Thoughts similar to the following have crossed my mind many times since 9-11.
I am torn: we are commanded to forgive our enemies, but also to stand against evil. Remember the Crusades, anyone?
Remember the Crusades were a response to Muslim aggression against the Byzantine Empire?
As my mentor at work had said back then “Operation Sea of Glass”.
(I.e., Moslem places are mostly nothing but desert sand, hence explosives heat turns it to glass....)
“I dont want them forgotten, I want them avenged.
Thoughts similar to the following have crossed my mind many times since 9-11.
I am torn: we are commanded to forgive our enemies, but also to stand against evil.”
This is the great conundrum that Christianity, and The West, faces.
In order to vanquish and eradicate Islam — the sworn enemy of all things free (as we in The West understand “freedom”) — The Christian West will have to resort to violence, even barbarity, that eclipses almost anything humanity has ever known.
Very few openly wish this to happen. But — if The West is to indeed “win” — it MUST happen.
From this reality there can be no escape. Perhaps that is why The West, certainly up to this point, is unwilling to face it. There are some futures so dark that one desires to simply turn away. But — as a well-know lady writer has said, “We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of reality”.
It was Christianity that made Western Civilization possible.
But could Christianity — the tolerant creed that “turns the other cheek” in an effort to “forgive our enemies” — also become the force that stays our hand and causes the loss of that very civilization?
Just wonderin’....