Until the advent of materialism and 19th c. dogma, Western Civilisation was superior to anything Islam had developed. Islam has not aided in the development of the modern world; in fact civilisation has only been created in spite of Islam. Proof of this resides in the 'modern' world and the unending political-economic and spiritual poverty of Muslim states and regions. Squatting on richer civilisations is not 'progress'. Islam is pagan, totalitarian, and irrational.
Muslims want to:
Yet if you object to 1400 years of Jihad, destruction, annihilation of Christianity and other non-Muslims systems and religions, you are the problem. You are phobic. You have a mental problem. When 5000 Black Christian Nigerians are raped and slaughtered this year by Black Nigerian Muslims, it is the fault of the Black Christian Nigerians. After all, the climate made the Muslims burn down their churches with priests inside, rape their women and take over their lands. Or if not the climate, than 'tribal warfare' and 'inter-tribal conflicts'.
Historian Efraim Karsh summarises just how stupid 'Islamophobia' as a term is:
Styling himself the “Seal of the Prophets”, sent by God to pass his ultimate message to humankind, Muhammad expanded Islam from a purely Arab creed to a universal religion that knew no territorial or national boundaries. He also established the community of believers, or the umma, as the political framework for the practice of this religion in all territories it conquered; and he devised the concept of jihad, “exertion in the path of Allah”, as he called his god, as the primary vehicle for the spread of Islam. Muhammad introduced this concept shortly after his migration to Medina as a means to entice his local followers into raiding the Meccan caravans, developing and amplifying it with the expansion of his political ambitions until it became a rallying call for world domination. As he told his followers in his farewell address: “I was ordered to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no god but Allah.’”
In doing so, Muhammad at once tapped into the Middle East’s millenarian legacy and ensured its perpetuation for many centuries to come. From the first Arab-Islamic empire of the mid-seventh century to the Ottomans, the last great Muslim empire, the story of Islam has been the story of the rise and fall of universal empires and, no less important, of imperialist dreams. Politics during this lengthy period was characterised by a constant struggle for regional, if not world mastery in which the dominant power sought to subdue, and preferably eliminate, all potential challengers. …
It is true that this pattern of historical development is not uniquely Middle Eastern or Islamic. Other parts of the world, Europe in particular, have had their share of imperial powers and imperialist expansion, while Christianity’s universal vision is no less sweeping than that of Islam. The worlds of Christianity and Islam, however, have developed differently in one fundamental respect. The Christian faith won over an existing empire in an extremely slow and painful process, and its universalism was originally conceived in purely spiritual terms that made a clear distinction between God and Caesar. By the time it was embraced by the Byzantine emperors as a tool for buttressing their imperial claims, three centuries after its foundation, Christianity had in place a countervailing ecclesiastical institution with an abiding authority over the wills and actions of all believers.
The birth of Islam, by contrast, was inextricably linked with the creation of a world empire and its universalism was inherently imperialist. It did not distinguish between temporal and religious powers, which were combined in the person of Muhammad, who derived his authority directly from Allah and acted at one and the same time as head of the state and head of the church. This allowed the prophet to cloak his political ambitions with a religious aura and to channel Islam’s energies into its instrument of aggressive expansion, there being no internal organism of equal force to counterbalance it.
Whereas Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of God, Muhammad used God’s name to build an earthly kingdom. He spent the last 10 years of his life fighting to unify Arabia under his reign. Had it not been for his sudden death on June 8th 632, he would have most probably expanded his rule well beyond the peninsula. Even so, within a decade of Muhammad’s death, a vast empire, stretching from Iran to Egypt and from Yemen to northern Syria, had come into being under the banner of Islam in one of the most remarkable examples of empire-building in world history. Long after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the abolition of the Caliphate in the wake of World War I, the link between religion, politics and society remains very much alive in the Muslim and Arab worlds.
If Christendom was slower than Islam in marrying religious universalism with political imperialism, it was faster in shedding both notions. By the 18th century, the West had lost its religious messianism. Apart from in the Third Reich, it had lost its imperial ambitions by the mid-20th century. Islam has retained its imperialist ambition to this day.
Imperialist. Militarist. Totalitarian. Pagan. Quite Fascist. This is the cult of Muhammad. It has no alignment, whatsoever, with a modern society.
Slavery is a vital component to Mein Koran and Islam. This is one reason amongst many why the Meccan moon cult is irreligious. Christianity frees a person from bondage, slavery and levels society. We are all equal in front of God. It matters not if you are rich or poor. A religion such as Christianity will promote free-will, rationality, faith through reason and the liberation of the mind, body and soul. It will demand equality in justice and in society at large and expect a person to do unto others as they would have done to them. Charity, forgiveness, welfare and health care are outcomes of a religion.
