John R. Houk
© July 20, 2017
I just finished
reading an interesting essay
from the
Acton Institute by Ed West. The essay is about the
Muslim migration to Europe. West notes that the Europe has become a secularist
society in which the Christian influence that developed Western Culture and
mores has been pushed to near non-existence.
Then West notes that a Europe that replaced Christianity
with religion-killing Multiculturalism. A lying Multiculturalism that claims to
accept everything that is diverse EXCEPT Christianity.
West does not specifically spell out a solution for the
Muslim invasion rather he dwells on how it happened and its current affects.
Here is my suggestion to reverse the curse of observant
Islam in Europe which will be a great inoculation for America’s future. BUT my
suggestion will drive Leftists, Multiculturalists and – wait for it
– Muslims – crazy.
It is time for Christian Americans to evangelize Europe to
return faith to Europeans. The obstacle to evangelism is that secularist
Multiculturalism is so entrenched that Europe’s hate-speech laws that look away
when it comes to Islam is avidly anti-Christian. Until those hate-speech laws
are reversed to allow Christians to criticize Islam as much as Muslims are able
to criticize Christianity in some of the most vile hate-preaching imaginable,
Christian evangelism will have to avoid speaking the truth about Islam as
compared to the Christian faith.
Christian evangelism will have to focus on the power of
Christ’s Redemptive purpose for humanity and hammer the meaning of the Love of
God which is finding Salvation. Even that will be a fine line because Biblical
morality is harshly divergent from Secular Humanist morality. When Leftist
alternative lifestyles criticize God’s morality, Evangelists will need to
confront the criticism in the same manner the Early Christians confronted Roman
polytheistic cosmopolitanism. Which was with steadfast faith in Christ without
violence and willing to become a public yet moral spectacle even if it ends
with a martyrdom quite different from Muslim martyrdom.
Muslim martyrdom is willing to die while killing as many
non-Muslims as possible.
Christian martyrdom is to die alone or with fellow Believers
as an example of faith in God. Christian martyrdom has a spiritual purpose to
influence non-Christians that joy in Christianity is vastly different than
selfish secularist joy which is only about self-gratification.
Devoted
zealous or ardent in attachment, loyalty, or
affection
Being devoted to
something means being focused on that particular thing almost exclusively. When
you are devoted to a cause, you work to achieve its goals. When you
are devoted to a person, you place their needs above your own.
Being devoted doesn't have to
refer only to personal relationships. It can focus on any area, activity, or
passion. … READ THE REST
American Heritage Dictionary
1. Feeling or displaying strong affection or attachment; ardent: a devotedfriend.
2. Having been consecrated; dedicated.
Collins English Dictionary
1. feeling or demonstrating loyalty or devotion; ardent; devout
2. (foll by: to) set apart, dedicated, or consecrated
Based on WordNet 3.0, Farlex
clipart collection.
Adj.
1. devoted - zealous in devotion or affection; "a
devoted husband and father"; "devoted friends"
»» dedicated - devoted to a cause or ideal or
purpose; "a dedicated dancer"; "dedicated teachers";
"dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal"-
A. Lincoln
2. devoted - (followed by `to') dedicated exclusively
to a purpose or use; "large sums devoted to the care of the poor";
"a life devoted to poetry"
»» dedicated - devoted to a cause or ideal or
purpose; "a dedicated dancer"; "dedicated teachers";
"dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal"- A. Lincoln
devoted
adjective
The definition of devoted is
someone who is very loyal and steadfast in giving love or attention.
(yourdictionary.com definition)
Webster's New World College Dictionary
1. characterized by devotion or
zeal; dedicated
2. very loving, loyal, or
faithful: a devoted husband
English Wiktionary
Adjective
(comparative more devoted, superlative most devoted)
So you get the idea of the selfless devotion in prayer and
faith in God that I am talking about, right? This is not a “
let us bow our
heads and pray” for five-seconds. This evangelistic prayer to revive
Christianity in Europe and revitalize Christian faith in America, is a get down
and get to work spiritually to cast down those unseen enemies that will
eventually lose anyway if you read the end of
The Revelation of John the Apostle.
Here is a character of evangelism that is work and will
succeed and Christ will add to the invisible Church hastening the return of
King Jesus from the Epistle to the Ephesians:
5 Therefore be
imitators of God [copy Him and follow His example], as
well-beloved children [imitate their father].
2 And walk
in love, [esteeming and delighting in one another] as Christ loved us and gave
Himself up for us, a
[a]slain
offering and sacrifice to God [for you, so that it became] a sweet fragrance.
8 For once
you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord; walk as children of Light
[lead the lives of those native-born to the Light].
9 For the
fruit (the effect, the product) of the Light
or[a]the
Spirit [consists] in every form of kindly goodness, uprightness of
heart, and trueness of life.
10 And try
to learn [in your experience] what is pleasing to the Lord [let your lives be
constant proofs of what is most acceptable to Him].
11 Take no
part in
and have no fellowship with the fruitless deeds
and enterprises
of darkness, but instead [let your lives be so in contrast as to]
[b]expose
and reprove
and
convict them.
