From Spengler (thanks to Religion of Pieces):
Jihad injures reason, for it honors a god who suffers no constraints on his caprice, unlike the Judeo-Christian god, who is limited by love. That is the nub of Pope Benedict XVI's September 12 address in Regensburg, Germany. It promises to be the Vatican's most controversial utterance in living memory.
When a German-language volume appeared in 2003 quoting the same analysis by a long-dead Jewish theologian, I wrote of "oil on the flames of civilizational war". [1] Now the same ban has been preached from St Peter's chair, and it is a defining moment comparable to Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946.
Earlier this year, Benedict's elliptical remarks to former students at a private seminar in 2005, mentioned in passing by an American Jesuit and reported in this space, created a scandal. [2] I wrote at the time that even the pope must whisper when it comes to Islam. We have entered a different stage of civilizational war. The Islamic world now views the pontiff as an existential threat, and with reason.
Jihad is not merely the whim of a despotic divinity, as the pope implied. It is much more: jihad is the fundamental sacrament of Islam, the Muslim cognate of the Lord's Supper in Christianity, that is, the unique form of sacrifice by which the individual believer communes with the Transcendent.
To denounce jihad on theological grounds is a blow at the foundations of Islam, in effect a papal call for the conversion of the Muslims.
Just before then-cardinal Ratzinger's election as pope last year, I wrote, "Now that everyone is talking about Europe's demographic death, it is time to point out that there exists a way out: convert European Muslims to Christianity. The reported front-runner at the Vatican conclave ... Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, is one of the few Church leaders unafraid to raise the subject." [3]
The Regensburg address oversteps the bounds of dialogue and verges upon the missionary. A great deal has changed since John Paul II kissed the Koran before news cameras in 1999. The boys and girls of the Catholic youth organization Communione e Liberazione that Ratzinger nurtured for a generation will have a great deal to talk to their Muslim school-fellows about. No more can one assume now that Europe will slide meekly into dhimmitude.
In that respect [I wrote during the conclave] John Paul II recalled the sad position of Pius XII, afraid to denounce publicly the murder of Polish priests by Nazi occupiers - let alone the murder of Polish Jews - for fear that the Nazis would react by killing even more. It is hard to second-guess the actions of Pius XII given his terrible predicament, but at some point one must ask when the Gates of Hell can be said to have prevailed over St Peter.
Specifically, Benedict stated that jihad, the propagation of Islam by force, is irrational, because it is against the Reason of God. Citing a 14th-century Byzantine emperor to the effect that Mohammed's "decree that the faith he preached should be spread with the sword" as "evil and inhumane" provoked headlines. But of greater weight is the pope's observation that Allah is a god whose "absolute transcendence" allows no constraint, to the point that Allah is free if he chooses to promote evil. The great German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig explained the matter more colorfully than did the pope, as I reported three years ago in the cited review:
The god of Mohammed is a creator who well might not have bothered to create. He displays his power like an Oriental potentate who rules by violence, not by acting according to necessity, not by authorizing the enactment of the law, but rather in his freedom to act arbitrarily ... Providence thus is shattered into infinitely many individual acts of creation, with no connection to each other, each of which has the importance of the entire creation. That has been the doctrine of the ruling orthodox philosophy in Islam. Every individual thing is created from scratch at every moment. Islam cannot be salvaged from this frightful providence of Allah ... despite its vehement, haughty insistence upon the idea of the god's unity, Islam slips back into a kind of monistic paganism, if you will permit the expression. God competes with God at every moment, as if it were the colorfully contending heavenful of gods of polytheism.
It is amusing to see liberal Jewish commentators in the United States, eg, the editorial page of the September 16 New York Times, deplore the pope's remarks, considering that Rosenzweig said it all the more sharply in 1920. Benedict's comments regarding Islam served as a preamble to a longer discourse on the unity of faith and reason. "Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?" Benedict asked, and answered his own question: "I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God."
It is not, however, the reasoned side of Benedict's remarks to which Muslims responded, but rather the existential. Rather than rail at the pope's characterization of Islam, Muslims might have responded as follows: "Excuse me, Your Holiness, but did we hear you say that you represent a religion of reason, whereas Allah is a god of unreason? Do you not personally eat the body and blood of your god - at least things that you insist really are his flesh and blood - every day at Mass? And you accuse us of unreason!" That is a fair rebuttal, but it opens up Islam's can of worms. True, we are not pottering about in this pilgrim existence to be rational.
Today's Germans are irrational, and know that their time has past, and therefore desist from bearing children. What mankind - Christian, Muslim and Jew, and all - demand of God is irrational. We want eternal life! Christians do not want what the Greeks wanted - Socrates' transmigration of souls, nor the shadow existence of Homer's dead heroes in Hades. That is an unreasonable demand if ever there was one.
