Prophecy Interpretation
So tell me PT, are you the only person you know that thinks about this situation as you do? The situation of prophecy concerning Islam and the West, I mean. (from the other thread).
You have quoted 1 atheist that does, but are you of a group that believes along these lines and is making it "their thing" to "spread the word" about this interpretation of the Word of prophecy? Anything you would like to share about your persepctives on prophecy and where they came from, would be great, too !
I would be very much interested to see your research stats on the Muslim population of the world in specific places and the decline of the West population. Not that I haven't gleened similar from various sources, but I would like to know if your sources are as much from the "left" as from the "right"and of course from any non bias (if even possible) sources.
I am no expert, but I do believe that statistics can be spun any way an imaginitive mind and media can conceive of, to fit their beliefs, etc...
I am open to hearing your argument, basically, but I always want to stay "centered" and objective...I think there are enough people on the planet that are not...or are still asleep. And I guess I want to see where you are at.
And what about the seeming fact that the majority of Muslims don't seem to be of the same ilk as the fanatics of violent Islam? Do you think they (majority of Muslims) are just waiting patiently for the chance to rise up and join the take over crowd...?? Or do you think that they are genuinely not interested in being a part of that violent perspective of Islam?
And to any Muslims out there...please, share your perspective with usIt will take several posts to answer your questions - but I am not unique in this view. It is wide spread and daily gaining ground among Evangelicals. Within 5-10 years, it will likely be the only thing taught. It's precepts are undeniable - only the particulars are still debatable and will probably remain so until we are much closer.
Concerning prophecy - the Bible is graphic about end times. Until the very recent past, many in the church have believed that the Papacy - Rome - was behind the ultimate appearance of a figure called Antichrist. Much of that thought has been passed down through the ages since the Protestant Reformation. The Catholic Church was obviously against the Protestants and there ensued a long and bloody struggle. In the breach - many Protestants began questioning if the Bible prophesied these events. Up until that time, the Catholic Church in the west, held all theological thought within it's dominions.
Luther, the spark that finally set the kindling of the reformation in an irreversible separation, did not believe the Book of Revelation belonged in the Bible. Upon learning that the martyr Polycarp - John the Apostle's heir - emphatically stated that revelation was John's Book - Luther relented.
It was the only book he did not write a commentary on. Luther simply said he did not understand it. His only thought about it was this: that if it could be understood at all, it most likely could be understood as a history of the Persecutions and Apostasy of Christ's church.
With this in mind - several learned men began to interpret the Book (and related books) in that method. It became known as the Historical Method of interpretation. Within a generation 3 great works had been produced and all Protestants became enamored with understanding the scriptures this way. The central feature of it's message was that the Papacy was a false religion and that it was the great Antichrist of the ages - and in the end days - would launch a final assault on the true church (which in their minds was Protestantism)
Furthermore, both Luther and Calvin viewed the Antichrist image as a 2 horned beast. The two horns of this beast was not only the Papacy - but also Mohamedism. The Turk and the Catholic were fierce persecutors of the true religion of Jesus Christ - so they said. In their ideas, it was obvious in that the Turks were fighting the Church (both Protestant and Catholic) from the outside - and the Catholics were fighting it from within.
In their view - all the symbols, numbers and cataclysms could be explained half literally and half symbolically as the events unfolding from the time of Christ - in front of their very eyes - and deep into the future.
These ideas prevailed well into the 18th century as you saw in Quincy Adam's writings - (and others I did not post).
In England during the late 1600's - there was a wave of end times belief that swept over the country for a generation. There was no one who did not think the end was near. Sir Isaac Newton became caught up in the study of it when a close student - a dear friend - got in the habit of predicting dates. All were wrong. For many years. The problem for Newton would have been inconsequential except the friend had the ear of the Queen and her court - who loved to hear of the imminent return of Christ. Newton was deeply embarrassed by it all and expelled the man from his presence.
Newton's scientific papers were passed down until in 1939 they wound up at Sotheby's where the famous Economist Maynard Keynes purchased them for the Alchemy subjects. Passed again to a manuscript collector who in 1969 bequeathed them to the Jerusalem Museum where the prophecy notebooks sat for 30 years until they were translated. It was an astonishing massive amount of work - and no one was prepared for what they discovered.
