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Thursday, July 20, 2017

Defeat the Islamic Invasion with Christ


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 praying Christians believing in the unseen power of God over the seen power of a Leftist State and the seen power of Muslim violent Jihad, will prevail. THE KEY is the word “devoted”.

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)


2. Zealous; characterized by devotion.

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:

Therefore be imitators of God [copy Him and follow His example], as well-beloved children [imitate their father].

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.

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].

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)
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The spiritual cause and cure of the 'European intifada'

July 14, 2017
Part of the Acton Blog RELIGION & LIBERTY TRANSATLANTIC

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.
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Defeat the Islamic Invasion with Christ
John R. Houk
© July 20, 2017
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The spiritual cause and cure of the 'European intifada'

Ed West is an author, journalist and blogger. He writes a regular blog for The Spectator and is deputy editor of The Catholic Herald. He is the author of The Diversity IllusionGroupthink, and The Silence of Our Friends.

© 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 THE REST


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