12 For it is
a shame even to speak of or mention the things that [such
people] practice in secret.
13 But when
anything is exposed and reproved by the light, it is made
visible and clear; and where everything is visible and clear
there is light.
14 Therefore
He says, Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine
(make day dawn) upon you and give you light.
15 Look
carefully then how you walk! Live purposefully and worthily and accurately,
not as the unwise and witless, but as wise (sensible, intelligent
people),
16 Making
the very most of the time [buying up each opportunity], because the days are
evil.
17 Therefore
do not be vague and thoughtless and foolish,
but understanding and firmly grasping what the will of the
Lord is.
18 And do
not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery; but ever be filled and stimulated
with the [Holy] Spirit.
19 Speak out
to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, offering praise with
voices [
[c]and
instruments] and making melody with all your heart to the Lord,
20 At all
times and for everything giving thanks in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to
God the Father. (
Ephesians 5: 1-2, 8-20; 6: 10-18 AMPC)
______________________
The spiritual cause and cure of the
'European intifada'
July 14, 2017
At
the start of the Syrian migration crisis, an Israeli security official warned
of a coming “European intifada.” Few noticed it at the time. But after a series
of attacks on largely Jewish targets in France and Belgium, the new reality
finally hit home in January 2015, when armed men opened fire at the Paris
offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Since then, terrorist
atrocities have escalated through Paris, Nice, Belgium, Sweden, Berlin, and
London. They include the murder of a priest by two Islamists in Normandy as he
was saying Mass.
Charlie Hebdo is a tedious and tasteless
publication that makes fun of dead children and has predictable 1968 views on
almost everything, except one of the most sacred: criticism of Islam. The day
of the massacre Hebdo featured as its front page a caricature
of Michel Houellebecq, whose controversial new novel was published that
week. Soumission is set in a France in the near future in
which an Islamist party has come to power with the connivance of both the Left
and Right in order to defeat the nativist National Front. Houellebecq, already
in trouble for criticising France's second largest religion in a previous work,
has since moved to Ireland, seeing France as no longer safe. Soumission became
a mega-bestseller. Also topping the charts that week was a polemic by Éric
Zemmour, a journalist of Jewish-North African descent who has criticised mass
immigration and the “demographic tsunami” it has brought.
The recent attacks in Manchester and London came as another
important book was selling in vast numbers,
The Strange Death of Europe by
Douglas Murray, which has spent weeks at the top of the
Sunday Times charts
despite this subject being not the sort of thing one talks about in polite
company. Murray's book follows James Kirchick's equally bleak-sounding
The
End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Ages. In his
book, Kirchick warns:
A Europe unmoored from the Enlightenment values it
brought to the world, ignorant of and unwilling to protect its civilizational
achievements, captive to chauvinist demagogues, indisposed to defend itself,
bereft of its Jews, estranged from America, cowed before Russia, and reverted
to its traditional state of nature with nations pursuing mercenary
self-interest at the expense of unity would not only spell the end of Europe as
we know it. Such a collapse would usher in nothing less than a new dark age.
Despite this, Kirchick is more optimistic than the title
suggests. He concludes that the continent may get out of its current mess, if
it can pool its resources and enjoy closer integration.
Others are not so optimistic. In Germany, historian Rolf
Peter Sieferle has made even more of a splash. His account of German political
psychology and its effects, Finis Germania, has enjoyed good sales
just as it has been roundly condemned by the prestige press. Die Zeit called
it a book of “brazen obscenity.” (He has not been able to enjoy his surprise
bestseller, having taken his own life last September.)
A former socialist who grew disillusioned with his
generation's naivety, Sieferle wrote that “[a] society that can no longer
distinguish between itself and the forces that would dissolve it is living
morally beyond its means.” In fact, he argued, Germans actually want to
disappear because of a belief that Germans are uniquely guilty due to the
Holocaust – that they carry a blood guilt as “the absolute enemies of our common
humanity,” becoming “a scapegoat people.”
This was perhaps why in 2015 German Chancellor Angela Merkel
made the momentous decision to open her nation’s borders. The numbers involved,
and the future implications for our continent, are staggering; the reasons for
her decision remain a mystery. Earlier that year the chancellor had told Reem
Sahwil, a 14-year-old Palestinian girl who wanted to stay in Germany, that if
she allowed Sahwil’s family to stay in Germany, all Africans would want to join
them. Germany “cannot cope with that,” she said.
Many in the German media criticised the coldness of
Chancellor Merkel's response and so when in late August migration pressure
looked like overwhelming Greece and Italy, the Germans snapped. In August 2015,
Merkel
announced her open door
policy, cloaking it in moral terms. “Universal civil rights were so far tied
together with Europe and its history,” she said. “If Europe fails on the
question of refugees, its close connection with universal civil rights will be
destroyed. It won't be the Europe we imagine.” As she
told them, “
Wir Schaffen das” – “We can do
this.” What followed were scenes of jubilation among Germans as they welcomed
refugees into their towns, as Murray writes:
As the trains came into the stations and the
migrants got off and went through the crowds some locals wolf-whistled and gave
them high-fives. Human chains of volunteers handed out food and gifts,
including sweets and teddy bears for the children. It was not just an
expression of the Willkommenskultur ("welcoming
culture") that Germany says it likes to practise. These migrants were not
merely being welcomed. They were being celebrated, as though they were the
local football team returning triumphant, or heroes returning from a war.