Newton was revealed to be a deeply religious man. He wrote over 1 million words on Biblical prophecy and spent 50 years in the study of it. (most people don't know this) As a result, he discovered that one could not understand prophecy correctly unless he understood history. Consequently, he became a historian. In his research he discovered that the calendar was off by 500 years among other discoveries. According to his writings in the early 1700's - the last days end of the age - could not happen before the year 2060 ad. He used the Historical method and history to derive the date. It was not an absolute date - he suggested it may even be later. That was quite a belief for the time. Concerning it he made this statement:
"About the time of the end, a body of men will be raised up who will turn their attention to the Prophecies, and insist upon their literal interpretation, in the midst of much clamor and opposition."
Sir Issac Newton 1642-1727
He gathered this prediction from the verses in the books which predict that the Righteous will know the days are here and understand the times and the meanings. But the unrighteous will not. Their blindness will be because of their own hardened hearts - and a universal great delusion.
So what does this all have to do with Islam? It relates this way. The historical fever reached a high point in many movements which began predicting more and more frequently - dates that should not have been used. The worst of these was Miller of New York in the 1840's. It was quite a huge movement.
""""""""As the various dates of Christ’s predicted return approached, Millerite publishing went into high gear. In May, 1843, 21,000 copies of the various Millerite papers were published for distribution each week. In New York alone, in the five month period ending April 1843, 600,000 copies of various publications were distributed. In December 1843, Himes proposed the publication of one million tracts; while in May 1844, he announced that five million copies of Millerite publications had been distributed up to that time.""""""""""
The predicted date - then others came and went and there followed The Great Disappoint. The movement split into fractures - of the 7th day Adventists - Jehovah's Witnesses and others. Many traditional denominations stayed away from the Millerite lines and ultimately the Pentecostal and Evangelical movements began - rose up - and swept the country. During the rise of the Evangelicals, a new Prophetic Movement called "Dispensationalism" began in Europe and reached our shores. In time - it melded with Evangelicalism and became it's main Prophetic view.
In this view - the Papacy still held the Antichrist position - but the Turk had faded as the Ottoman Empire fell apart and was dismembered by the allies after WW1. As a result we have had 100 years of Papacy Prophecies - and Mohamedism has been obscured. The Papacy world view has been embellished and intertwined with the development of the European Union and the decline of the church and the rise of modernism. (etc etc)
But 9-11 made a stark imprint on the minds of the world. And it did not escape the notice of prophecy students - and with it has come a revival of the Historical method of interpretation - as history continues to play a modern role. In 2001, with the advent of the personal computer and the raging Islamic wars around the world, and the proclamations of Bin Laden and others of fundamentalist beliefs, a small but strong group of teachers began to say more loudly what they had been saying for 20 years. That Islam is what the Bible has been identifying all along - and the Papacy was never the main character.
As this view has become more and more relevant - it has been made more widely known that the prophecies of Islam's Koran and Hadith - are the exact opposite of the prophecies of the Christian Bible.
Every living soul should give that a brief moment of thought.
In other words, the BIBLE and the KORAN - predict the polar opposite events - and each sees in the other the fulfillment of their prophecies. This is not an obscure rendering, the words of Islamists also shows they clearly think the days are here . As a small example, here's a few quotes,
"This war is fundamentally religious. The people of the East are Muslims. They sympathize with Muslims against the people of the West, who are the Crusaders." (Bin Laden)
"They came as the barbarians of this age. They are carrying hatred, historical animosity and religious prejudices that are fed by the prophecies of the bible against the Muslims, in general, and Iraq, in particular. The fundamentalist evangelists that rule Washington and London..."
Al-Zarqawi's April 2004 Audio Message to the Islamic Nation
""The goals of targeting humans: To provide clarification of the nature of the conflict. By targeting Christians and Jews it shows that this is a religious struggle. To show the main enemy. To cleanse the earth of these people and to deter others. To spread fear in the enemy and this is a requirement documented in Koran. To raise the moral of the Islamic Nation. To destroy the image of the government that was targeted. After the 9/11 attacks, America’s nose was in the dirt."