Before the Bible was written, the Babylonian hero Gilgamesh learned that his quest for immortality was futile. The demigods of Greece, mortals favored by Olympians, suffered a tedious sort of immortal life as stars, trees or rivers. The gods of the heathens are not in any case eternal, only immortal. They were born and they will die, like the Norse gods at the Ragnorak, and their vulnerability projects the people's presentiment of its own death. To whom, precisely, have the gods offered eternal life prior to the appearance of revealed religion?
Eternal life and a deathless mortality are quite different things. But what is it that God demands of us in response to our demand for eternal life? We know the answer ourselves. To partake of life in another world we first must detach ourselves from this world in order to desire the next. In plain language, we must sacrifice ourselves. There is no concept of immortality without some concept of sacrifice, not in any culture or in any religion. That is a demand shared by the Catholic bishops and the Kalahari Bushmen.
God's covenant with Abraham is unique and singular in world history. A single universal and eternal god makes an eternal pact with a mortal that can be fulfilled only if Abraham's tribe becomes an eternal people. But the price of this pact is self-sacrifice. That is an existential mortal act beyond all ethics, as Soren Kierkegaard tells us in Fear and Trembling. The sacraments of revealed religion are sublimated human sacrifice, for the revealed god in his love for humankind spares the victim, just as God provided a ram in place of the bound Isaac on Mount Moriah.
Among Jews the covenant must be renewed in each male child through a substitute form of human sacrifice, namely circumcision. [4] Christians believe that a single human sacrifice spared the rest of humankind.
Jihad also is a form of human sacrifice. He who serves Allah so faithfully as to die in the violent propagation of Islam goes straight to paradise, there to enjoy virgins or raisins, depending on the translation.
But Allah is not the revealed god of loving kindness, or agape, but - pace Benedict - a god of reason, that is, of cold calculation.
Islam admits no expiatory sacrifice. Everyone must carry his own spear. We are too comfortable, too clean, too squeamish, too modern to descend into the terrible space where birth, death and immortality are decided. We forget that we cannot have eternal life unless we are ready to give up this one - and this the Muslim knows only through what we should call the sacrament of jihad.
Through jihad, the Muslim does almost precisely what the Christian does at the Lord's Supper. It is the sacrifice of Jesus that grants immortal life to all Christians, that is, those who become one with Jesus by eating his flesh and drinking his blood so that the sacrifice also is theirs, at least in Catholic terms. Protestants substitute empathy identification with the crucified Christ for the trans-substantiated blood and flesh of Jesus.
Christians believe that Jesus died on the cross to give all men eternal life, on condition that they take part in his sacrifice, either through the physical communion of the Catholic Church or the empathetic Communion of Protestantism.
From a Muslim vantage point, the extreme of divine humility embodied in Jesus' sacrifice is beyond reason.
Allah, by contrast, deals with those who submit to him after the calculation of an earthly despot. He demands that all Muslims sacrifice themselves by becoming warriors and, if necessary, laying their lives down in the perpetual war against the enemies of Islam.
These are parallel acts, in which different peoples do different things, in the service of different deities, but for the same reason: for eternal life.
Why is self-sacrifice always and everywhere the cost of eternal life? It is not because a vengeful and sanguineous God demands his due before issuing us a visa to heaven. Quite the contrary: we must sacrifice our earthly self, our attachment to the pleasures and petty victories of our short mortal life if we really are to gain the eternal life that we desire. The animal led to the altar, indeed Jesus on the cross, is ourselves: we die along with the sacrifice and yet live, by the grace of God.
YHWH did not want Isaac to die, but without taking Abraham to Mount Moriah, Abraham himself could not have been transformed into the man desirous and deserving of immortal life. Jesus died and took upon him the sins of the world, in Christian terms, precisely so that a vicarious sacrifice would redeem those who come to him. What distinguishes Allah from YHWH and (in Christian belief) his son Jesus is love.
God gives Jews and Christians a path that their foot can tread, one that is not too hard for mortals, to secure the unobtainable, namely immortal life, as if by miracle. Out of love God gives the Torah to the Jews, not because God is a stickler for the execution of 613 commandments, but because it is a path upon which the Jew may sacrifice and yet live, and receive his portion of the World to Come.
The most important sacrifice in Judaism is the Sabbath - "our offering of rest", says the congregation in the Sabbath prayers - a day of inactivity that acknowledges that the Earth is the Lord's. It is a sacrifice, as it were, of ego. In this framework, incidentally, it is pointless to distinguish Judaism as a "religion of works" as opposed to Christianity as a "religion of faith".
To Christians, God offers the vicarious participation in his sacrifice of himself through his only son. That is Grace: a free gift by God to men such that they may obtain eternal life. By a miracle, the human soul responds to the offer of Grace with a leap, a leap away from the attachments that hold us to this world, and a foretaste of the World to Come.
