|
|
Headage Pat's Lament "Both autocratically through the courts and democratically at the ballot box, America is being de-Christianized; becoming a pagan country. As Vaclav Havel said, what we seem to be trying to create is 'the first atheistic civilization in the history of mankind.'"So laments Pat Buchanan. To be blunt: paganism is not atheism, Pat, it's just not your brand of theism. So sorry. The shedding of YHWH is a necessary step in the evolution of ethical humanity. The question is whether we've done it too soon, because old man Allah is up and running and strong. There is a problem there, and a big one. While the Books of the Jews do indeed contain that old tribal magic, that Chosen People ethos, all of the tribes that the Israelites hated, killed and defeated--the Amalekites, Amorites, Ammonites, Hittites, Girgashites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites, and so on--are merely names now, and have faded into the strata of history. Not so the Book of the Muslims. In it, their Most Holy Prophet says that Allah commands hatred of the Jews, and the Jews as a people are still very much with us. We don't need to hem and haw about how "maybe" the tribes mentioned in the Muslim Book are "related" to the modern Jews, the way that some try to relate the Canaanites to the modern Arabs. I used to believe that each iteration of the Book of the MonoGod was an
improvement upon the last: there were the Israelites, steeped in their
tribalism, which was surpassed by the universalist ethical leanings of the
Christian sects, which was then somehow improved upon by the writings of
Mohammad. But then I learned more. I came to know about Mohammad's rejection by
the Jews as a prophet of their God, and the historical facts surrounding his
writings: "What was correct wasn't new, and what was new wasn't
correct" is the maxim applied to his efforts. Never was there a more
emphatically human attempt to birth prophecy! How holy can a potential prophet's
anger at rejection possibly be? Not very. The keepers of the MonoGod's holy
books wouldn't let Mohammad play with them, and so he wrote his anger at them
into his version of the Book. And now, because of the peculiar resonance that
this desert tribesman's words have with his tribal kin, we have the monstrosity
that is Islam: a faith with no organization, no reformative authority, and
explicit instructions to kill members of a specific ethnicity writ large into
its holiest Book, ready to be quoted as the very word of God to anyone inclined
to hear them. Fabulous! Readers will point to Christianity's bloody history. Yes, I will say. And when was the last Crusade? What? Centuries ago? Ah, I see. The Holocaust! Others will say. Don't forget about that! Pius XII did nothing! Yes, I will say. And who are the most fervent supporters of Israel now? What? Evangelical Christians? Ah, I see. But any religion can be used to justify any hatred! Yes, I will say. That is why we have so many Christians flying planes into buildings, and why all those Jews are blowing themselves up in Riyadh. The rest of the world has already gone through the process that Islam now needs to inflict upon us, and instead of armor, swords and arrows, they will use biological agents, nuclear weapons and airliners to conduct their convulsive evolution. Splendid! The Muslim faith as it now exists is deeply flawed, perhaps irredeemably so. It is so out of step with modernity that the Arab civilization based upon it ground to a halt centuries ago, unable to progress any further. Which brings me back to Pat's lament: our incipient atheistic society. An atheist will not assign proper weight to the faith of a theistic believer. He will underestimate the power of the MonoGod idea, and will thus underestimate a theistic opponent. That is why it is fortunate, in some ways, that our man Bush is a believer. He knows what the MonoGod idea is good for, and how it can be used to provide the strength of will needed to bash our enemies on the head until they can't get up. Pat Buchanan is a forward-thinking fellow, and projects our cultural shedding of YHWH into the future, when we will all be putting our grandparents down like faithful dogs and scraping all of our children from our wombs, heading towards societal twilight. But he's wrong. For an atheistic nation, it's astounding that about 9 in 10 of us of us believe in god in some way or another. It's just that we no longer think that said god cares much about "girlie magazines," or that god ought to rigidly inform all of our ethical decisions. Which is certainly frightening to a man like Pat, because it puts him, along with the culture, into a vertiginous free-fall. But, like those Jewish scholars who believe that YHWH gave the Jews the Torah and then stepped away to watch what they’d do with it, we in the Christianized West are taking our first wobbly steps away from the ethical parent-idea that is god. We’ll probably fall on our asses, but we’ll get up and try again. We’ve still got enough faith to get the important things done, and right now the most important thing is to avoid getting caught up in the messy chaos of the Islamic birth into the modern world.
|