Al-Battar Training Camp- Excerpts 7th edition March 2004
""We are fighting so that God's word will become supreme and religion will be for God. "And fight them on until there is no persecution and the religion becomes Allah's." [Koranic verse]
Whoever opposes this aim or stands in its way, is our enemy and a target for our swords, regardless of his name and kinship. We have a religion that God has revealed as a scale and judge. Its word is decisive and its rule is not a joke. It is the judge between us and people. Praised be God, our scales are ethereal, our rules are Koranic, and our judgments are prophetic."
Abu Mus’ab Al-Zarqawi
****
This is but a paltry collection - easily 1000 could be posted showing where the Fundmentalists understand their fight as their Islamic prophecy being fulfilled. And they conditionally understand the prophecies of the Christian Bible as being used against them - just as their books say it would.
In Iran, Achmadenijad's belief in the Mahdi as the predicted saviour of the world, and the soon to arrive Isa(Jesus), his divine prophet, mirrors the Bible's prophecies of the coming of the Islamic Antichrist and his false prophet (doing miracles).
This circumstance is called an "Anti-Parallel". (polar opposites side by side through time)
Each side sees the other as evil. That's the essence of it. As the awareness grows that we are literally seeing the fulfillment of these things - the next thing to be fulfilled is an Islamic Caliphate to take over that entire part of the world.
The West is doing everything in it's power to prevent this - and keep "Islam" as a religion of peace - divided into 50 different countries - instead of a revived world religion centered in a single state that spans 3 continents.
When one looks at the map below as if it were a State - instead of a religion - one sees the scale of what the world will face if it is united. The Bible clearly shows that it will eventually unite - and it gives roughly these boundaries as it's form. The red is Shiite Islam - the Iranian kind. The dark green is Sunni. Dark colors show 85-100% Muslim population.
(notice the teeny tiny little white speck there - that's Israel)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c … ry.svg.png
Compare that to the Muslim Ottoman Empire during the days of Isaac Newton.
http://media.npr.org/news/specials/mide … entury.jpgThis argument presumes for a moment the neoconservative presumptions about the whole "Islam versus the West" mentality and all the doctrines that pony along with it. I for one believe the underlying presumptions are based in religious paranoia that has it's foundation in dogmatic thinking and absolutist positions of moral superiority.
Sorry to disturb you here, you have obviously given this a lot of consideration, but I am willing to bet you will be sorely disappointed about the whole "Islam versus the West" thing. It is kind of irrelevant anyway, because China will be the next superpower, and because our very economy depends on imported goods from the Chinese, there is little or nothing we can or will do to stop it.
Once the Chinese become a fully fledged superpower, our political aspirations (be they religious or secular or both), will take the back burner to what the Chinese want to do.
Pretty much what you have described is neoconservative ideology translated into theology. I have heard it before (in other circles), and it is really no big deal as far as I am concerned. There were terrorist attacks before 9/11 that Al Qaeda initiated, and while none of them killed as many people as the incidents on Sept 11th. 2001 did, that number of innocent civilian deaths due to terrorism is commonplace in a place like Africa, and yet they do next to nothing about it most of the time. We seem to have the opposite reaction, the minute some fanatic sect kills 3,000 of us we retaliate and end up violating people's national sovereignty through the wholesale invasion of their countries.
All in all the rhetoric spawned by the neoconservative imperative to stem the tide of Islam will lead to wholesale genocide, once we realize that we cannot stop them from making babies. We will try to wipe them out, so that they cannot outnumber us. This in my opinion is par for the course with Christianity and will be sanctioned by any good priest or preacher, and probably won't be called what it is in the end, until someone stops us Of course their will always be a few priest and preachers who will stick their neck out and get it chopped off in protest, and after it's all said and done they usually end up getting exalted whilst people say "See our religion isn't that bad after all because these people were the few dissenting voices trying to speak the Love of God after he gave our past nation over to wickedness as a consequence for our sins". If such genocide where to happen then this cycle would happen all over again, just like it did after the Inquisition, after the Civil War, After WWII, and the numerous other occasions where organized religion in the form of a majority of leftover sorry depressed preachers/priest/ministers tried to cover their sorry asses for getting swept up in some oppressive cause and try to apologize for their mob mentality and the ease with which they buckled into the demands of the mob (cowardice).
