A Foundation Of Love

by Rebecca Bynum (Feb. 2009)

 
Within the anti-jihad movement, there are many who argue that Islam need not be countered in its religious aspects, but only as a political system, because only by its politics are non-Muslims directly affected by it. In this view, the religious aspects of Islam are a private matter and should be of little concern. But as I have noted many times, a man’s belief, that is, his fundamental view of reality, determines his attitude toward and reaction to the world of reality and to other human beings. Thus, belief systems must be of utmost concern if one cares about the destiny of humanity.

We abandon our responsibility to our fellow human beings if we do not address Islam in all its aspects. As Ibn Warraq has noted many times, “Muslims are the first victims of Islam.” And though Islam certainly provides a strong sense of belonging which benefits social cohesion, it does so at the expense of personal freedom and individuality. Islam is something one is born into and cannot leave without the most extreme intellectual, emotional and physical struggle – a struggle very few win, as witnessed by the tiny number of ex-Muslims compared to the number of ex-Catholics or ex-Lutherans for example. The right to question and leave the religion one is born into, is a fundamental freedom absolutely denied by Islam, which is why the numbers of Muslims multiply rapidly compared to other religious groups. In Great Britain, the Muslim population is multiplying at a rate ten times that of the rest of society.[1] Thus, curtailing Muslim immigration must be a part of the strategy of resistance. We have to deal with Islam as a whole and realize that it spreads not so much by the attractiveness of its ideas, but in large measure by simple procreation.

Religion in its most basic sense is what man perceives the nature of reality to be. Even the viewpoint that reality is impersonal and indifferent may be said to be “religious” because it is fundamentally a belief. It is religious belief which provides a common consensus about the nature of the world we inhabit and which forms the basis of culture. It is obvious that we in the West no longer agree on the basic nature of reality and thus our culture, which is at bottom a creation of the mind, is disintegrating. Here, Richard Weaver avoids the word “religion” by substituting the term “metaphysical dream,” but his meaning is the same:

 

“The darkling plain, swept by alarms, which threatens to be the world of our future, is an area in which conflicting ideas, numerous after the accumulation of centuries, are freed from the discipline earlier imposed by ultimate conceptions. The decline is to confusion; we are agitated by sensation and look with wonder upon the serene somnambulistic creations of souls with had the metaphysical anchorage. Our ideas become convenient perceptions, and we accept contradiction because we no longer feel the necessity of relating thoughts to the metaphysical dream.

“It must be apparent that logic depends upon the dream and not the dream upon it. We must admit this when we realize that logical processes rest ultimately on classification, that classification is by identification, and that identification is intuitive. It follows then that a waning of the dream results in confusion of counsel, such as we behold on all sides in our time. Whether we describe this as decay of religion of loss of interest in metaphysics, the result is the same; for both are centers with power to integrate, and, if they give way, there begins a dispersion which never ends until culture lies in fragments.”[2]

 

On the other hand, disintegration also comes on the eve of new creation: the seed must die before it can sprout. And though the old is passing away, disintegrating, something new may emerge as a center of integration. What may now be discerned is there is a new religious basis is in active formation centered on individual subjective experience (God-consciousness) rather than theology. Theology is created by the reasoning made possible through anchoring thought in religious assumptions. But, as Weaver points out, the ultimate source of that anchoring is intuition, that is, experiential knowing through contact with reality.

As I have pointed out in articles past, a major element of confusion in both Judaism and Christianity is the failure to differentiate the very old conceptions of God from more modern conceptions. This has created a schizophrenic world-view in which God (or reality, or the universe – these may be used interchangeably) is both benevolent and malevolent at once. On the one hand, God is a loving, forgiving, transcendant and perfect father, but on the other, he is a stern punisher, chiefly concerned with making black marks in one’s book of life and planning for one’s eternal punishment in a humanly vengeful fashion.

Fear of God was once the prime motivating factor for the religious person of olden time: “Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.”[3] Now, however, the motivating factor of both Christianity and Judaism seems to be guilt, or the avoidance thereof. It may plausibly be put forward, that the religious stream of the West is gradually moving away from fear as the primary motivating factor for religious living, through a period where conflicting ideas about the nature of reality are accepted. Ultimately, however, these conflicts must be resolved and religion must make sense to the modern mind.

Since the Enlightenment, Western man has, in large measure, rejected the schizophrenic view of God provided by Judaism and Christianity and opted instead for a God of indifference, or the idea that God is dead, or that even he never lived. In the extreme version of this view, the universe is seen as totally mechanistic and thus purposeless, mindless and valueless. Mind is nothing more that a glandular illusion and value is merely a social consensus which may change with the passing fashion. The great error here is the failure to differentiate the tangible from the intangible, between matter and life, or even between matter and mind. Samuel Butler’s early and profound critique of Darwin rested upon his objection to the banishing of mind from the equation.

