Sunday, April 05, 2009

The Role of the Sacred in the Counterjihad

In last night’s Turban Bomb post, IoshkaFutz left a thoughtful comment about the decline of the sacred amongst us infidels, and the necessity for a re-sacralization of the West if the Counterjihad is to be victorious.

I reproduce his thoughts below in their entirety, edited slightly for spelling and clarity. The emphases are mine:

I am not proposing to give in to Islamic sacredness. Quite the contrary. I am upholding the sacredness of our own ethos including the customs it has generated as opposed to Enlightenment indifference.

Instead of the emphasis on taunting, the emphasis should be on simply affirming, (reminding) positively what we are all about, or what we were once all about… an issue far greater than freedom of speech — or else we should ask the Good Baron to change the fine pic at the top of his Blog and the caption below it:

At the siege of Vienna in 1683 Islam seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe. We are in a new phase of a very old war.

If it’s a very old war, what the hell were they fighting about back then? Ideology? Freedom of speech? The right to mock? Or bedrock virtues that were not today’s egalitarianism or supposed freedoms, but sanity, courage, forgiveness, chivalry, purpose (anti-fatalism), reason and on and on… right on down to our foodstuffs, stories, songs, wines and beers. (Which BTW are intimately connected to what was once sacred to us).

I say treat those things as sacred or at least sacrosanct… and then let them whine. To me the Muslims who in their mosques preach terrorism offend the sacred. They and our politicians (our state, our law) need to be reminded that some things are holy and non-negotiable.

I accept that the Muslims believe that their nonsense is holy, but I suggest reminding them in a firm and strong way that to us most of it is either downright sacrilegious or far inferior because our “sense” (our sacred) is holier… and that we are attached to pork, wine, song, dance, just as strongly as we are to the COMPLETE PROHIBITION of freedom of speech when it comes to preaching terrorism.

I say that despite all appearances, Islam is not deranged but quite rational. Rationally evil, but rational. Nothing deranged in the sense of “toys in the attic” lasts 1400 years, weathering absolutely everything that history has slung its way. They have a goal, and every single aspect of Islam is rationally poised to reach it. A teenage suicide bomber might be irrational, but suicide bombing is not. The boy is timed, primed and targeted for a purpose, by someone over him who otherwise would have not had a chance against overwhelming power. The rest of the world’s religions are in different ways blessedly irrational (mystical), but Islam has a worldly purpose and plays our Enlightenment weaknesses like a fiddle.
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There are other considerations. For example, who is the real interlocutor? Them, the Muslims? Forget about it. It’s a waste of time. Our own mostly benighted people, and the fools that govern us are the only ones we may ever hope to reach. They won’t be reached by insulting the sacred. Because underneath it all, everybody has a sense of the sacred… and so they are torn.

In today’s world it is easy to arrest someone for being offensive. But if instead of a placard with a Mo-bomb, if there were one with a choice bit from our constitution… getting arrested, insulted, called a Fascist and beaten up would be quite a different matter. It would be incontrovertible truth that what we live by has become a dead letter. That we are arrested for citing our own constitution. This would pave the way for a necessary refounding.

Westerners need to decide what’s sacred to them. Mohammad is the top dog in that religion. Insulting the top dog could be a tactical error. It goes under the heading of “religion”, and religion goes under the heading of births, funerals, marriages… important passages. And, thanks to the Enlightenment, it goes under the heading of the “private sphere.” That is why some construe it as a gratuitous personal insult to each single member of that religion. Better to fight for a piggy bank and a pork chop, a Christmas carol, a brewery, a swimming pool — and work up towards Mohammad — than to hammer at the top while everything below is emptied.

It is useless to fight Mohammad if you’re too proud to defend a pork chop or a mannequin in the window. Unless you understand the full import of the caption under the Good Baron’s picture at the top of the blog, you don’t have the picture.

The Enlightenment has disembodied that picture. A country can lose its very soul, be knocked off the very kilter of its continuum under Enlightenment “rights.”

I understand Profitsbeard’s anger. But he cites few instances, Newsweek articles… I cite the emptying out of Turkey, all of North Africa. I can also cite Fjordman’s brilliant essays about why science flourished here and not elsewhere. The same goes for humor, entertainment, fashion, and everything under the sun.

It is easy to win an argument against “theocratic maniacs”, but they have their mirror image: the atheist rationalists, the libertarians. So on the one side we have honor killings and chadors and on the other Gay Parades with Virgin Mary dildos. They have everything sacred and we have nothing sacred. We have monomania.

