Ohmyrus sums up his argument by saying that “in the
current war against terrorism, secularism is a hindrance. It encourages
political correctness, low birth rates, self-doubts and apathy. The West,
especially Europe, is in a deep spiritual crisis. Secularism could be a
fatal weakness in its body politic against a resurgent Islam as polytheism
probably was in 7th century Mecca. Modern Europeans are the lucky heirs of
Christian civilization which has contributed so much to human progress. It
has brought on the scientific revolution, abolition of slavery and human
rights. The separation of Church and State also created the space for
democracy to take root. (...) But for it to be useful, Christianity needs
to be revived, particularly in very secular Europe which was once part of
Christendom. Bring back that Old Time Religion.”
Now, I don’t disagree with the fact that Christianity does have its
flaws. Monotheism’s inherent potential for intolerance is one of them.
But so is the opposite, the potential for naïve pacifism and
turn-the-other-cheek mentality when confronted with Islamic aggression, a
flaw which is too frequently displayed by many Christian leaders. As Bat
Ye’or has pointed out in “Islam and Dhimmitude,” Christian leader
have frequently participated in selling out their own in Muslim majority
countries. The church needs to understand that Islam is an enemy and can
never be an ally, otherwise the church may die and will deserve to die.
Both these potential flaws in Christianity have been balanced out in the
modern West by the worldly institution of the nation state, made possible
precisely because of the separation between the spiritual and the temporal
inherent in Christian teachings. This is what has made individual choice
and modern democracy possible. Contrast this with Islam, where the
individual hardly exists except as a cell of a larger organism, the Ummah.
For example, in Islam, if a man and a woman are left alone with each other
in a room, it is normal for many Muslims to assume that they have had
sexual relations. The rational behind Islamic thinking is that it is the
responsibility of society to remove the possibilities for temptations. The
logic behind the modern, Judeo-Christian West is that society does bear
some responsibility, but that ultimately, individuals need to take
responsibility for their own actions. This is why democracy, in which the
whole point is the possibility of individual choice, is so difficult to
establish in Islamic countries, in which the thinking is to remove any
possibilities of making a “wrong” choice. Muslims thus hate our
freedom because it permits people to think and decide for themselves. The
Muhammad cartoons affair is a good example of this. The protesting Muslims
see countries as collective entities in which governments are to be held
responsible for the acts of individual citizens. The concept that what
matters in Western nations are individuals is alien to them.
What made Europe strong and dynamic earlier was the power of the
individual, but still an individual that felt part of something larger
than himself, his nation and his religion. At the beginning of the 21st
century, Europe is weak. We are weak both because we have lost our
religion and subdued our nation states, as embodied in the Eurabian Union,
and because we have been weakened by collectivist ideologies. The USA, the
most individualistic of the Western nations, but also the most religious
and the most patriotic, has retained some of this Western dynamism, even
though the same weaknesses are very much present there, too. At the same
time as Islam is advancing in Europe, individualism is spreading in other
parts of the world. Unless Europe returns to her roots, we could get a
situation where notions of the individual, which have been previously
championed by Europe, will slowly die in Europe while they are advancing
in parts of Asia.
The traditional, Western idea is that not everything we consider to be
immoral can be punished, at least not in this life. What we have done
wrong now is Egalitarianism, the concept that all choices and viewpoints
are equally valid and equally worthy of respect. Islam creates an
extremely inflexible society where the autonomous individual hardly
exists. On the other hand, we have Western Multiculturalism and nihilism,
where there is no right or wrong and where the individual is so autonomous
that the country and the
civilization largely is left defenseless, because nobody any
longer identifies with it any longer, and because short term gratification
of individual desires is the only thing left. We need a balance between
the two. For Europe, that means ditching the European Union, or
the Evil Empire as some of us call it, and a return to our
traditional, Judeo-Christian religion. Since religious people have more
children than non-religious people, Europe in a couple of generations from
now will be much more religious than now. The only question is what
religion this will be. If the current Islamic advances continue, anything
that can be remotely described as European culture will die. The
alternative is a revival of our own religious heritage. I agree with
Ohmyrus: Bring back that old time religion.
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