Christianity Out, Islam In
If you want a very quick, yet accurate, overview of the state of religion in the West today, my title is not a bad place to begin. That is basically what we see happening all over the West. As the West gets more and more secular it is lashing out at religion in general, but Christianity in particular.
At the same time, however, and most oddly, it is bending over backwards to accommodate Islam. Thus it is waging a war against Christianity especially while it is welcoming Islam into its midst with open arms. Given the very real differences between these two religions, this is a very bizarre development indeed.
The contrasts could not be greater:
-Muhammad was a prophet of war; Christ is the Prince of Peace.
-Muhammad and his disciples killed for the faith; Christ and his disciples were killed for their faith.
-Muhammad preached “Death to the infidels!”; Christ prayed “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”.
-Muhammad constrained people by conquest; Christ constrained people by love.
Yet the West prefers the former while despising the latter. The evidence of the anti-Christian agenda is readily available. A new article by Ken Blackwell and Bob Morrison discussing the January 16 Religious Freedom Day in America offers some details on this.
They write, “Today, we find religious freedom in grave jeopardy. Obviously, the HHS Mandate that forces Christians to subsidize abortion-producing drugs is the clearest example. There is an avalanche of others. Last August, our organization, Family Research Council, partnered with the Liberty Institute to release a report on the growing threat of religious hostility from government action.
“We are seeing another high profile example of religious hostility. Pastor Lou Giglio has been banned from offering a prayer at next week’s Inauguration of President Obama because the pastor had fifteen years ago preached in defense of true marriage. The militant forces of political correctness got the pastor banned.”
The Giglio affair I have already discussed in detail elsewhere: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2013/01/11/big-brother-in-action/
They continue: “MSNBC’s Larry O’Donnell thinks that’s not enough. President Obama is slated to take the Oath of Office with his hand on the Bible – ‘a stack of Bibles,’ actually. CNN reports the First Lady will hold up her Robinson family Bible, President Lincoln’s Bible, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Bible.
“‘Still, the president, following one of our most absurdist traditions in the government that invented the separation of church and state, will put his hand on this book [the Bible] filled with things he does not believe… and with his hand on this book he will recite the oath of office…’ O’Donnell’s attitude is just the latest in the media scorn for religion. CNN’s respected political analyst Bill Schneider famously said the media ‘doesn’t get religion.’
“We certainly saw this in the famous case of NBC’s august anchor man, John Chancellor. He reported that Ronald Reagan would take the oath ‘with his hand on the Bible. It is opened to a favorite passage: Eleven Chronicles 7:14.’ No one in the control room told Mr. Chancellor there are only two (II) books of Chronicles in the Bible. Maybe no one knew.
“The famed Rothman-Lichter Survey of prestige journalists at that time showed that 91 percent of these opinion shapers never attend a worship service of any kind. That’s not only a pity in their personal lives, it is a hazard in the nation. That is because our leading opinion makers do not understand what motivates tens of millions of their countrymen — and billions worldwide.”
So while the war against Christianity abounds, we are also reaping the whirlwind of mass Muslim immigration without making the slightest demands that they embrace the values and traditions of the host culture: things like pluralism, separation of church and state, religious freedom, and freedom of conscience.
Far too many Muslims in the West have refused to embrace these democratic values, and have instead insisted on following the bloody example of the Prophet. They think they can continue the intolerant and violent ways of their own faith. Mark Steyn offers us just a snippet of what this entails:
“In the summer of 2010, mourners lined the streets of Wales’s capital city to pay tribute to a seven-year-old boy killed in a house fire. In fact, Yaseen Ali Ege was brutally beaten to death, and then set alight with barbecue fuel. By his mother. For failing to learn the Koran. Over the preceding months, Mom had used a stick, a rolling pin, and a hammer on her son, but, despite these incentives, he had memorized only a couple of pages. And so she killed him, and subsequently declared she felt ‘100 percent better’.”
He continues, “Of course not all Muslims brutalize their families — although the ten-year-old daughter of Asia Parveen of Stoke Newington was treated for 56 injuries after being beaten for not reading enough verses of the Koran, and Hesha Yones of west London had her throat cut by her father for being too ‘Westernized,’ and a five-month-old baby in Halmstad, Sweden, was beaten to death with a Koran, and this very month a campaign against Muslim domestic violence is being launched in Scotland, and a BBC poll last year revealed that two-thirds of young British Muslims favor violence against those who ‘dishonor’ their families, and in the Netherlands Muslims make up 60 percent of the population of battered-women’s shelters . . . And of course not all Muslims are self-segregating, although 57 percent of Pakistani Britons are married to first cousins, and in Bradford, Yorkshire, it’s 75 percent . . . Nevertheless, many Muslims share the broader cultural preferences of Yaseen’s mother….
“Who knows? In Wales as in much of the Western world, we are in the midst of an unprecedented sociocultural experiment. Its precise end point cannot be known, but on the Continent its contours are beginning to emerge: In Amsterdam, formerly ‘the most tolerant city in Europe,’ gay-bashing is now routine; ‘youths’ busted into a fashion show, pulled a gay model from the catwalk, and beat him to a pulp. Claire Berlinski reported for National Review two years ago that in the French suburb of La Courneuve 77 percent of veiled women say they cover themselves to ‘avoid the wrath of Islamic morality patrols.’ In Potsdam, the Abraham Geiger Theological College advises its rabbis not to venture on the streets wearing identifying marks of their faith. In synagogues from Copenhagen to Berlin to Rome, Jews are warned to hide their yarmulkes under hats or baseball caps at the end of the service. In Paris, a man wearing no identifiably religious clothing was beaten unconscious on the Métro for being caught reading a book by France’s chief rabbi. The message is consistent, from Jews to gays to women: In the new Europe, you don’t want to be seen as the other. Keep your head down, or covered.