I mean, stop and think about it. If Islam really is violent across the board (in the specific manner that the neoconservatives contend), then we have a few options:
A. Convert them
B. Genocide
C. Take out their terrorist organizations as a means to address the alleged "inherently violent nature" of Islam itself which is supposedly not only violent internally but "out to get us or convert us".
D. Accept that they might outnumber us and only use violence in the threat of an invasion.
E. Invade their countries and try to take over and establish democracies (which is what we are attempting now).
A. Is not going to happen (in my opinion), unless we use the exact tactics the Muslims used to start their religion in the first place (conversion at swordpoint or threat of death).
B Seems likely, albeit the genocide and wholesale slaughter of entire sectors of Muslim populations would have to be couched in theological language in order for it to work eventually (and that was done in the Old Testament so it is a cinch to do it today as well).
C Still doesn't address the neoconservative allegations that Islam is inherently violent in nature and out to get us by forced conversion, the paranoia of terrorism will eventually need to be replaced by the paranoia that would drive eventual genocide once the Muslims rebelled against our puppet democratic states that we forced upon them. What happens if we spend 50 years and finally "defeat the terrorists"? That still won't address the alleged neoconservative paranoid doctrine that contends that Islam is inherently violent and that within that context wants to out reproduce and assimilate us, so that wont suffice to just destroy terrorists, because the neoconservative view at it's core supposes deeper problems within all Muslim peopl, not just terrorists of a fanatical sort.
D. We could do D, and D would fall under a reasonable response that respects their national sovereignty when they inevitably out reproduce us (supposing they are all still "allegedly" hellbent on destroying us.
E. This won't work, because Islam will not yield to Christianity and has shown a very very long history of not yielding to Christianity's pathetic attempts to convert Muslims. If we give them democracy it is highly likely they will keep the democracy and just vote us out of power, or force us out eventually, but then you are still left with the alleged "violent Muslims" who want to assimilate Christians (as this is based in a fundamental assertion that has yet to be proven).
In one sense it is a big deal (the Islam vs the West neocon contention that Evangelicals like to paint as being the "big picture", and in another sense it really is not, because in 80 years the Chinese will be ruling the roost (all 2 billion or so of them) and not us.
Just my two cents.
I think a lot of our problems come from the idea that because we have lost 3,000 people we have the divine right to go make war in other countries and violate their national sovereignty and then KEEP CHANGING the justification when the old ones are shown to have been founded on lies/misleading statements/falsehoods.
I sincerely doubt that anyone will give two shits about our country in 60 years because of several factors (one being the exportation of jobs overseas which is weakening us politically and will weaken us severely over time), and that in the end we won't be the "big dog" imperialists we are now.
I am sure people will disagree with me, but it really matters not, the internal logic of the neoconservatives is full of pie in the sky concepts that just plain ignore reality as well as being impossible to validate without the inevitable genocide and anti-Islamism that would result from believing neoconservative dogma (as the dubious premises are validated).
Not to mention the fact that their are plenty of people in this country (the majority in fact) who won't allow wholesale anti-Islamic genocide to happen, (Hitler anyone?). The 20th century saw the persecution of the Jews, the 21st does not need to see the persecution of Muslims in the name of Christ. Of course making Muslims the anti-christ and promoting that message is exactly what Hitler and the germans believed about the Jews (even long before hitler came to power back in Freud's days), so it is no surprise that another form of dogmatic facism rears it's ugly head again even if it disguises itself as being based in fact when it is really based in popular sentiment.
I am sure (if the neoconservative ideology is enacted), that once the Chinese put us down like dogs for waging an Anti Islamist genocidal crusade, we will be licking our wounds just like the Nazi's did after their attempt at their Jewish Genocide Crusade. Difference being this time around that nuclear weapons are far more prevalent and sophisticated. I would be extremely worried about this, except for the fact that their are many americans who have already turned somewhat and would be willing to turn full tilt on their fellow americans if we continue invading country after country in pursuit of anti-Islamic agendas (despite their many guises, Christian or not).
Please do not get me wrong, I do not believe that the organized religion that millions of Muslims practice is inherently non violent (and not just in regards to us). They tear each other to pieces too, not just other people (Sunnis vs Shiites). Some are making an active attempt at something resembling our secular notion of peace, but by and large the situation as I see it in developing third world Muslim countries, is one of people's heads getting placed on the chopping block for something as minor as smoking pot.