This struggle is not about teeing off the idiots in the asylum, but about the asylum-keepers having lost sight of sanity.

If you want to drop an Alka-Seltzer tablet into a barrel of amoebae and watch them get riled up, go ahead. I understand what’s at play. I can get worked up in a lather about how they’re supposedly crazy (they’re NOT).

Freedom of speech is not going to save the West. Nothing “Enlightenment” will. The sacredness of our homes, our culture, our history, our customs will, if people wake up to them.

Nothing about Islam is sacred… but isn’t it odd that they are the only ones defending sacredness? Along with the food in schools and prisons, they now have got that in their bag too.

13 comments:

Czechmade said...

As long as you keep discussing on a secular level, you remain very weak. They are the master of the "holy" by their definition.

Tell the imam, he is blaspheming against the Holy Spirit, if he says something against Christians en bloc. Many are guided by Holy Spirit...which he cannot prove not to be the case. If you are able to say that, his "holy" monopoly shrinks immediately.

We need to master our religious language to be able to drive them back into their limited and limiting little beit or dar ash-sheitan. Simple logic cannot really conquer their "holy" (grey matter), even if everybody knows it to be false.

Even communists learned how to respect the Christian holy space - protected by definition - during endless interrogations in communist jails. The Christians did much better than others under immense pressure.

It is amazing that you can safeguard something by definition. There is no real effort involved. It works.

Their false concept of eternity is hitting us badly, counter them with another concept - and they lose.

Even atheists might try to develop a language working in this sense. Than you only repeat what you have to say to their detriment. Call it koan or tao or something else, but make sure you are not unarmed - that you stay on a very firm ground.

Czechmade said...

It is very easy to create something sacred. By definition it can be jogging, mowing the grass in front of your house or fishing in the pond.

The activity has a different meaning.

Kafka defined his writing as prayer.

Why not. The Hindus might think of their disciplined breathing as a prayer. Why not.

It is relatively easy, but we need a consensus as well to make it valid.

This is amazing. Why should be a social fabric a basis for a viable
spiritual exercise? In a way it is wrong. In a way it is necessary.

Should we better avoid the "words"?

Whiskey said...

Somewhat OT: Hotair dot com is reporting that the Danish PM will apologize for the Mohammed Cartoons to Muslims in Instanbul tomorrow, the result of a personal consultation between himself and Obama, and the Turkish PM Gul.

It's rumored the apology will be a total grovel-fest, no word on possible extraditions and so on of the Danish cartoonists.

Obama reportedly personally intervened to get the apology.

X said...

I hope they broadcast it all over denmark. Lets see how they react to that. Somehow I suspect they won't be leaping to congratulate the man for his "bravery".

ChrisLA said...

Apologists for Islam try to disarm Jews and Christians by claiming that we all worship the same God. Those striving for "dialogue" and common ground grab at this bait without really considering whether or not the Jehovah-god has anything in common with the Allah-god. A definitive examination of these two gods written by P. Newton can be found on the Internet. Google "Allah: Is he God." Once having read this study, no one will ever accept the notion that Allah and God are the same. You don't have to be a "believer" in any particular faith to reject the commonality of God and Allah.

Profitsbeard said...

I still say Islam is deranged.

Its goals are paralysis and misogyny and intolerance and rule by crank and murderous maniac.

Madness is often apparent "rationality" carried to irrational extremes.

It has endured by playing on the lowest of male human desires (loot and rape and patriarchal tyranny) by using a superificial kind of "reason" ("We, too, are an Abrahamic religion! Really!", but essentially brings nothing but a mad stasis at the end of its viciously determined and cunningly manipulative thrust.

The sacred is rooted in humility before reality.

Something Mohammad and his followers know nothing about.

Living in their Cosmic Revenge Fantasy instead of appreciating the tender and fragile glories of this evanescent world.

The philsopher A.N. Whitehead said that he was basically an optimistic man because he understood "the inherent instability of evil".

That is my optimism about Islam.

Frantic scambling for the crudest forms of worldly power, and the crushing of the human spirit into a straightjacket of sanctimonious folly, may last a millennium, but will finally collapse of its own anti-natural, anti-human pretensions.

Islam may be an actual "Thousand Year Reich", but all such darknesses shadowing the soul ultimately produce weaker and weaker beings, and their end is certain: inbreeding eventully narrows the self-limiting group to disability, dementia and extinction.