In just a year Germany accepted a total of
1.1 million migrants. Most were
not Syrian, and most were not refugees as defined by the UN. Most were young
men, and most intended to bring their family with them; once those relatives
are taken into account, Germany will have experienced nothing short of a
demographic revolution. At a time when low-skilled jobs are disappearing this
is a potential explosive cocktail.
Kirchick wrote that “historical guilt for the crimes of
Nazism inspired an open-door refugee policy as ill considered as it was well
intentioned, the negative consequences of which will be felt for generations.”
Among the new Germans was the Sahwil family, which was given permission to stay
at the end of 2015. The young girl gave a little-noticed interview in which she
said she hoped to return home one day ... when Israel “is no longer there.”
Merkel's executive decision was only an acceleration of a
long-running trend that began after the Second World War with the first migrant
workers in Britain, France, Germany, and the Low Countries. They were there for
economic reasons, and people did not expect them to stay, but as Western Europe
became diverse, much to the discomfort and opposition of people outside the
political class, all sorts of rationalizations were offered. Yet as Murray
accurately points out, at the heart of this was a spiritual void.
On a profound level, we imported religious people because of
the absence of our own faith. Western Europe took immigrants from the Islamic
world just as it was adopting bohemian culture mores, characterised by more
liberal attitudes to drug and alcohol use, and extra-marital sex. The new
“bourgeois-bohemian” middle class combined this countercultural individualism
with the materialistic values of capitalism. Across 10 Western European
countries, church attendance
fell from 38.4 to 16.6
percent between 1975 and 1998. Europe became a consumerist paradise with an
economic model that depended on demographic growth, which only religious
societies can provide. In France, Caucasian women who practise religion have a
half-child fertility advantage over the non-religious; in Austria
self-identified atheists have fertility rates of just
0.86 children per woman.
It was assumed, if unspoken, that Muslim migrants – dressed
in suits, often moderate beer drinkers – would become godless or at least less
observant upon breathing European air, their children even more so. It's safe
to say there are now few people left who have not been disabused of this
notion. Muslims arrived in a continent going through a revolutionary social
change which made the path to integration complex and difficult. Unsurprisingly
their sons, feeling the sense of alienation common to second-generation migrants
sometimes feel little attachment to the national culture, preferring a strong,
global brotherhood of faith that offers the comfort of certainty and the heroic
narrative. And yet when the UK government repeatedly emphasises
“British values” during
anti-extremism initiatives, they find it hard to articulate those same values
without the obvious one: Christianity. Instead, they limply define Britishness
by
tolerance and diversity, almost
as if these things are a replacement faith.
…
Which they sort of are. Diversity offers Europeans a form of redemption,
something heavily influenced by the tragedy of 1914 to 1945 but also deeply
linked to our guilty culture. When the body of three-year-old Syrian boy Aylan
Kurdi, a Syrian washed up on a Turkish beach, it became the most powerful image
of the decade. Yet in the Arab world, there was little sense that this was
their fault. As Murray writes, “there was not anything there remotely like the
introspection and self-accusation indulged in by Western politicians and
media.” Indeed, the Gulf Arab states have taken virtually no Syrian refugees.
Europe has a guilt and savior complex. As a result, it seems
to be replacing the atonement of the Savior’s death with its own.
Much of Europe's behaviour since 1945 has been an attempt to
exit history, a tired continent looking for peace and inner calm, sick of the
wars of religion, ideology and race that have dogged it for centuries; in doing
so it can also finally achieve its redemption. The tragedy is that, in doing
so, it has almost certainly ensured that their posterity will not get that
peace. Murray concludes that “[i]t is always possible that the tide of faith
that began its long, withdrawing roar of retreat in the nineteenth century will
come back in again.” One must hope. Together with their traditional faith,
Europeans must recover their lost Burkean notion of society being a compact
between the living, the dead and those yet unborn.
___________________
Defeat the Islamic Invasion with Christ
John R. Houk
© July 20, 2017
__________________
The spiritual cause and cure of the 'European intifada'
© 2017 Acton Institute
Acton Institute Mission & Core
Principles
The Acton Institute is a think-tank whose mission is to promote a
free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberty and sustained by
religious principles.
The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty is named
after the great English historian, Lord John Acton (1834-1902). He is best
known for his famous remark: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power
corrupts absolutely.” Inspired by his work on the relation between liberty and
morality, the Acton Institute seeks to articulate a vision of society that is
both free and virtuous, the end of which is human flourishing. To clarify this
relationship, the Institute holds seminars and publishes various books,
monographs, periodicals, and articles.
The Acton Institute organizes seminars aimed at educating religious
leaders of all denominations, business executives, entrepreneurs, university
professors, and academic researchers in economics principles, and in the
connection that can exist between virtue and economic thinking. We exhort
religious leaders to … READ
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