Materialism in the West hit its high-water mark no later than the first half of the twentieth century, when Jacques Barzun and Richard Weaver made their heroic efforts to reinstate mind as a reality to be reckoned with on its own terms. Their work stands in stark contrast to the increasingly insipid appeal of the new scientism which offers a chemical answer to every mental and emotional question.

The Muslim religion as we have seen in previous essays is more or less comprised of an enhanced materialism – materialism as religion. And as stated earlier, religion for Muslims is thought to be as much a line of descent as a set of beliefs, conferring as it does a belief in essential superiority.

‘Since Islam regards non-Muslims as on a lower level of belief and conviction, if a Muslim kills a non-Muslim…then his punishment must not be the retaliatory death, since the faith and conviction he possesses is loftier than that of the man slain…’Islam and its peoples must be above the infidels, and never permit non-Muslims to acquire lordship over them.”[4]

 

Like Western materialism there is no effort to differentiate the tangible and intangible in Islam. Worship itself is brought down to the material level, being thought of as the equivalent of obedience to Islam. And since Muslims are mainly created by being born into the religion, it is difficult to see much difference between Islam in this regard and the belief in Aryan superiority or the belief in the aristocratic superiority of an earlier age. The arbitrary idea of superiority outrages the overwhelming human desire for fairness. Islam is a man-made house of straw and will undoubtedly be destroyed by that unseen wind, the pressure of true proportion, measure and value, which is felt by all who love freedom. For it is clear, Islam unfairly enslaves the body, mind and spirit of all its adherents and therefore must be opposed in its entirety, as a religion, by religious counter values. If we attempt to oppose it as a political system, by political counter-values, we must confess our political values are ultimately rooted in religious values, just as in Islam and we are immediately face to face with the religious conflict we had hoped to avoid.

Perhaps the religious thought that will prove most effective in opposing Islam, is not the Christianity of the Middle Ages, nor the Judaism of Moses and the Torah, but a new and living religious sensibility based on the reality of the steady God-consciousness of those who have found their own personal religious experience. While it is tempting to dismiss the New Age movement as a fad, it nevertheless reveals a profound spiritual hunger and a widespread searching after a religion of experience in the West. Many, very many, are seeking and finding. Modern man desires his religion first hand, and is unsatisfied with the second-hand religion of the past, religion that is based on the experience of others, even if that “other” is Saint Paul himself. And herein lies a paradox, that the greatest objective reality (God) may only be found in a purely subjective manner.

“Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him [Jesus] a question, tempting him, and saying,

 
Master, which is the great commandment in the law?

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. [Deuteronomy 6:5]

This is the first and great commandment.

And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. [Leviticus 19:18]

On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”[5]

Truly this is the kernel of Western religious thought. In order to know God, one must love God and when one loves God, one partakes of his nature and it becomes impossible for the God-knowing man not to love his brethren, the children of God, even as God himself loves them. Once a man discovers the kingdom of heaven within his heart, the world is transformed and all life is infused with new meaning and value. He cannot help but reject a view of God contrary to the loving spirit he knows by and through his own experience.

It is, however, all but impossible to oppose the twisted value system of Islam, by affirming there are no values except those of man-made consensus. One may point out the man-made nature of Islam, its essential materialism, its distortion of the scripture and the base character of its prophet, but one cannot effectively counter the God of Fear with a God of Nothing. The God of Fear can only be vanquished by a God of Love and to do this, love must be affirmed as the highest reality known to man. This cannot be done by an atheism that rejects the separation of matter and value, thus rejecting the reality of value, the reality of love, and the reality of the transcendent entirely. Religion can only be opposed by religion and it is to those God- knowing men who simply know that they know, who will most convincingly reject the Islamic characterization of God and its distorted world-view.

What we face is not only a clash of civilizations, or even a clash of religions, but a clash between levels of reality. Thus, we fight on the side of truth against error, goodness against evil, and life against death. The justice of our cause is self-evident: opposing evil is not evil. We stand upon a foundation of love in opposition to a foundation of fear and hatred. If we can hold the high ground, and deal with Islam firmly and with Muslims humanely, we will not lose.

Allah is already dead.

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[1] London Times, “Muslim population rising ‘ten times faster than rest of society’” by Richard Kerbaj, Jan. 30, 2009.

[2] Weaver, Richard Ideas Have Consequences (The University of Chicago Press, 1948) pgs. 20-21

[3] The Bible, Psalm 111:10 (King James Version)

[4] Tabandeh, Sultanhussein A Muslim Commentary on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1970

[5] The Bible, Matthew 22 35-40 (King James version)

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