“For a decade, I’ve been told by those who think I’m ‘alarmist’ that there’s nothing to see here. The seven-year-old whose non-appearance at the teddy bears’ picnic goes unremarked . . . the beleaguered National Health Service reeling under the costs of genetic disorders from cousin marriage but now providing free and discreet ‘hymen reconstruction’ for Muslim daughters who got a little over-Westernized one night . . . the infidel women going veiled to avoid trouble in les banlieues . . . the rabbis wearing baseball caps on the streets of Berlin and Brussels . . . One reason that there’s ‘nothing to see’ is the ever greater lengths we go to cover it, and ourselves, up. The veil descends, on all of us.”
Quite so. So the West has chosen to reject the most civilising and most benevolent religion on the planet for one that is the complete opposite. No wonder the West is heading down the tubes so fast. And I too have been called “alarmist” and worse for pointing out these inconvenient truths.
But I, like Steyn, will keep presenting these warnings until we are officially bound and gagged by the authorities and the forces of political correctness. But at least the both of us can rightly say, “We told you so.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/01/endangered_religious_freedom_day.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
http://www.steynonline.com/5387/the-veil-descends
[1365 words]
The Islamisation of the Western world is something 19th century nihilist, Friedrich Nietzsche would not find surprising in a culture which has assumed the ethic of “anti-Christianity” as its common creed of unbelief. Nietzsche, in his usual strident and scathing “deconstruction” of Christianity, praised the medieval Islamic culture of Moorish Spain because he believed “it had to thank noble and manly instincts for its origin—because it said ‘yes’ to life…” (Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 60)!
John Wigg
Pharaoh hardened his heart, … Pharaoh hardened his heart, … Pharaoh hardened his heart, … the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart. (Exodus)
Judicial blindness is a condition of God’s making, where those who will not see, eventually cannot see as a punishment for hardening of the heart.
There is no forgiveness for blasphemy of the Holy Spirit – it is only a work of the Holy Spirit that men and women come to repentance. If the Holy Spirit has been so offended that He withdrawers, then there is no possibility of conviction of sin, of righteousness and of judgment to come. Without conviction, there can be no repentance; without repentance there can be no forgivenes; and without forgiveness there can be no salvation. A very hopeless and horrible condition to be in.
Is the West at that point in history? I don’t know. However, when Jerusalem reached that point, God said of the city and its inhabitants, “I will strike you with the ‘arar [irreversible curse – decree of utter destruction]” (Malachi 4:6). Just over 400 years later, the city was burned to the ground, the temple was overturned so that there was not one stone left upon another, the people in the city were subjected to immence horrors – and all at the command of Jesus.
Is God too nice to do to the West that which He did to His chosen people of the day – the Jews? He is no respecter of persons. Think on the description of the resurrected Jesus as provided in the Book of Revelation:
Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems, and he has a name written that no one knows but himself. He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood (c.f. Isaiah 63:1-6), and the name by which he is called is The Word of God. And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Then I saw an angel standing in the sun, and with a loud voice he called to all the birds that fly directly overhead, “Come, gather for the great supper of God, to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of mighty men, the flesh of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all men, both free and slave, both small and great.” (Revelation 19:11-18)
We must head the words of Psalm 2:
Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in him.
Too many have been raised on the images of gentle Jesus, meek and mild. To the repentant and broken of spirit, this is how He comes to them, but to the wilful and stubbord in heart, there is nothing gentle about Him. We must have far more preaching on hell fire and brimstone; and we must have more preaching on the temporal judgments of an angry God – ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’
The grace of God is not greasy, and it does have an end, for those who harden their hearts just one time too many.
Lance A Box
My expectation is that Bill, like Steyn, will keep presenting these warnings until people wake up from their stupor and are finally confronted by the awful reality of where we are headed.
Rachel Smith, UK
If people were committing these vile acts under the banner of Christianity we’d have our leftist government (fully supported by the leftist MSM) setting up a Royal Commission to investigate the cases and establish all sorts of controls on Christianity and invasive interventions to “monitor” Christians. But once again, they let it go when it comes to muslims. In fact, if Nicola Roxon gets her way, one day you and Mark Steyn could even be charged with vilification just for publishing these statistics. The hypocrisy of it all!
Frank Norros
I have been writing on this topic at my blog for some time.
I am not surprised by this, but I am saddened. In the end though, our citizenship is with the City of God, and even the accomplishments of the West, just another instance of the earthly city, will whither away.
The question is, what next? Demographics and migration patterns all point to a clash between secularists and Muslims in the coming decades. Christians will go under ground. Lots will just go along with the secular program (like Rowan Williams). There will be martyrs and confessors (Benedict XVI? Who knows…). But the Church will not die out.
Meanwhile, it is worth remembering that we are seeing more conversions from Islam to Christianity today than at any other period in history, even in Europe.
Abu Daoud
See also this <a href="http://www.iranhumanrights.org/2013/01/cost_of_faith/" article on the report: The Cost of Faith: Persecution of Christian Protestants and Converts in Iran
David Haslam