Posted on 04/25/2005 12:09:57 PM PDT by CHARLITE
When Pope Benedict XVI was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger he told Europe to recover its Christian roots “if it truly wants to survive.” Amen from an arch-Protestant whose ancestors included refugees who fled Catholic persecution for freedom in Virginia.
The new Pope is a scholar who sees history unfolding into the future. We agree. Europe will be Islamic and subject to Islamist Totalitarianism by 2100, unless Europeans turn to faith and family. If Europe fails to live for faith and family, succumbing further to Socialist Human Secular Totalitarianism, then European culture deserves to die under Islamic culture.
Many Europeans hope that Muslims in Europe will abandon their faith, as so many Europeans left Christianity, to worship themselves in personal hedonism. Some Muslim immigrants become modern, pagan Europeans. Human Secularism is just a new face and form of empty Pagan religion. Meanwhile, Muslim proselytizers convert more Europeans to Islam. Believing in something always beats believing in nothing. Human Secularist worship of self, indeed, is believing in nothing.
Europeans support socialism to guarantee themselves small incomes, long vacations, and social services from all powerful governments. They can’t afford children and don’t want them when parenthood demands personal sacrifices. So, European population will decrease from 728 million (2000) to 630 million (2050). Muslim immigrants (15.2 million) and a million more every year added to Turkey (68 million) are a population exploding to double as soon as 2015. Demographics are destiny. Muslims will vote themselves into power.
If Europeans become people of profound Christian faith, Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox, they will marry more and have larger, happy families. But, faith will do more than foster family size competition with Muslims. Strong faith in greater ideas will challenge and convert lesser claims to Truth. Thus, Europeans must awaken to how vibrant Christian orthodox thinking offers a bright, better future than both Socialist Human Secularist Totalitarianism and Islamist Totalitarianism.
Socialism and Islamic cultures are based on obedience, peasantry, and the unity of theology and state. Then-Cardinal Ratzinger wrote that Europe is “moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and has as its highest own value one’s own ego and desires.” Christianity is built on love of God and others before self, intellectual inquiry, selfless good works and thrives when divorced from the state – which may be the way to make it rebound in Europe.
All the dead Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Christian European churches are supported by the state more or less. The tiny, growing Evangelical (Protestant) populations are not. Maybe Pope Benedict XVI can take his great Church away from governments and give it back to The People. Consider how alive Roman Catholicism is in America, Africa and Asia where the state doesn’t support it. Meanwhile, the Protestant Reformation is sweeping Latin America where millions seek personal relationship and responsibility in faith. Christian ideas compete well where there is real competition. Offered in lovingkindness from an Evangelical Christian who lived in Europe 10 years and loves it.
First, Europeans must challenge their Socialist masters to criticize Human Secularism and Islam and promote Christianity honestly. Even if Christians dare call homosexuality a sin – without the Thought Police charging them for Hate Speech Crimes – as they do throughout Europe today. Free Europeans’ speech to have truly free religious speech or stay suppressed by Socialists and then, someday, oppressed by the Mullahs. If Europe continues to criminalize Biblical Christian speech, then the culture that produces such intolerance deserves to die.
When Europeans choose to follow Jesus Christ over Voltaire, Hegel, Marx, Nietzche, Darwin, Freud, Lenin, Hitler, and their statist EU cousins, they can confront the Muslims – again. Muslims repeatedly invaded Europe with ravaging Armies for a thousand years. Don’t blame the Crusades’ counter-attacks. The first invasion was stopped by Charles Martel (732). Later, a courageous Pope led the coalition which defeated another invasion at the Battle of Lepanto (1571). The Muslims came to conquer, kill, rape and rule until finally defeated at Vienna (1683). Now, after 400 plus years of declining civilization the Muslims bring their population bomb to Europe.
Europeans can enforce restricted immigration to keep from being overwhelmed. Christian believers can love the resident Muslims to Christ – just like the Muslim convert, Dr. Ergun Caner, new Dean of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, said it happened to him in America.
Pope Benedict XVI would be bold to end European church-state supports. Europeans should stand with the Pope, however bravely he chooses, for the eternal truths of Christianity or watch European culture die.
Comments: JAtticus@aol.com
No, but they need to do a whole lot of things all at once, including having large families and shipping the Muslims back to the Middle East and North Africa. That won't happen unless there are very big changes.
