Home Contact Register Subscribe to the Beacon Login

Monday, February 09, 2015

SALLY MORRIS:  AMAZING DISGRACE

As might well be expected, President Obama's comments at the National Prayer Breakfast this week drew some well-earned fire. Not to beat a dead horse, but we've heard this theory of moral relativity before and it doesn't wash. He referred to distortion and using religion for evil: “ we also see faith being twisted and distorted, used as a wedge -- or, worse, sometimes used as a weapon.” Here he is trying to convince us that the jihad that is wracking the world isn't Islam but some sort of distortion. We are supposed to not concern ourselves with Islam – ISIS (or ISIL, as he terms it) isn't Islam! It's a distortion! Well, the problem with this is that it IS Islam. This is why it is so difficult for good, peaceful, kind Muslims to stand up and rebuke these terrorists. They don't really have a leg to stand on because the Koran instructs its followers in violence, not peace.

 

First of all, let's take the implied comparison of Islam with Christianity: “And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.” Well, he said a mouthful there. Let's take the Crusades. For a few hundred years Christians put up with Muslims attacking and conquering Christian lands. At some point they felt they'd had enough, went to their pope and requested that they be allowed to put an end to it. Thus were born the Crusades. The Islamic wars, aka “Crusades”, were intermittent, but persistent. The final Christian victory was at Vienna as late as 1683. (For a timeline here – it was only two years later that Johann Sebastian Bach was born.) This was a siege, the outcome of which would settle the course of Europe – until now, that is. Had Christians not pushed back (the Crusades), we'd have seen an end to Western civilization long ago. It happened that Spain was visited upon by Moors and European Spaniards were made second class in their own nation, much as the Germans and English and Swedes are in theirs today. Back then, though, it wasn't new. It was getting old. Spain struggled for nearly 800 years under their Muslim warlords and finally, Ferdinand and Isabella reclaimed their country in Granada in 1492. As a result of the 800 years of oppression at the hands of Muslims, the Spanish queen over-compensated and the Spanish Inquisition was used against stealth reclaiming by the Moors. You know the rest – the horrors of that institution and the repressive nature of the Catholic Church in that era, particularly in Spain, and under direction of the Spanish monarchy. In fact we could include Protestant and Non-Conformist abuse as well – let's toss in the New England witch hunts for good measure.

 

Now two things to note here with regard to the Spanish Inquisition: 1) It was a reaction against the oppression of Islam in Spain and the desire to end that era by force. One might look to the Mohammedan practice of “takkiya”, or lying in order to achieve the desired result, as reason for the Spanish government to mistrust supposedly converted Muslims and fear their intentions. 2) The Inquisition was not – was never – part of Christian teaching. You will find no reference to setting up an Inquisition in either New or Old Testament. This was a political organ, albeit usually presided over by priests. You will not find Christian doctrine teaching about Inquisition. It was an aberration. (And, note also: it was in the distant past.)

 

(It's interesting to note by the way, that much of what else fueled the Inquisition and witch hunts had to do with natural events . . . like climate change. The human suffering caused by the Little Ice Age, a 400-year period of cold temperatures which disrupted food supplies, etc., seemed to require a scapegoat. In the case of the late Middle Ages it was witches. Today it's not witches who are blamed but progress. In neither case did the perpetrators of these abuses consult real science. In the Middle Ages they didn't have the knowledge; today we don't have that excuse. In both cases there were motivated collateral financial winners and losers. But I digress.)

 

There is no call to wage war against “unbelievers” or to make them submit to Christianity within the Bible. There is, as far as I am aware, no teaching in Judaism calling for jihad against “infidels”. But there is plenty of this in the Koran, so non-Muslims have had to fight back and go on Crusades. Now, of course, both the Inquisition and the Crusades were run by people who were not perfect. Many mistakes have been made over the centuries and there have been rogues, but the Bible is not the source. If Obama is referring to this departure from Christian teaching when he refers to “distortion”, etc., of religion, I would agree on that one. But what he was trying to do was to paper over the barbarity of modern-day Islam and try to raise from the long dead the straw man of the Inquisition or the Crusades. One would think the Crusades were a one-sided business – not self-defense! The bottom line is that Obama is correct when speaking of distortion of religion for evil ends – IF he's speaking of Christianity. That has happened. But he's completely off the mark when he applies this to Islam. The evil we see there is not “distortion”. It is orthodox Islam – by the book, by the Koran. So this is why Islam is the problem, not Muslims.