PatriotUSA said...

islam holds nothing sacred but JIHAD, conquest and domination under the sword.

Islam has a worldly purpose and plays our Enlightenment weaknesses like a fiddle.
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I could not have said this better!

islam is evil, vile and without any merit or good for mankind. It's history has proven that, over and over!

Czechmade said...

An example of the sacred by definition might be John the Baptist and his work in the river of Jordan. His saintliness allowed him to foresee Jesus Christ. His saintliness was however not enough to baptize with Holy Spirit.

The only work of Jesus Christ was to bring Holy Spirit. There was nothing else to add - not even New Testament.
The New Testament was of little importance to him and is not part of Trinity.

Quran is (a parody of a holy book) part of the unholy trinity of islam - book, mo, allah.

The sacred by definition in this case is for ex. "kill the infidels". A hell sold as "god".
More than a blasphemy.

The Hindus understand this better than the Christians: one cannot promote a sacred text without being part of a lineage - living tradition. It is not about a "book", reading, preaching, expounding. A Holy Spirit is the link, not the letters.

The letters (the book) might be/is again sacred by definition. It is obviously not enough.

Steven Luotto said...

Ciao Profitsbeard,

The thousand year Reich is going on year 1400. Evil was religionized. Religions work at a different level. They are the bedrock. They are patient, they have long timings.

It was the amazing Fjordman along with some recent forumming that inspired my rant. Once upon a time we were all fools. Then some men were told a set of stories and their civilizations flourished. Before the great scientific achievements, before rationalism and political freedoms, there were religions. Some did well by man, others far less so and got people walking in circles and not even broad circles, but very tight and cruel ones.

Fjordman in his great scholarly works rightfully wants to instill a sense of pride. I am not a scholar so I'll take a dumber approach: I would wish to instill LOVE and ATTACHMENT to those virtues which shaped us. With encroaching Islam far more than mockery rights will be denied us... but the very shape of EVERYTHING to come.

I agree with your assessment. I can tell you why Islam is deranged. I have written 4000 pages on forums about its derangement, its infinite wrongness. But despite it all, it is successful. The green oriflamme flag is proudly flying where it should be reviled. The reasons are many and nobody has a squeaky clean pulpit.

One of the reasons is precisely the freedom we have to change and even refuse our "bedrock"... We have notions of freedom and progress and that means we were allowed to widen or break out of our circles. The right to improve ourselves also means the right to make mistakes.

If you love Astronomy, physics, optics, bacon and eggs, flirtatious women, politics, humor... its best to love the old stories. To rally around them.

At another forum, I read Winston Churchill mentioning, in a famous speech, how the Cathedral in Cologne took 600 years to build. I'm not a scholar, I'm not anything, but I can imagine how much can change in 600 years. Ideologies, friends-to-enemies, enemies-to-friends, fashions, customs... not to mention wars, plagues, floods and locusts. The Dawkins God-delusionists carried on where the rational undeluded minds would have given up. The delusion became something grand and very beautiful, the very symbol of a city... the rest, the politics, except what might still stir our poor minds TODAY (only to be forgotten or transcended tomorrow), became irrelevant.

Clicking deeper into the Winston Churchill pages, I read scads of his wartime speeches... And not at all surprised, I found him time and time again speaking (thinking) like a theologian. There is something sacred about real big fights. Perhaps because the FUTURE is at stake... an "unknown". Yes all is unknown except that defeat will mean different stories and all that they will issue.

Some promised 1000 year reichs and only lasted 12 years, others a New Man, and petered out after a 7O. They generated incredible hope and excitement, they all declared they were based on "fact". And maybe some of those facts even were facts. But there's no beautiful Cathedral with people inside still saying the same thing.

Islam is not Fascism except to those who have a very narrow lens and see the world and man's place in it in terms of "values" and not virtues.

At present, much of the fight is against Islamo-Fascism. And I'm okay with it to an extent. I would hide the Cartoonists in my own home. They are heroes and perhaps - as some suggest - getting the Muslims seriously riled up so that they make a nuisance of themselves and cause events to precipitate is - strategically - the way to go. If I had a magic wand, I would be the first to use it.

But I would like a place for the sacred accorded in the struggle, a love and appreciation and ATTACHMENT for things outside political or enlightenment considerations. I call it sacred. I'm convinced that it is, just as I'm sure that Winston Churchill was convinced, just as I'm sure that even Stalin was convinced - if not of the truth - at least of the utility of making religious appeals when it looked like his countries were about to be overrun.

