| Submit your comments on this article |
| International-UN-NGOs |
| The pope, the president and politics of faith |
| 2008-06-17 |
| by Spengler |
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #9 And Gallio cared for none of these things |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2008-06-17 17:42 |
| #8 Geographically and culturally, Iraq is the hub of the wheel in the middle east. Nothing like self governing and a good economy in Iraq to put HUGE pressures on the totalitarians around Iraq (Iran, Syria, the Soddys) |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2008-06-17 11:52 |
| #7 Excellent read. Thanks for the post. At the beginning of the war in Iraq, I told someone that WMD was just a pretext. I thought from the beginning, that GW was different. He saw, in 9/11, the failures of the realpolitics we had been engaged in for so many years. The invasion of Iraq was nothing less than a leap of faith, an attempt to change the status quo of the region. And slowly, but surely, it is working. |
| Posted by: Galactic Coordinator Thromoque2155 2008-06-17 11:08 |
| #6 None dare call it Crusade. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2008-06-17 09:20 |
| #5 Christians threten the very existence of Islamby insisting that people can and do have a direct, personal relationaship with God. This demolishes the "top down" power structure built into Islam, by destroying the ability of the Imamns to command ruthless obedience under pain of direct worldly punishments. Christianity calls for people to love their neighbor and themselves as children of God. It calls for Love to be held as the highest value. Islam, concerned as it is with power, hatred, and fear, cannot survive for long if Christian ideals are allowed to flourish. And that, my dear McZoid, is why they are so afraid. They may be Lions of Islam, but Christianity has faced and defeated lions long ago. And apparently under Pope Benedict, the Catholic Church, is remembering how - and the evangelicals never forgot. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2008-06-17 09:16 |
| #4 How could Christians being eaten by lions threaten the Roman Empire? |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2008-06-17 06:49 |
| #3 How is the murder cult threatened by Christian evangelists? Evangelists are murdered when they venture into Muslim pig pens. |
| Posted by: McZoid 2008-06-17 06:43 |
| #2 Muslims are in dialogue with a pope who evidently does not merely want to exchange pleasantries about coexistence, but to convert them. This no doubt will offend Muslim sensibilities, but Muslim leaders are well-advised to remain on good terms with Benedict XVI. Worse things await them. There are 100 million new Chinese Christians, and some of them speak of marching to Jerusalem - from the East. Islam is in danger for the first time since its founding. The evangelical Christianity to which George W Bush adheres and the emerging Asian church are competitors with whom it never had to reckon in the past. The European Church may be weak, but no weaker, perhaps, than in the 8th century after the depopulation of Europe and the fall of Rome. An evangelizing European Church might yet repopulate Europe with new Christians as it did more than a millennium ago. Spengler errs in ignoring the even greater African Christian populace. A group with even older and greater grievances against muslims, particularly arabs. They have large scores to settle. Bush was magnificently right to conduct a punitive expedition against Saddam, but horribly wrong to wade into the mire of nation-building. He should have found a cooperative dictator to replace Saddam and marched out Spengler misunderstands that Bush's ambition is as great as the Pope's and that they are mutually supportive. Had we left we would have only left a new boss to go as bad as the last boss. But to introduce liberal pluralism is to threaten islam at its core by creating a political structure that values each individual and to offer each individual the opportunity to live the life they wish, unconstrained, if they choose, by the rantings of an 7th century megalomaniac. Obama does not understand this, or if he does, wishes to subvert it. The Pope understands and that is why he does not try to subvert it. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2008-06-17 06:16 |
| #1 Faith in Christ means: rejection of the concocted pseudo religion - islam - as an elite tool, created to externalize the personal sexual depravities and booty needs of its perverse founder. Then again, meaning is personal and our elites insist on including practise of the arab murder cult, within the "freedom of religion" framework. To me, Islam is the exact equivalent of ritual Aztec cannibalism. A jihadi should be given a social value equal to a cockroach. |
| Posted by: McZoid 2008-06-17 00:31 |