There is no Grace in Islam, no miracle, no expiatory sacrifice, no expression of love for mankind such that each Muslim need not be a sacrifice. On the contrary, the concept of jihad, in which the congregation of Islam is also the army, states that every single Muslim must sacrifice himself personally.
Jihad is the precise equivalent of the Lord's Supper in Christianity and the Jewish Sabbath, the defining expression of sacrifice that opens the prospect of eternity to the mortal believer. To ask Islam to become moderate, to reform, to become a peaceful religion of personal conscience is the precise equivalent of asking Catholics to abolish Mass.
Islam, I have argued for years, faces an existential crisis in the modern world, which has ripped its adherents out of their traditional existence and thrust them into deadly conflicts. What was always latent in Islam has now come to the surface: the practice of Islam now expresses itself uniquely in jihad. Benedict XVI has had the courage to call things by their true names. Everything else is hypocrisy and self-delusion.
Pastorius comment:
What Spengler says here, in contrasting the God of the Jews and the Christians with the God of Islam, is true. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is a God who provides the sacrifice for man. He is a God of forgiveness, and redemption.
Allah, on the other hand, is a God who demands blood sacrifice of his adherents. Allah is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Allah is Moloch.
12 comments:
"He is a God of forgiveness, and redemption."
This is the primary reason why i chose the Christian faith. I just cant believe in a god that teaches me to be ruthless against non-believers or other human beings. Humans need love to build a society, not hate. Thanks for this post Pastorius!
Love and Peace.
The essay was a great read, but I did notice that one analogy was off, "To ask Islam to become moderate, to reform, to become a peaceful religion of personal conscience is the precise equivalent of asking Catholics to abolish Mass." I would suggest a better analogy would to asking Catholics give up the belief in the ability of Jesus to redeem the sinner. Admittedly, I am anti-Catholic atheist, but still I'm trying to affirm Catholicism's strength against the querulous argument that Catholics are more concerned about ritual than substance. ("Substance" meant as the common English word and not as a term from Aristotelean philosophy.)
I'm glad you like this. Obviously, IBA is not a religious site, but sometimes I think it is important to express the religious element of this war sometimes. Religion does impact the culture of Western Civilization, and it is important to acknowledge that, and understand what we are fighting for.
Demosthenes,
I think there is a way in which what you say is true. However, I don't think Spengler was in anyway making the point that Catholicism of Judaism, or Protestantism is emphasizing ritual over relationship. The point really is that each religion has a fundamental sacrament which is central to the worship of God. For the Jew, it is the Sabbath. For the Catholic, it is Holy Communion. For most Protestants, it is Communion and Prayer, although, I would argue that it is marriage and family.
In Islam, the fundamental sacrament if blowing yourself up in the presence of the Infidel and the Jew.
That's the point.
"Providence thus is shattered into infinitely many individual acts of creation, with no connection to each other, each of which has the importance of the entire creation."
Very true. Islamic theology rejects causality. According to the koran, the sun, moon and stars move around the flat earth from moment to moment by Allah's will. Allah causes the sun to set every evening in a muddy spring in the West. It need not do so if he did not will it.
Therefore Newton's laws of motion and the rest of physics are blasphemous to Muslims. This is why Islamic 'science' never advanced beyond mere description towards discovering the underlying regularities. This was fortunate, because as a result Muslims never developed the intellectual capabilities needed for an industrial revolution.
Thus for several centuries - as Churchill said - European civilisation was sheltered in the strong arms of science, preventing it falling to the barbarians as did ancient Rome.
This also explains why there are so few muslim Nobel Prize winners. The fruits of kafir technology may be used for Jihad, but advancing the underlying science could earn you a fatwa.
...... and following on from my previous comment, the Judeo-Christian YHWH is much smarter than Mohammed's Allah. By setting up the laws of physics, YHWH allows systems and subsystems to run themselves without the need for massive moment-to-moment hands-on intervention and micromanagement.
YHWH is like a computer programmer who understands the variables and writes a program that will cope with multiple instances of similar calculations. Whereas Allah is an old fashioned clerk, who can't see from the particular to the general, and so does every individual calculation by hand.
PS
Q: How many Muslims does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. They prefer to sit in the dark and blame it on the Joooooooz
Fascinating post, excellent read. I have finally picked up my copy of Walid Phares' Future Jihad yesterday. Though I'm only a few chapters into it, it so far mirrors this essay quite nicely. Jihad as concept from the inception of Islam has not changed, merely the new false definition put out by apologists. I agree, as usual about allah as opposed to YHWH, and will repeat my contention that had Muhammad gleaned more knowledge of Jewish and Christian scriptures, we would see at least one passage in the quran in which allah identifies himself as "being" or "I AM" rather than a collection of powerful and pleasant platitudes.