In all this there might be my cultural bias, which loves an Oriana Fallaci (an atheist) not just for her warnings and denunciations, but for her loving act of humility towards the church she had spent the better part of her years undermining.

She defined herself a Christian Atheist. She believed in the separation of church and state and discovered that underneath it all it was a religious concept. She loved her country to distraction and saw that it was Religion that had kept the pagan wines flowing while at the same time teaching temperance. It was the blessed virgin who had taught compassion, while at the same time being a stern mother. Oriana saw the beauty, perhaps half of the world's classically defined "art" done for the glory of God with much of the philanthropy provided by peasants. She understood that as no one quite does optics and physics like the west, no one really laughs with quite our same gusto either, for the simple reason that we have difficult, almost impossible ideals running parallel with human appetites. Watch me preach the joys and virtues of chastity and then see what happens when Monica Bellucci walks into the room. Oriana loved our music which is mostly happy and hopeful, positive, so unlike the plaintive laments of Islam which seem to consider life a curse.

Perhaps she understood that religion in the broader sense of the term is anyhow inescapable and that all said and done, she didn't have a better story, just a bunch of smart-aleck ideas, but nothing that could create a culture or allow a cathedral to be built over the span of 600 years. Yes, she could probably write a very intelligent book about the importance of teaching history, but would probably not come up with something as crazy as patron saints from other centuries being carried around by the semi-literate and being celebrated by the ignorant with local specialties named after ancient belligerants.

Half of our problem is loss of historical memory. I discovered (on other, less intelligent fora) in the hands of atheists and liberals that nearly 99% of the dead, like Blaise Pascal or even John Von Neumann would not be fit to enter their inner sanctums... They'd be allowed to participate, but lacked the ideological prerequisites to be considered "friends."

I'm beginning to see traitors, but it's really just ignorance. They don't know why they laugh, why they are kind to animals, why women aren't property, why there is Star Trek, why there is the tango instead of Honor Killings.

The reasons are sacred.

Czechmade said...

IoshkaFutz

The problem we face is that the West likes everything to be somewhat complicated and civilized.

That means that simple tricks - Gypsies style - in a railway station or tram number 22 are almost 100% successful.

We should stop writing many words, stand and think that the simple muslim trick is so simple that we almost cannot grasp it:

"The evil number 2367 (Mohammad) is sacred by definition" is a trick focused on one guy who did live it. Pretended "religious" limitation (actually virtue) and exhortation of imitation of anyone after Mohammad/ defined by Mohammad.

It is a counterpart of Electra/Orestes or Odysseus not recognized as such.

The same principle is reflected in islamic sexuality for ex.: all kinds of perversions are sanctioned, but please, please kill the homosexuals at any cost and cover your (raped) women as much as you can.

The muslims celebrated their success in Egypt/Byzance, Mezopotamia/Byzance, Syria/Byzance, parts of India,
Indonesia/Malaysia, Persia etc. using their nasty little stupid trick.

This time they should fail. Let us study more those little nasty tricks of the fifth grade magician.

And also great cultures - including ours.

Steven Luotto said...

Dobry Vecer Czechmade,

You are correct, but you will notice how a complicated jurisprudence can be squeezed out of false premises. Take Communism for example: one was hardly an intellectual in Prague at a certain point of that city's history of one wasn't a communist. Or take the Nobel Prize people, those who award the greatest scientists gave one of the fathers of Modern Terrorism, a man who stole billions from his people, reducing them to misery, and who taught Materska Skola children how to hate, the "coveted" peace prize.

I've come to the conclusion that evil is incredibly appealing. The Gypsy tricks are childish innocence, mere pranks compared to Islam which is fantastically more cunning.

But you're right, we tend to complicate. Becoming angry for us means becoming binary. With reasonable people complications can become side doors of reaching an understanding. With Islam that is fruitless.

I'm certain that if the Islamic question were approached morally, even with a bit of Christian kindness and forgiveness gumming up the works, we'd have the answers at our disposal. But ideals have turned into something to hide behind. Yet again we've gotten too smart for our own good.

X said...

Common mistake, and I see what you're trying to illustrate, but the peace prize isn't handed out by the academy of science. It's a purely political creation, handed out by a Swedish organisation.

Czechmade said...

Jožko,

"compared to Islam which is fantastically more cunning"

Nothing specifically cunning about islam. They just call their war-mongers clerics. Thats all.
Stop calling them clerics and they start crumbling. Use rabelaisian technique "Les moutons de Panurge".