Then again, I also would not contend that Christianity as practiced by most Christians is somehow inherently non violent either, as all general human weakness aside (which we all have), history has shown time and again the propensity of Christians to take up a weapon and kill in the name of God or country (The crusades and the Civil War come to mind), in order to preserve a '"tradition" or "conserve" a "heritage" that was very much oppressive of it's own people.
Christianity has yet to produce enough results to earn my respect. For every Martin Luther King you always had ten thousand others who were far more willing to submit to the oppressive system and call it a "virtue".
The difference between X-tianity and me lies mainly in the fact that I don't let the paranoia of being "assimilated" by Muslims who can and will out reproduce us, feed into their self fulfilling prophecy and those self fulfilling prophecies we setup for ourselves too. Discourse of some kind is a good option, and in the end, unless we want to stoop to their level, it is the only option.
They won't yield and convert, no matter how many pie in the sky promises X-tians throw up, (~1400 years of Islam should have solidly proven that are our attempts to convert them are weak, pathetic, inept, and largely ineffective).
If we cannot attempt discourse that is non coercive and somehow get along then our only chance at changing the situation is to be both co-ercive and violent (which we are doing right now).
Democracy is not something you import, it is an idea of tolerance that has to come from the people themselves within their own religious framework, if it doesn't then it doesn't. Trying to force it on them will only aid history in repeating itself when they eventually expel us using guerilla warfare and the political system (which they have done many times in their past).
It really is not an "Us vs Them" "West vs invading Hordes of Islam" type of thing. It is more a "Humanity" type of thing. As long as some dogmatic religious person somewhere exists with a soapbox or pulput to preach in however, people will be successfully polarized and duped into believing the illusion that it really is "Us vs Them". Whether the "Them" is the Jews and their sympathizers, or the "Them" is the Blacks and their friends/sympathizers, or the "Them" is the Protestants and their cohorts, or the "Them" is the evil Catholics and their papist beliefs, or the "Them" are the evil neighboring Caananites and their superstitious gods.
Same name different game.
I suspect natural selection might have it's way when it comes to humans who are dogmatically religious, even in spite of us possessing nuclear weapons.
I want to correct your statement first,there is no violent perspective of Islam.It could be a misconception but the reality is something else.Could you or any othere person be able to quote any teaching of Islam based on violence,calling people to be violent or involve in such activities.Contrary they are being made to do so.
Now coming to the acts of muslims involved in violent activities has not its roots in Islam but the frustration of their minds after getting attacked by their enemies in differnt ways.Who can decline the fact that,this time the most targeted religion is not Islam and its followers.Even i wonder politics of some nonmuslim countries revolve around it.Lets take US presidental candidates .What intentions Tom Tancredo has saying that muslims two holy cities(Mecca & Medina) should be attacked to keep America safe.
Obama says, if elected, he might order unilateral military strikes in Pakistan.If all such remarks are for the political gain,what kind of racist ideology their voters would have.If they are pointing toward their future strategies,could they combat terriorism this way.
Why the frustration is there?
BALTIMORE, Maryland (CNN) -- War has wiped out about 655,000 Iraqis or more than 500 people a day since the U.S.-led invasion, a new study reports.
Looking at the casualities in Afghanistan and Iraq..
-- IN AFGHANISTAN --
8,587 AFGHAN TROOPS KILLED
and 25,761 SERIOUSLY INJURED July 2004
3,485 AFGHAN CIVILIANS KILLED
and 6,273 SERIOUSLY INJURED July 2004
342 U.S. TROOPS KILLED
and 1,026 SERIOUSLY INJURED Jan. 2007
278 OTHER COALITION TROOPS KILLED
and 834 SERIOUSLY INJURED June 2007
? U.S. and COALITION CIVILIANS KILLED
and ? SERIOUSLY INJURED
Casualities in Iraq....
30,000 IRAQI TROOPS KILLED
and 90,000 SERIOUSLY INJURED Aug. 2003
785,957 IRAQI CIVILIANS KILLED
and 1,414,723 SERIOUSLY INJURED June 2007
3,615 U.S. TROOPS KILLED
and 50,677 SERIOUSLY INJURED June 2007
287 OTHER COALITION TROOPS KILLED
and 861 SERIOUSLY INJURED June 2007
160 U.S. CIVILIANS KILLED
and 288 SERIOUSLY INJURED June 2007
251 OTHER COALITION CIVILIANS KILLED
and 452 SERIOUSLY INJURED June 2007 (Source:www.unknownnews.net)
At the end i leave you all with one question.
