Bryan, howdy-do? Been a few days since your last doltish communique, and, hey, here you are, preaching how the US Government should be militating for a world-wide conversion from Islam to Christianity.
Yeah, when you put it that way, it sounds kind of crazy …
It’s long past time to give up our nation-building efforts in Muslim countries. It won’t work, can’t work, and never will work.
Well, in fact, there’s something to be said there. Trying to impose a new government on a chaotic country is always going to be difficult, especially if a military effort is …
Islam makes the creation of a democracy an impossibility.
Oh. Um …
Islam is not about freedom, it is about heavy-handed and punitive control. Domination is at the heart of Islam, making the Muslim faith utterly incompatible with the Judeo-Christian values on which Western civilization has been built.
Golly. I suspect the folks in the history of Europe who have faced the rule of Christian monarchs, or have faced the wrath of a Christian church or society that considered them heretical … I’d suspect they might consider Christianity “heavy-handed and punitive” and about “domination.”
Freedom is in the DNA of Christianity, but tyranny is in the DNA of Islam.
Tell it to the Cathars. Or the Albigensians. Or the Huguenots. Or the Quakers.
Islam is grossly and permanently incompatible with the liberty we cherish in the West. And since tyranny is deep in the spirit of Islam, only the Spirit of God can root it out.
They’re bad guys! You can know that because we are telling you they’re bad guys!
The Judeo-Christian tradition says, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor. 3:17). That verse was found on the lips of virtually every patriot during the days when were were defending our newly proclaimed independence from the foreign aggression of the British. That Bible verse became an animating force in our quest to secure and preserve liberty. Individual liberty is in the heart and soul of Christianity.
Um … but if you read the actual passage in context, Bryan, it’s more about a “freedom” from death and the Law, and liberty from the old order through the new order in Jesus. It’s not “freedom” as in “freedom of [whatever]” as described in our political documents.
Where there is the spirit of Christianity, you will find a hunger and thirst for freedom.
From sin and condemnation and death. Not from tyranny and political oppression … or, for that matter, religious oppression.
Where the spirit of Christianity is absent, as it is in Muslim lands, you won’t. There is no “Spirit of the Lord” in Islam. The spirit that animates Islam is of a much darker sort.
Because, y’know, they’re swarthy.
You won’t find a verse like 2 Corinthians 3:17 in the Qur’an. What you find in the Qur’an is, “slay the idolaters wherever you find them” (Sura 9:5).
As opposed to, say, Deut. 20:10-17:
10 When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. 11 If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. 12 If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. 13 When the LORD your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. 14 As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the LORD your God gives you from your enemies. 15 This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.
16 However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. 17 Completely destroy[a] them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the LORD your God has commanded you. 18 Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the LORD your God.
Now, one doesn’t see stuff like that in the New Testament. But the NT (vs the OT) was a matter of a powerless minority in the face of an opposition majority. The OT was more about a contention of forces — just as much of the Qur’an is.
The only thing that will give us a shot at building a democracy in an Islamic land is a mass conversion of its people to biblical Christianity.
Biblical Christianity, mind you. None of that namby-pamby Episcopalian crap.
If we want to see freedom come to those darkened, benighted lands, we should be sending missionaries in, right after we send in the Marines to neutralize whatever threat has been raised against the United States.
Yes. Kill the opposition, bomb the towns, obliterate the opposition … then send the Good News. Just like Jesus suggested over and over again.
If they don’t want our missionaries, fine. Their choice. We’ll take them and our Marines home, and let them know we’ll have no hesitation about returning with lethal force if they threaten us again. This time, Marines and missionaries. Next time, Marines and missiles.
And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, right. After all, Jesus taught that you should reach out to those who do not believe, sit down and sup with the sinners and outcasts, then bust some caps in their heads and then ask anyone who survives to swear fealty to Him or else face his missle-laden vengeance.
Yeah, that really sounds like a Christ-like approach.
The fundamental mistake Western politicians such as George W. Bush make is thinking that Islam is just like Christianity only different. They are so accustomed to an environment shaped by a Christian worldview, which prizes such things as individual liberty, freedom of conscience and religion and equality under the law that they assume that everybody wants those things.