Brave individuals can't deal with this. All they can do is piuck up their families and emigrate. Whole populations will have to change, and there isn't much time, because they will soon lose control and be in the minority.
Yes, back when it was known, to itself and others, as "Cristendom."
Here's hoping they find a way to overcome the growing mortal threat.
I think the author has outlined it, in principle.
"Strong faith in greater ideas will challenge and convert lesser claims to Truth"
would you say that, the whole world must convert to Christianity in order to increase population and keep the Totalitarian Muslims in check??
Not really very practical, when you put it that way. There's no question, though, that western civilization is facing it's most critical challenge in five centuries. We are facing annihilation. Period.
"Strong faith in greater ideas will challenge and convert lesser claims to Truth"
would you say that, the whole world must convert to Christianity in order to increase population and keep the Totalitarian Muslims in check??
mah bad for the double
I think we have to be careful of faith based programs, once a group starts taking money from the government they get infiltrated by liberals.
Welcome to FR, Borges
(Influenced by the English philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753), Borges played with the idea that concrete reality may consist only of mental perceptions. The "real world" is only one possible in the infinite series of realities. These themes were examined among others in the classical short stories 'The Garden of Forking Paths' and 'Death and the Compass', in which Borges showed his fondness of detective formula . )
Not a good idea to start your presence here, bitching and moaning about one's spelling's slip off.
The names mentioned, was an example of waisted science/knowledge/wisdom under a presumed Islamic Europe as envisioned under that scenario.
Do you have to be spoon fed to understand/dig anything when congregating?
hinckley buzzard
"Here's hoping they find a way to overcome the growing mortal threat." I think the author has outlined it, in principle.
If you read the link that I hope to generate comments and ideas from, you can see that I attempt to fill in that outline a bit.
RetiredArmy
I guess France and Germany will change their names to Muslin names...
David Horowitz has a good book out, called Unholy Alliance. It really comes down to false prophets and false teachers. Whether the main threat from the wimps and barbarians manifests itself as the bin Laden's becoming Jacobins or the Jacobins becoming Muslins really depends on the weather since the trousered apes (the pagans) threaten civilization as well as the Islamofascists.
cherokee1
Couldn't we just say that Christian Capitalism works pretty good?
If the USA had a tagline that would be it.
untrained skeptic
There are some rumblings of a renewal of values and religion in America, but it's going to be a hard fight to turn from the path we're on. Dittos.
Borges
What you speak of is more than intellectual relativism, it is moral relativism. But the meaning that you took from Bowden's statement, I believe, is incorrect. Roy Varghese in a debate that he had with Chris Hitchens published in The American Enterprise summarizes what the position of your religious and philosophical opponents comes down to: "Those who dismiss God as a product of psychological conditioning or pre-scientific myth have not come to terms with [something more essential.] The universe follows laws, which leads us to ask how those laws came into being." In other words, the modern equivalent of the flat-worlder is the man that believes that there is nothing beyond what we know about the universe or can theorize about it. The epistemology that Lenin, Hitler, and those that transformed man into material, ultimately contradicts this fundamental statement, which is that nothing comes from nothing.
The name of liberalism that the left has taken from Christendom (here's a summary of the history of that) is really LIEberalism. It is a counterfeit. It is an umbrella for all sorts of coercive (via fraud or govt. mandate) machinations. As C.S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man ("Miracles" also influenced me very much): "mankind [is] to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in the one lucky generation which has learned how to do it..." He writes, "I have described as a 'magician's bargain' that process whereby man surrenders object after object, and finally himself, to Nature in return for power" pgs 74, 76. Will our American notion of liberty deteriorate further into a shapeless antinomian nihilist void and will entropy triumph over true freedom? Are we to surrender to the automaton world by making ourselves into machines, only a bit more advanced than the roach? Would God sacrifice His Son for that? Would God if he existed, not produce this Act of love behind all of creation and truth in the known and yet unknown universe? So we go back to Rome with Pilate (the man that had the most fortune via nature by virtue of his position here) asking the Lord "what is truth?" The answer from Christ remains, "I am Him."