Not so with Muhammad’s cult. It is banal, primitive, aggressive, and devoted to slavery in many forms. The Musulman is the slave of the Al Lah or moon idol of Mecca. Women are the slaves of men. Whites and non-Muslims are slaves of the Umma or cult of Muhammad, forever in a house of war, until subjugated and enslaved, or forced to convert (a golden age for modern quackademics). Non Musulman women are to be taken by ‘the right hand’ as sex or domestic slaves, answerable to their male Musulman masters.
Muhammad possessed and traded in slaves. He also had 15-20 sex concubines arranged and presented for his erotic pleasures. Have a read of Mein Koran to see how it venerates slavery in the image of its mad founder.
4:036: Worship Allah and join none with Him in worship, and do good to parents, kinsfolk, orphans, Al-Masakin (the poor), the neighbour who is near of kin, the neighbour who is a stranger, the companion by your side, the wayfarer (you meet), and those (slaves) whom your right hands possess. Verily, Allah does not like such as are proud and boastful;
There are about 420 pages in the Koran. The word 'slaves' appears on 226 of them. The word ‘slave’ in the singular, is found on 109 pages. Together 'slave' and 'slaves' are found in 335 pages or in about 80% of the Koran. At the verse level these terms comprise 5% of the verses out the Koranic total of 6236. It does appear that the moon deity of Mecca or ‘The Lord’, the Al-Lah, approves of, and is concerned with submission (Islam) and 'slavery'.
Sura 4 reviewed here, is rather obsessed with knavery. ‘Only’ 30 % of the Sura preaches hate and violence against the Infidel. A large part of the rest demands submission to Muhammad. Since Muhammad is the only human possessor of 'truth' your role in life is to follow, obey and never deviate from Koranic totalitarianism. Be a good slave:
Islam promotes slavery. The enslavement of non-Moslems, Whites, Blacks, Hindus and Buddhists is an animating and important feature of Muhammad's cult. 10-15 million Blacks were transhipped north from Black Africa to the Moslem heartlands. This is the same number of Whites taken by Moslems from 630 AD to 1900 AD. Even in Koranic theology there is much discussion about the slaves. Sura 4:3 and 24 discuss polygamy, marrying young girls and sex-slave girls.
4:025 is quite explicit: And whoever of you have not the means wherewith to wed free, believing women, they may wed believing girls from among those (captives and slaves) whom your right hands possess, and Allah has full knowledge about your Faith, you are one from another. Wed them with the permission of their own folk (guardians, Auliya' or masters) and give them their Mahr according to what is reasonable; they (the above said captive and slave-girls) should be chaste, not adulterous, nor taking boy-friends….
The Koran has some rather odd and pre-iron age rules relating to compensation around freeing slaves and paying blood money, if a believer is murdered by mistake. This is a text that one would expect to find in an early iron age culture:
4:092: It is not for a believer to kill a believer except (that it be) by mistake, and whosoever kills a believer by mistake, (it is ordained that) he must set free a believing slave and a compensation (blood money, i.e Diya) be given to the deceased's family, unless they remit it. If the deceased belonged to a people at war with you and he was a believer; the freeing of a believing slave (is prescribed), and if he belonged to a people with whom you have a treaty of mutual alliance, compensation (blood money - Diya) must be paid to his family, and a believing slave must be freed. And whoso finds this (the penance of freeing a slave) beyond his means, he must fast for two consecutive months in order to seek repentance from Allah. And Allah is Ever AllKnowing, AllWise.
The above ‘law’ is truly barbaric. If a Moslem kills another Moslem by mistake, the criminal can get away with the murder by freeing a sex slave and paying some blood money. Now that is justice! Such 'laws' inform Sharia and provide more than a mild discomfort for the Marxist-Moslem multi-cult, who whine that Moslem 'law' is the same as Western law. Late bronze age codes around blood money and slave sacrifice have nothing to do with modern jurisprudence.
In any event slavery, which is not a part of any 'religion' worthy of the name, but certainly a distinctive feature of mindless cults, is a major theme within the Koran and Islamic history. Perhaps the pious post-modern can explain how slavery is freedom, and sex concubinage female equality.