Right. I mean, who’d think that Muslims would have any interest in individual liberty? I mean, if that were the case, you’d expect, under various Middle Eastern tyrannies, all sorts of protest movements to take place. It’s zany!
That is a shallow, naive and fatal assumption to make. President Bush simplistically believed that there is a hunger for freedom in every human heart. Not so. There is a hunger for human freedom beating in the breast of Christianity, but the hunger beating in the breast of Islam is for the exact opposite of freedom, totalitarian control.
THEY’RE EVIL PEOPLE. THEY DESERVE TO BE KILLED, AND ANYONE WHO SURVIVES CAN BE CONVERTED BY THE SWORD. THAT’S THE CHRISTIAN WAY TO DEAL WITH ISLAM, UNLIKE ISLAM THAT BELIEVES IN CONVERSION BY THE SWORD.
Is that what you mean, Bryan?
Seven times this year alone, Muslim members of Afghan security forces have fired on coalition forces, that is, on our own guys. Yesterday, the victims, all nine of them, were Americans. How many more American lives will be needlessly forfeit before we recognize the impossible task we have set before them?
Nation-building is a nice sentiment, and it’s worthy of us as a Christian nation to do what we can to assist other nations toward freedom. But sentiment unguided by truth and realism is just dangerous folly.
Nation-building is, indeed, a nice sentiment, but the barriers it faces are not intrinsic to any given religion or culture. Instead, the barriers have to do with conflicts of outsiders vs natives, the risks of collateral damage, and the resentment of tribalism/nationalism. These are exacerbated both by outside forces with an interest to stir up trouble, and outside forces with a contempt for the local, pagan, non-Christian wogs.
Our presence in Iraq has tragically made things much less safe for our spiritual brothers and sisters in our common Christian faith. Christians in Iraq are in far more danger now than when we went in. Muslims are bombing Christian churches and going door to door in Christian neighborhoods to root out and kill the infidels. Christians have been fleeing for their lives since U.S. forces entered in 2003. Christians were safer under Saddam than they are under the American flag. If we’re going to do nation-building, the minimum thing we ought to leave behind is a nation that provides freedom of worship for followers of Christ.
Yes, certainly. But two things to consider:
- Iraq under Saddam was under brutal, institutional suppression of sectarian conflicts (aside from the governmental preference for Sunni vs Shiite). That produced a security for Christian populations in Iraq.
- With Saddam gone, and sectarian violence suddenly rising in response to the lack of suppression, it’s hardly surprising that minority groups would be in greater danger — Christians as well as other. And Christians were, I suspect, in even greater danger, ironically, due to the identification of the invading forces (from the US) as Christian. Which seems to contradict the idea that, after the Marines, all we have to do is send in missionaries to sweep up the spiritual remains.
American blood is far too valuable to be expended on anything other than American interests.
Yes, that is definitely What Jesus Would Do.
Once American force has been used to subdue Islamic threats in foreign countries, it’s time to leave. Our military should be deployed to serve our interests, and once our interests – ours, not theirs – have been served, it’s time to declare victory and leave.
Because, frankly, screw ’em. Right, Bryan?
Bottom line: if our reason for being in Iraq and Afghanistan is to kill bad guys, let’s keep the finest military in the world …
Or at least the most expensive military in the world.
… there long enough to get the job done. But if our reason for being there is to do nation-building, it’s time to give that up as a lost cause and bring our troops home.
I’m somewhat inclined to agree, Bryan. But not because Muslims are filthy, savage wogs who are only interested in brutality and tyranny. But because nation-building through half-way measure military intervention is problematic at best. Either we devote ourselves — treasure and blood — to the cause, or, yes, we should pull out.
But that’s not a Christianity vs. Muslim thing. Indeed, it’s not dissimilar to the dilemma facing the British Crown over their intransigent American colonies. They were faced with a “nation-building” exercise vs. insurgent Americans. Ultimately, they decided the cost was too high and withdrew. But at least they didn’t frame it as a clash of cultures or some sort of fundamental religious divide between faithful Anglicans and freedom-hating dissenters/non-conformists.