Category Archives: Islam

Nobody Goes To War for the Rules-Based Order

Article by J.B. Shurk.

Excerpt:

Are all cultures equally worthy of our respect?  Globalists say, “yes.”

Are all religions equally worthy of our respect?  Globalists say, “yes.”

Are all nations equally worthy of our respect?  Globalists say, “yes.”

Globalists speak of “multiculturalism” as if it were a virtue and equate Western civilization with “white supremacy,” “patriarchy,” and “imperialism.” They believe Christians should celebrate Islamic holidays. They believe national borders are “racist.” They believe that anybody who rejects globalism promotes “hate.”

He Told a Muslim “God Won’t Forgive You” — Then This Happened 

5 minute video with John MacArthur

Quote from the video description:

In this excerpt, John MacArthur recounts a conversation with a Muslim man who admitted his sin and expressed hope that God would forgive him.

MacArthur presses the crucial question: on what basis would God forgive sin? This moment exposes the fundamental difference between human religion and the gospel. While many rely on uncertain hope, the Christian message rests on the finished work of Christ, who bore sin and secured forgiveness through His substitutionary death. Without that foundation, there is no assurance of salvation.

How 1936 Consolidated the Progressives’ Triumph in 1913

Article by Gary North.

Excerpts:

Until the myth of Keynes and the myth of Franklin Roosevelt, which are closely entwined, are refuted in a series of comprehensive, scholarly materials, and then translated into materials accessible to the general public, and rhetorically effective among bright high school students who are in homeschool programs, we will remain on the receiving end of the Establishment’s overwhelming control of the media and academia. The World Wide Web offers a way to get around both of these Establishment operations, but in these two fundamental areas of American history — the New Deal and Keynes’s original introduction to Keynesianism — we have not yet begun to fight.

The intellectual battles over the New Deal and Keynes were part of a continuing war. Conservatives and libertarians lost both in 1936, but not because of their lack of theory. Mises had provided the basis of the answer in 1912 with The Theory of Money and Credit. Hayek also had the foundation: Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1933). But neither of them sat down in 1936 to write definitive answers to Keynes. Neither of them ever did. Mises wrote a major book in 1957: Theory and History. By then, Keynes was triumphant in Western academia. Hayek’s final book was in 1988: The Fatal Conceit.

You have to fight when the battle comes to you. It is not good enough to be well armed. You have to stand your ground and fight.

The importance of the language of theology and millenarianism for the Marxist revolutions

In 1988, Dr. Gary North gave a speech on Karl Marx and Marxism. The portion relevant here starts at this point and extends to the end about 12 minutes later.

Here’s what he says: In 1660, when Charles II acceded the English throne, it was clear the Puritan revolution had failed. From then on, the language, but not the system, of political tracts was secularised. For example, prior to 1660 there was regularly talk of the three ages of man being the age of the Father, the age of the Son and the age of the Holy Spirit. After that date, especially in the 19th century, there was often talk of the age of religion, the age of metaphysics and the age of reason.

This fed into the Marxian belief in an atheist millennium that was about to be ushered in, in fact that it was assumed to be “inevitable”.

However, the professional revolutionaries hit a brick wall in 1965, North says. And that was the undeniability of the failure of a socialist revolution in Indonesia. In a strong counter-revolution, 100.000 ethnic Chinese were killed by “racial anti-communists”. These, I assume, were Muslims (North doesn’t say).

North goes on to say that from then on, communists realised they couldn’t take over a country with deep religious roots. They would have to restructure their ideology and pitch and re-write their pamphlets.

They realised that they have to have a religious and theological foundation if they wanted to capture the minds of the people.

Out of these thoughts was born the “liberation theology”, which was, or is, particularly active in Latin America.

North finishes by saying that recruitment for revolutionary movements is based on a vision of world transformation and whose side you need to get on to drive progress toward a “new world order”.

My interpretation of North’s words here: From 1965, “Stalinist” communists implicitly agreed with the early “cultural Marxist” Antonio Gramsci, whom they had up until then treated as a heretic. The Italian Gramsci had in the 1920s written essentially that in Europe a Bolshevik revolution would not succeed because of the “cultural hegemony” of the Catholic church. It was these writings that inspired the Frankfurt School a generation later to their – largely successful – cultural revolution which has totally marginalised the church, where it has not been co-opted.

Atheist Richard Dawkins Says He Would Choose Christianity over Islam ‘Every Single Time’

Calls Himself a ‘Cultural Christian’

Article here.

Excerpt:

When pressed by Johnson on whether he saw the decline in church attendance and the increasing numbers of Islamic mosques being built across Europe as a problem, the professor said: “Yes I do”.

Stating that he would have to choose his words “carefully” — perhaps in light of the attack on fellow New Atheist Salmon Rushdie in 2022 by a radical Islamist — Dawkins said: “If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I would choose Christianity every single time”.

“It seems to be a fundamentally decent religion that I think Islam is not,” he added.

Questioned as to what he felt was indecent about the Muslim faith, Dawkins said: “There is an active hostility to women which is promoted, which I think, is promoted by the holy books of Islam… I’m not talking about individual Muslims, who are quite different.

“But the doctrines of Islam, the Hadiths and the Qur’an are fundamentally hostile to women, hostile to gays and I find that I like to live in a culturally Christian country although I do not believe a single word of the Christian faith.”

Why I am now a Christian

Atheism can't equip us for civilisational war

Article by Ayaan Hirsi Ali on UnHerd.com.

Quotes:

Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

We endeavour to fend off these threats with modern, secular tools: military, economic, diplomatic and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or surveil. And yet, with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground. We are either running out of money, with our national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars, or we are losing our lead in the technological race with China.

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

[. . .]

To me, this freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilisation. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities. It was these debates that advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstitions, and built institutions to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible. Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage. It became increasingly clear that Christ’s teaching implied not only a circumscribed role for religion as something separate from politics. It also implied compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.

[. . .]

In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilisational. We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do. We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy. And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools. To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.

The lesson I learned from my years with the Muslim Brotherhood was the power of a unifying story, embedded in the foundational texts of Islam, to attract, engage and mobilise the Muslim masses. Unless we offer something as meaningful, I fear the erosion of our civilisation will continue. And fortunately, there is no need to look for some new-age concoction of medication and mindfulness. Christianity has it all.

That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist. Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday. But I have recognised, in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt, that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.