Jihad is as engrained as other ways of life and religious doctrines, as Phares insists, of the Arab world. We simply haven't paid enough attention here in the West since the Middle Ages, during our defensive successes against the march of islam that Westerners barely seem aware of and muslims unable to stop thinking of.
I love the rituals of the Orthodox Churches and of the Roman Catholic Church, which I joined after finally converting to Christianity. I could not join a church devoid of them. As much as that bias offends many Protestants, it is deeply engrained in me. But as we learned in our "RCIA" classes essential to officially joining the RC church, there is no ritual practiced that is not designed to intensify the meaning of aspects of Christian beliefs and worship. Everything is done for very specific reasons and add greatly to the Mass. They are not forms of worship, but symbols of beliefs. And unlike jihad, they have nothing to do with the subjugation and conquest of other peoples.
How many of God's Commandments exactly did muhammad break again? Always a strange aspect to the life of one claiming to be a "prophet" of that God.
Pastorius, I agree. I agree. I don't see how discussion of religion can be avoided given the topic. And sometimes it is enjoyable to discuss Jewish and Christian ideas for anyone who values Western culture--just as we should discuss the other ancient source of Western culture, the Greek philosophical tradition. Both streams of our Western tradition add depth to our life. They are worth fighting for.
When I attack Christianity anymore, it is to attack the liberal Christianity that surrenders before any enemy and the Catholicism that inspires it. I've become a big fan of conservative Protestantism in an atheist sort of way. When it comes down to political leaders--not philosophers--I am thankful to Martin Luther and Genghis Khan for being the two men I am most indebted to for being able to lead a life of freedom.
Demosthenes,
I agree. We need to learn the art of giving and loving our neighbors, but when it comes time to go to war, we need to learn the art of obliterating our enemy with no remorse.
The answer is in the posting.
"But of greater weight is the pope's observation that Allah is a god whose "absolute transcendence" allows no constraint, to the point that Allah is free if he chooses to promote evil."
This 'god' can lie.
There is no covenant to bind him, no promise that cannot be broken - even to his own worshippers.
This is not God; by any definition, it is satan.
Yes, you and I are in agreement. And, his old world title is Moloch.
THE SYMBOLISM OF THE REGENSBERG ADDRESS
From http://patrickpoole.blogspot.com/2007/02/historical-note-on-symbolism-of.html
"One historical note lost thus far in the discussion of Benedict's Regensburg lecture is the symbolism that the city of Regensburg represents for Muslims and Christians alike in the history of anti-jihad.
The first is that during Suleiman the Butcher's push into Europe to lay siege to Vienna in 1529, Regensburg was the place at which his calvary was finally stopped in their advance into the European heartland.
As the main body of Suleiman's Ottoman army advanced towards Vienna, his troops massacred, tortured, enslaved and killed Christians all along the way. As his calvary approached the city walls, his soldiers carried on their pikes the severed heads of their Christian victims. The city was defended by only 16,000 troops led by Nicolas von Salm in the face of Suleiman's 250,000 troops.
After three weeks of an unsuccessful siege, and the inhabitants of Vienna continuing to hold fast against Suleiman's vast army, Suleiman declared victory, murdered all of his Christian captives, and set about his return to Istanbul with Vienna unconquered, raping, pillaging and enslaving all along the way as is the custom of the Religion of Peace™ ....
Thus, Regensburg represents the highwater mark of the European conquests of Islam's greatest jihadi, Suleiman the Butcher."
The second historical tidbit related to Regensburg is that in 1545, it was the birthplace of Don Juan of Austria, hero of the Battle of Lepanto in 1572.
On October 7, 1572, with the Ottoman ships in sight, Don Juan shouted to his men, "We are here to conquer or die! In death or in victory, you will win immortality!" By the end of the day, the Holy League had won by God's grace a decisive victory: the Turks had lost 210 ships and 25,000 Muslim soldiers and sailors, including Ali Pasha, as well as 8-10,000 Christian slaves that drowned chained to their oars.
The Christian fleet lost 12 ships and 7,500 men, but freed 15,000 Christian slaves from their defeated and dead Muslim masters.
Only bad weather prevented Don Juan and the fleet from striking deep into the heart of Ottoman territory in the Dardanelles. Rising from an ignoble birth in Regensburg would come one of the greatest Christian heroes fighting victoriously against the Ottomans and halting one of the most ambitious expeditions of the perpetual campaign of jihad in history, thus protecting the mainland of Europe.
In light of these tasty tidbits from history, one is given to wonder whether Benedict chose Regensburg for its historic and symbolic value in the 1,400 year Christian defense against jihad.
By his lecture was he drawing a line in the sand at Regensburg, much like in 1529, and telling the modern day forces of jihad, "Here we push back"?
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