Hrrrmmmmmmm?
Posted on 05/02/2006 5:18:02 PM PDT by NZerFromHK
Two days before Christmas, I was in a store in Vermont buying a last-minute gift when the owner’s twentysomething daughter walked in. “Thanks for the sweater, mom,” she said. “Kevin really liked his present, too.”
“But it’s only the 23rd,” said the bewildered lady.
“Mom,” sighed the kid, wearily. “How many times do I have to tell you? We always open our presents on the solstice.”
A couple of weeks later, a neighbor of mine in New Hampshire got married. He’s a biker and a tattooist, and he’s deeply spiritual. So he and his bride were married in the middle of a field in a service filled with imprecations to Odin, Thor and sundry other Norse gods. The congregation of bikers rolled their eyes, which may or may not be a traditional Norse mark of respect.
G K Chesterton made a famous observation that when men cease to believe in God they’ll believe in anything. But the anything they’ll believe in is at least in part environmentally determined. Alice Thomson of The Daily Telegraph in London was recently granted an interview with the Dalai Lama at Dharmsala, the old British hill station in northern India where he lives in exile. En route to his pad, she encountered both a native Tibetan bearing the brutal marks of Chinese torture and, at one of the luxury hotels that have sprung up for moneyed pilgrims, a “rotund Austrian biscuit heiress” who turned to Buddhism after her stomach staple failed to take.
My North Country neighbors can’t afford air tickets and a suite in Dharmsala. So, given those constraints, solstice worship and Norse deities seem a reasonable fit with the landscape of northern New England. But they’d be a tougher sell in, say, Glasgow or Rotterdam. So what would work in the densely populated parts of western Europe? I’ve been a demography bore for years now – pointing out how aging childless French, Belgian and Dutch populations are surrendering their turf to young fecund Muslims – but, at the risk of piling too many doomsday scenarios atop one another, it’s worth noting that Islam is advancing not just by outbreeding but also by conversion.
Herbert Asquith is not the most famous British Prime Minister to American ears, but he’s the one who took his country into the Great War, which is the one that ended the Caliphate and delivered the Arab world into British hands. His great-granddaughter, Emma Clark, is now a Muslim. She’s a landscape artist, and has designed an “Islamic garden” at the home of the Prince of Wales. The Honorable Jonathan Birt, son of Lord Birt, the former Director-General of the BBC, is also a Muslim and is known as Yahya Birt. The Earl of Yarborough is a Muslim, and goes by the name Abdul Mateen, though whether he can get served in the House of Lords’ tea room under that moniker is unclear.
The above “reverts” – as Islam calls converts - are not merely the Muslim equivalents of the Richard Gere Buddhists and Tom Cruise Scientologists but the vanguard of something bigger. As English and Belgian and Scandinavian cities Islamify, their inhabitants will face a choice between living as a minority and joining the majority: Not all but many will opt for the latter. At the very minimum, Islam will meet the same test as the hippy-dippy solstice worship does in Vermont: It will seem environmentally appropriate. For many young men, it already provides the sense of identity that the vapid nullity of multiculturalism disdains to offer. As for the gals, I was startled in successive weeks to hear from both Dutch and English acquaintances that they’ve begun going out “covered”. The Dutch lady lives in a rough part of Amsterdam and says, when you’re on the street in Islamic garb, the Muslim men smile at you respectfully instead of jeering at you as an infidel whore. The English lady lives in a swank part of London but says pretty much the same thing. Both felt there was not just a physical but a psychological security in being dressed Muslim. They’re not “reverts”, but, at least for the purposes of padding the public space, they’re passing for Muslim in public.
Where’s Christianity in all this? Judging from the name he took, Pope Benedict foresees dark days ahead and his job as being to save European Catholicism. But who will save Protestantism in Europe? The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, declared during the Afghan campaign that the USAF pilot and the suicide bomber are morally equivalent - both “can only see from a distance: the sort of distance from which you can’t see a face, meet the eyes of someone, hear who they are, imagine who and what they love. All violence works with that sort of distance.” He’d go into it all in more detail, I’m sure, but his Potemkin church is too busy selling off its buildings. On the BBC the other day, in a desperate attempt to cut himself a slice of the Gaia-worship self-flagellation action, he demanded government “coercion” on everything from road speed, cheap air travel, etc, “if we want the global economy not to collapse and millions, billions of people to die.”
Environmentalism doesn’t need the support of the church, it’s a church in itself. But Britain and Europe could use a vigorous, confident, believing Protestantism right now, and Dr Williams is earthbound in every sense. Faith abhors a vacuum.
Mark Steyn on Christians and Islam in Europe!
So, white Europeans are tossing in the towel against the Muslim influx by converting to Islam. I guess the "surrender monkey" term no longer applies only to the French.
"Rowan Williams"
Isn't that Mr. Bean?
The ones moving in from Africa. What Europe once exported it must now import.
"Both felt there was not just a physical but a psychological security in being dressed Muslim. They’re not “reverts”, but, at least for the purposes of padding the public space, they’re passing for Muslim in public."
Wow. Looks like cultural surrender is in full swing.
Rowan Atkinson is Mr. Bean.
Horror bump.
Will the States be it?
Probably the football hooligans.
Cultural surrender will happen on a worldwide basis. There is nothing holding it back. Name one place in the world where people will stand up to these Islamic people and win.
You go to Africa and there are churches, vibrant growing churches all over the place.
The same thing in South America and in the Philippines. All of these areas that were once where missionaries were sent are now places that send missionaries. The numbers are small but growing.
This is telling. Scary, and telling. Intimidation.
My very wise mom long ago pointed out that "the pendulum swings." The free-love sexual "revolution" that began in the 60s, she says, swung the pendulum to the extreme of sexual promiscuity. It's created a world today in which it is deemed "normal" for people to have sex before marriage as well as live together (and even have kids) without the benefit of matrimony (I always called it "playing house"). My mom's prediction has for years been that such promiscuity will inevitably, eventually result in a polar opposite of extreme sexual repression. How that "pendulum swing" would manifest itself she has not ventured to say, only that it will surely happen. Maybe this piece from the excellent Steyn hints at the way the pendulum swing will exhibit itself in society?
And also East Asian places like Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, and even the PRC. There, the evangelical churches are thriving. Politically they may be pacifist for the time being, but on the gospel and faith they are so arch-orthodox/fundamentalist/conservative that make Jerry Falwell and James Dobson sound like moderate secularists.
It is from them that the "Back to Jerusalem" evangelism campaigns are taking place.
I personally believe Europeans and American liberals will turn pro-family and moralist at least on social issues, but rather than to the Christian or traditionlist Chsistendom directions, it will be towards Islamism motions.
We can easily envision something like this: In 2035 the British Parliament passes the Third Reading of Alcohols Act which bans productions and consumptions of all alcohol acts, while the US Senator Dr Abdul Aziz (D-MI) has called for his Democratic colleagues to ban abortions altogether, and the French National Assembly has passed laws proposed by President Mohammad al-Sahr banning sales and possessions of pornography and pre-marital sexual acts.
Well the US evangelists are pretty great at building kid centered churches that attract thousands. Our local one is Presbyterian, which is native to England.
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