It is refreshing, indeed mandatory, to read common sense and real perspectives from the past. Out of the dark and gloom of the modern era of 'scientism' [abiogensis, plant food causes climate, panspermia, life on dead rocks, algae became Achmed etc.]; and into the light of learning. In a culture which praises transgendered bathrooms and applauds a bronze age moon cult as enlightened, it is difficult to understand where civilization came from and why it formed. There is no 'evolution' of civilization to use the modern world's unscientific obsession. Civilization, as with life, art or any material substance, is designed, built, constructed and managed. It can be torn down, just as easily as it can be created.
Adams makes important notes on Christianity's seminal impact on Western Civilization, a metaphysics unlike any which had preceded it in the pagan world:
"Christianity taught also the equality of all men in the sight of God. It taught this not merely as an abstract idea. Stoicism had done that. But in the early Christianity, at least, it put the idea into practice so far as it was possible to do so. The master was held to treat his slave as a brother. They both stood on the same footing within the church, and its offices and dignities were open to both alike. ...instances are not uncommon of men from the lowest classes rising to positions in the church of the highest rank. The teaching of the church always kept before men the idea of the equality in moral rights and in final destiny of all men. That it was the chiefly effective force in establishing practical equality, so far as it has been established, can hardly be asserted."
Equality of men, leads to the equality of rights, freedom of speech and due process, between all men, and over time, women. The universal ethics of Christianity, demanded a universal creed in which all men had to be treated equally, fairly and justly.
"Christianity also taught, as a necessary result of the Christian conception of the relation between God and man, that religion has a direct practical mission as an ethical teacher and help. This was a new and most important step in advance. The ancient national religions had made no ethical demand of the worshipper. The character attributed to the gods could not be helpful to any man. The pagan priest had never looked upon himself as a teacher of morals, or conceived of any reformatory mission for his religion. The Greek or Roman in need of ethical aid and comfort sought the philosopher and not the priest. This whole condition of things Christianity revolutionized. The pure ideal of character which it held aloft in its conception of God, its clear assertion of the necessity and the possibility of such a character for every man which it made in the gospel narrative, created an intimate bond between religion and ethics unknown before. The religious life which Christianity aimed to create in the individual must of necessity express itself in right conduct. This was its true fruit, its external test, and to perfect this the energy of the new religion was especially directed."
Even when acting badly, and Christians have a long history of that, as does most any man or woman today; the ideal does not perish. The character of faith should imbue all action. God is not unknowable or untouchable. He is a part of each person and of the world around us.
...[the] fatherhood of God, typified and proclaimed in an extremely effective form in the sonship of Christ, man’s elder brother, brought man near to God and gave him a new point of view for all the future. Love became the great religious force of the new age. In the practical working of Christianity this idea did not remain a mere idea. It was transformed into a positive force in history through the keen conception which the individual Christian had of the immediate personal relationship between himself and God, by virtue of which the power of the Almighty would come to his aid in his endeavor to make himself like God. In other words, Christianity not merely taught that this relationship was an ideal possibility, but it made men believe it as a fact, so that they actually lived with a sense of the divine power in them."
Animated by equality, opportunity, joy, morality, a strong character, always trying to stay ahead and deny the baser impulses and true demerits we all possess including free will and our poor choices [sin]; Christianity galvanized and demanded action. Help to the poor, the needy; protection of the old, young, infirm and innocent. A conscious desire to do good and to be active in this life, to try to live a good, not a crude life and to participate in society in order to effect good works for the next life if grace grants us that. A commitment to life, family, beauty, reality and proper conduct. We all far short. But those attributes are what created the modern world. Christianity created that culture.
Outright persecution Today we are living through one of the most serious phases of Christian persecution in history. Throughout the world Christians are meeting exclusion from society, sustained violence, arson attacks, rape and murder because they profess faith in the Prince of Peace. Most people, especially the liberal opinion-formers, prefer to ignore it.
Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world, and most of the persecution occurs in Muslim majority states. Despite continual cries of ‘Islamophobia’, and stiff competition from Hindus in India and Buddhists in Myanmar, the uncomfortable truth is that Islam is the most persecuting religion in the world.
Christianity may have been born in the Middle East but it is being systematically driven from its homeland. The apartheid states covering North Africa and the Middle East continually disadvantage and persecute their Christian populations with nary a murmur from the secular liberal West. Sadly, large numbers in the church are no more concerned about their brothers and sisters than are the unbelievers.
Christians in the West don’t help matters when we describe our problems as ‘persecution’. What we experience is as nothing to what our brothers and sisters elsewhere suffer on a daily basis.
Institutional harassment The high priests of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion deem traditionally-minded Christians to be undeserving of the privileges of equality, diversity, and inclusion.