I debated with a libertarian at InTheAgora blog who finally came to the position that America's founders quoted the Bible for manipulative purposes. If that was true it meant that they could not truly conceptualize man as an individual capable to make law or govern himself to be able to live in a free republic. If they had that mentality they couldn't have put together the seperation of powers which pagans can't help but violate, as we see judges doing in the userpation of roles that belong to other parts of government and society. The moral vacuum left by the arrogance of self-centered man that produced transitional libertarianism in Europe (and even then in very brief bursts) only rolled out the red carpet for the tyranny that moral relativism leads to. With the coming challenges that face the world, not disregarding the present threats to the future of civilization, now more than ever we must stress the folly of the idea that we can repeat the mistake in America as was made in Europe, that we can harvest and consume the fruits of Christianity presently without bothering to care for its seeds for very long. What the point of the sentence that offended you is, is that the man that pulls the trigger and the man that purts together the ideas that lead to it, have historical and intellectual fingerprints and causal relations, it is not that either we as individuals, or that God, the author and Supreme Judge of the soul, will decide that those that led a man away from morality via a perverted philosophy into commiting immeasurable atrocities will automatically be judged as equally corrupt. Some people may rise above their philosophies and not actually follow them through.
Here is the faith that reason and love are of supernatural origin, that the limits of our perception of "the edge of the water" does not cascade into a cold blank oblivion and that God could not intervene on behalf of His Holy Creatures and Creation; Here is the faith that is essentially in communion with the Providence that America's Founders spoke of, which is that by turning from sin, nature will shine again as Man accepts his Redeemer, the faith as expressed by C.S. Lewis that: "The Power that always was behind all healings [put] on a face and hands... The whole system, far from being thrown out of gear (which is what some nervous people seem to think a miracle would do) digests the new situation as easily as an elephant digests a drop of water. She is, as I have said before, an accomplished hostess. But when Christ walks on the water we have a miracle of the New Creation. St. Peter also walks on water- a pace or two: then his trust fails him and he sinks. He is back in the old nature."
This is the theology, the ideology so to speak, that makes America what it is and head and shoulders above the nations of the world as a force for good. To digress from the correct path obviously is going to give us serious complications when it comes to figuring out what the heck America's interests are and what they definitely are not.
See above post please!
read later
Ridiculous. The fact that the Founders were (gasp!) politicians who used the art of political "spin" (in this case, selective quoting of a respected source) does not bear upon the fitness of the population generally.
You may think that it's ridiculous, maybe you think I'm not being forthright about the debate that I had. See for yourself, the link is right here.
Feel free to also comment on my summarized historical analysis of our civilization - as well as to skip past the first five paragraphs, since they assume the point of view of the authors of the American experiment.
This article should see the light of day all over the place.
I think it's timely too, with Bat Ye'Or writing about the coming Dhimmitude of Europe and guys like Lawrence Auster warning about the same thing.
and this
Is disturbing.
I won't take any credit for Canada, Bush is my fault. I voted for the man. He was the better of the worse and you can bet that the suicidal fascists in Saudi Arabia have it in for Prince Abdullah and those in the Mideast that are not giving America a harder time. You have to choose your battles. I'm sure that the president has compromised, but I don't believe that he would compromise more than he thinks the circumstances call for.
I sincerely wish that I could believe that that were true. But based on the incredible things that I have seen in Southern Arizona where I grew up, in California where I live, in Europe where I visit frequently on business, and the awful things that have happened just in the last few months and years to my family as a result, I simply cannot agree.
The man has not just compromised. He is vehemently on the other side. Why...God Knows.
As for Paul Martin groveling to the Sikh god, I can say that Britain is worse. Last week in Paris I was treated to an election "debate" in Britain on Sky News, featuring Michael Howard of the Tories and a bunch of other flotsam and jetsam who made up the Labour, Liberal Democrat, and Green Party opposition. His guarded and reasonable assertion criticizing the abuse of the "asylum" system was met with derision, catcalls, epithets ("Nazi!"), and all sorts of hoots and howls. The fools are rabidly and adamantly destroying themselves as they terrorize anyone who criticizes Muslim or any other immigration from non-Christian, non-white countries.
It's only a matter of time. Mr. Bush could help end it all, but....he's AWOL.
Guys like him are everywhere there. Staring at you, furtively glancing over their shoulders, waiting, planning...someday. Someday, Christian.
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