered strong faith exactly because it is insane. The impossibility that the suit will not disappear and reappear in Paradise after Atta’s plane disintegrates on impact makes belief in it pious.
The Quest for the Historical Muhammed, by Ibn Warraq: Origins of Islam. Essay: A Critical Look at the Sources. Al-Rawandi, I.M. Prometheus, 2000 ↩