It is not uncommon for street preachers to be taken to a police station and interrogated before being released to wait for months before a court hearing, then finally cleared. Even although the charges don’t stick, the process is the punishment and serves to inhibit others.
There has even been a case where a woman was prohibited by police from singing Christian songs in the street on the grounds that she was not permitted to ‘sing church songs outside church grounds’. The police later admitted they had ‘made a mistake’, but the incident illustrates a prevalent official mindset which is dismissive of Christianity.
In 2018 Father Mark Morris was fired from his post as Catholic chaplain at Glasgow Caledonian University for holding an off-campus prayer meeting in response to a gay pride march in the city. As Madeleine Kearns wrote, identifying gay pride ‘as a gross offence to God then praying about it with a bunch of grannies is, it turns out, a gross offence against the Church of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion’.
Polite Persecution Polite persecution is the opposition biblical Christians experience increasingly in the West. This well-mannered persecution takes away our freedom as well as our right to voice a considered opinion based upon Scripture or our right to conscientious objection.
Only certain modes of expression are permitted to the Christian when speaking of contentious subjects. That is to say, only those neutered expressions which have been stripped of all force, power and above all clarity.
Take the opposition of biblical Christians to same-sex marriage and sexual relations. It would be acceptable in polite society to make a nuanced philosophical argument, carefully citing exceptions and different opinions amongst authorities, about the proper ends of sex. But one may not discuss the matter in the more robust, direct and difficult-to-misunderstand terms likely to be employed by non-graduate working people.
This means in effect that biblical arguments are permitted to be put forward only by a select class of non-controversial Christians, those who are well versed in the acceptable modes of speech used by liberal progressive graduates. As well as sharing the same background as the secularists, the acceptable Christians usually share the same political and moral views. They are considered safe.
Scorning or dismissing out of hand Christians when they voice a traditional position on sexual morality in an unapproved fashion is a way of silencing biblical Christians in the public square.
Christian vs Christian One of the most disturbing aspects of polite persecution is the refusal of many Christians to acknowledge its reality. If any Christian in the West says that the Church here faces discrimination, one of his co-religionists is sure to accuse him of overstating the case.
When pro-life Christians join demonstrations or prayer vigils there are always polite Christians ready to object that such action brings the church into disrepute. When working-class Christians question the wisdom of flooding the country with Muslims, many of whom have no intention of integrating, there are always polite respectable liberal Christians willing to denounce them as ‘racist’.
This divide-and-conquer strategy is one of the most effective powers of polite persecution. Rather than being conducted only by Intolerant progressives employing crude means, it is very often enforced by Christians themselves in order to flatter and serve their secular betters. They can always be counted on to rush to denounce other Christians as ‘hateful’, ‘insensitive’ and ‘bigoted’.
Liberal Christians should be careful they don’t allow their own biases and insecurities about their standing with their secular liberal friends to control their fellowship with other Christians. Failing to defend fellow believers from the scorn of unbelievers, even though they may not share all the convictions of those conservative Christians, is a betrayal.
This article appeared in A Grain of Sand and is republished by kind permission.
“...the presence of the Christian church enhanced, rather than damaged, the development of the natural sciences.”
The quote above is entirely accurate. In 'Galileo goes to Jail and Other Myths...', there is a good and detailed record of why this statement is true. There is no doubt that an objective observer, not one immersed in the apocrypha of the poorly named 'Enlightenment', or the post modern claptrap of cultural Marxist relativity, including the nonsense that Moslems invented everything [including fire, at least twice]; recognizes the veracity of the claim. This is not to say that only Western European traditions formed science; or that only Western European efforts are worthy of the name science. The very definition of science is in dispute, it is not metaphysics and hand-waving [evolution, globaloneywarming]; nor is it operational and technological innovation [manufacturing processes, design improvements, new technologies]. But it is entirely correct to say that modern science was formed only in Catholic Western Europe.
Naturalism or naturalist 'science', was long debated by Christians. As this book relates, going back to the 2nd century AD, Christian philosophers, well versed in Aristotle and Plato, were arguing over pagan theories about nature, the cosmos, and observed phenomena. Every educated person knew that the earth was a sphere, that unlike Aristotle's belief it moved, and that there was a cosmological rotation of planets in certain orbits. No one however, either pagan or Christian, knew why. Christians attempted to find out:
“[detailed study of naturalism from] Justin Martyr (d. ca. 165) to Saint Augustine (354-430) and beyond, Christian scholars allied themselves with Greek philosophical traditions deemed congenial to Christian thought.”
