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.
But I think you are someone who will believe what ever is written as long as it fits into your world view even if the article is very short on real factual evidence as this article certainly is.
LOL one day I want to meet Mark Steyn see if he is as tough as he is with his rhetoric, I would bet he will be a weedy little man who after one punch will grovel and weep and apologies for using my country as a whipping boy for him to sell his bull dressed up as analysis.
I know he is a ex theartrical critic.
marking for later
There is no such thing as "total secularism" or a completely blank, contentless culture.
People cannot collaborate on a large scale without a shared consensus on values.
Secularism is a philosophical vacuum and it will eventually be filled up with something - Islam, Christianity, radical socialism, Odinism, or what have you.
And your entire notion of "proper democracy" is ultimately religious in origin.
The older I get, the more I am convinced that indeed, religion is as necessary to the success of human civilization as air and water. Shocking and politically incorrect as it is to say so, some religions are better than others, and Christianity is superior if only because within its teachings are the key elements of how human civilizations can thrive -- not just exist, but thrive. Christianity ALONE is why there is no longer slavery in the Western World, and why indeed slavery was so short-lived in the U.S. The ten commandments, the seven deadly sins, the Golden Rule, are so simple. Don't engage in envy (class warfare and what it's doing to America, anyone?). Don't steal. Don't bear false witness. Avoid gluttony and sloth. No matter what, take a day off once a week to count your blessings, etc. etc. If every individual in America attempted to live by these rules, imagine how many "chronic" societal ills would evaporate. But no -- we live in a society that happily engages in envy, lust, anger, avarice, adultery, covetousness. Pop culture and government "entitlement" programs make them accepted and even fashionable!
Morals are taught, not innate. Societies that lack religion are doomed to become advanced "Lord of the Flies" societies. Human sacrifice, slavery, gratification of appetites for cruelty, compassion regarded as weakness. I have a friend who is half indigenous South American. He says he's damned glad the Spanish missionaries ended up down there, otherwise he'd be living in a mud hut in a society that perceived as "normal" things that we have, over the centuries because of religion, come to understand are barbaric and primitive.
As I have gotten older, I have realized how very, very much we "sophisticated" folks have come to take Christianity for granted and arrogantly attribute to our own good sense benefits which in truth have resulted in centuries of adherence to the Christian ethic.
Mark Steyn is actually a rather imposing and large-framed fellow. I don't think he'd back down from another Brit of any size.
Bump
But for the record the Philippines and Africa have been dealing with Islam longer then the US.
As for large countries taking on Islam, would you consider India to be large?
As for large countries taking on Islam, would you consider India to be large?
I do.
Last time Islam was taken on by India in any meaningful way, they partitioned the country....and the Moslums are STILL fighting.
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