 

Next he roves on to the race card – slavery! After all, Christianity was “used to justify” slavery and Jim Crow “in our own country”! Well, let's back up. No one makes excuses for slavery – it was a wholly unacceptable institution and as early as July, 1776, the founders were battling to get it outlawed. It was a given that in time it would go, with or without a civil war. In order to end slavery, 500,000 American lives were lost in battle. Nearly all of them Christian, most of them Caucasian. Obviously there were still holdouts, but they lost, and under law, slavery officially ended in our own country. It existed for around four hundred years in the West before it was abolished. I don't know what Obama meant by Christianity being used to “justify” this. I think that's a stretch. In any case, the Bible doesn't condone slavery.

 

But let's take a look at Islam. The Koran is FULL of references to slavery – and not in terms of its abolition. There are extensive verses dealing with how to treat slaves, who may become slaves, that it's a good idea, but not required, to free them – a nice gesture, if you will. And the history of slavery begins in Arabia. It began even before Islam, to be sure, and has been going on in varying degrees for fourteen hundred years now. Under Islam it spread. Officially, the most recent nation to abolish slavery is Mauritania (1983), and Muslims from Saudi Arabia to the East Indies have traded in human beings. Slavery, unofficially, is still going on in Saudi Arabia. Today, with the rise of militant Islam, the slave trade is on the increase due to the Islamic doctrine of captured conquered peoples being subjugated. Currently children are smuggled in to become slaves, often mutilated. We all know the plight of women – any women captured in battle become property to be used and sold, but to a Muslim, it is fair enough to say that women have always been slaves - if you consider that a woman's life and word is officially valued at one-half that of a man's, and that women have virtually no rights at all. If that doesn't count as slavery I don't know what would. And the whole slavery thing, Obama thinks, is his card to play because he's black. Well, his black relatives were never American slaves. They were Africans. If they were enslaved it would have been by Muslims. The slave trade, which still goes on under the radar, lasted officially for 14 centuries.

 

So, now, getting into the final stretch, let's take another look at what we have in the Prayer Breakfast address. There was a pithy bit about “humility”, as if Obama would know what that meant:

And, first, we should start with some basic humility. I believe that the starting point of faith is some doubt -- not being so full of yourself and so confident that you are right and that God speaks only to us, and doesn’t speak to others, that God only cares about us and doesn’t care about others, that somehow we alone are in possession of the truth.” Well, that's a hot one. Of all the wrong people to bring up humility. This man was going to make the oceans recede, remember? He doesn't need Congress – he's got a pen and a phone. He set out to “fundamentally transform America”. Doesn't everyone who hears this remember the famous “latte salute”? This man respects no one. His “humility” had him – on his own- as if it were personal property – sending a bust of Churchill back to England! He just wasn't a big fan of Churchill. So back it went – the representation of one of the greatest leaders of the 20th Century, presented to America as a token of our brotherhood in battle against the Nazis. One day our thesaurus will offer “Obama” as a choice under “arrogant [person]”.

 

I do hope that the Pope, will see fit to address this hodge-podge of disinformation and slander. He really should because he is the official leader – to the extent we have one – of the Christian faith. Someone should speak up. I know some who would just say about Obama's verbal excrement, “Consider the source”. I've never found that a satisfactory path to follow. It usually ends up with the error established as fact and accepted, rather than the truth prevailing. And even if in the next world it does, I'd like to see it get an airing in this one.

Click here to email your elected representatives.

Comments

No Comments Yet

Post a Comment


Name   
Email   
URL   
Human?
  
 

Upload Image    

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?