The Greek philosophers were not blindly accepted as 'experts' by Christians. Unlike Moslems, the Christians threw a healthy and heavy skepticism into pagan claims and beliefs. Today of course, the very term 'scientist' means one has to fall to the knees and scream in adulation. Not so with real science and philosophy. Justin Martyr was a Jewish convert, murdered by the Romans for his beliefs [how very tolerant]. In particular he was killed by the Romans for daring to assert that reason and faith are bound together, and that Christianity espousing this belief was no threat to the Roman state, and in fact would aid man in understanding nature:
“In the first part of the First Apology, Justin defends his fellow Christians against the charges of atheism and hostility to the Roman state. He then goes on to express the core of his Christian philosophy: the highest aspiration of both Christianity and Platonic philosophy is a transcendent and unchangeable God; consequently, an intellectual articulation of the Christian faith would demonstrate its harmony with reason. Such a convergence is rooted in the relationship between human reason and the divine mind, both identified by the same term, logos (Greek: “intellect,” “word”), which enables man to understand basic truths regarding the world, time, creation, freedom, the human soul’s affinity with the divine spirit, and the recognition of good and evil.”
In the name of tolerance the pagans killed the man who wrote the above.
In 'Galileo goes to jail and other Myths', there is a nice passage about Tertullian, another Christian who married reason with faith, in the 2nd century AD:
“Tertullian presented, and to a very significant degree he built it out of materials and by the use of methods drawn from the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition. He argued, for example, that the precise regularity of the orbital motions of the celestial bodies (a clear reference to the findings of Greek astronomers) bespeaks a "governing power" that rules over them; and if they are ruled over, they surely cannot be gods. He also introduced the "enlightened view of Plato" in support of the claim that the universe must have had a beginning and therefore cannot itself partake of divinity; and in this and other works he "triumphantly parades" his learning (as one of his biographers puts it) by naming a long list of other ancient authorities.
Tertullian and many other Christian writers [some of whom were called Montanists, largely orthodox and ascetic]; had no issues with pagan philosophy and its relevance. Basil of Caesarea (ca. 330-379), carried on some of Tertullian's ideas, and had similar attitudes toward the classical sciences. He sharply attacked philosophers and astronomers who "have wilfully and voluntarily blinded themselves to knowledge of the truth."
“But while attacking the errors of Greek science and philosophy-and what he did not find erroneous, he generally judged useless-Basil also revealed a solid mastery of their contents. He argued against Aristotle's fifth element, the quintessence; he recounted the Stoic theory of cyclic cosmological conflagration and regeneration; he applauded those who employ the laws of geometry to refute the possibility of multiple worlds (a clear endorsement of Aristotle's argument for the uniqueness of the cosmos); he derided the Pythagorean notion of music of the planetary spheres; and he proclaimed the vanity of mathematical astronomy...”
Who can possibly argue with the above ? It is common sense and correct. Today sci-fi parading as science vomits out theology about pregnant black holes, dark matter and multi-verses. Maybe these non-scientists can revisit Basil, laws of geometry and even Aristotle.
What the early Christians knew, and what we have forgotten in our age of the cult of science; is that science itself is a metaphysical enterprise. Whatever your world view is, will shape your so-called science. Augustine in the late 4th century knew this. His very influential view, was that the knowledge about our world is not a legitimate end in itself, but a means to other ends. In other words, your philosophy imbues your reason. In this vein the classical sciences must accept a subordinate position as the handmaiden of theology and religion. This philosophy is still used today but in the reverse. The metaphysics of 'science', now controls other 'faiths'.
“Augustine's handmaiden science was defended explicitly and at great length, for example, by Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century, whose defense of useful knowledge contributed to his notoriety as one of the founders of experimental science.
Augustine and others like him applied Greco-Roman natural science with a vengeance to biblical interpretation. The sciences are not to be loved, but to be used. This attitude toward scientific knowledge was to flourish throughout the Middle Ages and well into the modern period. Were it not for this outlook, medieval Europeans would surely have had less scientific knowledge, not more.”
This is very true. Without the handmaiden concept, “medieval Europeans would surely have had less scientific knowledge, not more.” When your world is random chaos, when you believe you are evolved algae, when you scream that there is no meaning, no reason to live, and that all is without purpose, your world view and your society do not develop reason, nor science, but a cult of social chaos, relativity, lamentation and death. There is no reason to the current post-modern dogma and cult of 'science', which is anything but scientific.