Who is more violent?I'll post several Demographic views. The first is by a conservative - and the others Left and Middle of the road.
It’s the demography, stupid By Mark Steyn
Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the western world will survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most western European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands— probably—just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the west.
One obstacle to doing that is the fact that, in the typical election campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the west are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society—government health care, government day care (which Canada’s thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain’s just introduced). We’ve prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith, and, most basic of all, reproductive activity—“Go forth and multiply,” because if you don’t you won’t be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare. Americans sometimes don’t understand how far gone most of the rest of the developed world is down this path: In the Canadian and most Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way up to important jobs like the health department. I don’t think Don Rumsfeld would regard it as a promotion if he were moved to Health & Human Services.
The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birth rate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyper-rationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a twenty-first-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could only increase their numbers by conversion. The problem is that secondary- impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths—or, at any rate, virtues—and that’s why they’re proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.
Speaking of which, if we are at war—and half the American people and significantly higher percentages in Britain, Canada, and Europe don’t accept that proposition—than what exactly is the war about?
We know it’s not really a “war on terror.” Nor is it, at heart, a war against Islam, or even “radical Islam.” The Muslim faith, whatever its merits for the believers, is a problematic business for the rest of us. There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general rule, it’s easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in “Palestine,” Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali. Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act locally.
Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it’s not what this thing’s about. Radical Islam is an opportunist infection, like AIDS: it’s not the HIV that kills you, it’s the pneumonia you get when your body’s too weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they lose—as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there’s an excellent chance they can drag things out until western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.
That’s what the war’s about: our lack of civilizational confidence. As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: “Civilizations die from suicide, not murder”—as can be seen throughout much of “the western world” right now. The progressive agenda —lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism—is collectively the real suicide bomb. Take multiculturalism: the great thing about multiculturalism is that it doesn’t involve knowing anything about other cultures—the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures. It’s fundamentally a fraud, and I would argue was subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don’t want to live in anything but an advanced western society: Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched native dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting to sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or that your holistic masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality, but not that you or anyone you care about should have to live in an African or Native-American society. It’s a quintessential piece of progressive humbug.
Then September 11 happened. And bizarrely the reaction of just about every prominent western leader was to visit a mosque: President Bush did, the Prince of Wales did, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom did, the Prime Minister of Canada did… . The Premier of Ontario didn’t, and so twenty Muslim community leaders had a big summit to denounce him for failing to visit a mosque. I don’t know why he didn’t. Maybe there was a big backlog, it was mosque drivetime, prime ministers in gridlock up and down the freeway trying to get to the Sword of the Infidel-Slayer Mosque on Elm Street. But for whatever reason he couldn’t fit it into his hectic schedule. Ontario’s Citizenship Minister did show up at a mosque, but the imams took that as a great insult, like the Queen sending Fergie to open the Commonwealth Games. So the Premier of Ontario had to hold a big meeting with the aggrieved imams to apologize for not going to a mosque and, as The Toronto Star’s reported it, “to provide them with reassurance that the provincial government does not see them as the enemy.”
Anyway, the get-me-to-the-mosque-on-time fever died down, but it set the tone for our general approach to these atrocities. The old definition of a nanosecond was the gap between the traffic light changing in New York and the first honk from a car behind. The new definition is the gap between a terrorist bombing and the press release from an Islamic lobby group warning of a backlash against Muslims. In most circumstances, it would be considered appallingly bad taste to deflect attention from an actual “hate crime” by scaremongering about a purely hypothetical one. Needless to say, there is no campaign of Islamophobic hate crimes. If anything, the west is awash in an epidemic of self-hate crimes. A commenter on Tim Blair’s website in Australia summed it up in a note-perfect parody of a Guardian headline: “Muslim Community Leaders Warn of Backlash from Tomorrow Morning’s Terrorist Attack.” Those community leaders have the measure of us.
Radical Islam is what multiculturalism has been waiting for all along. In The Survival of Culture, I quoted the eminent British barrister Helena Kennedy, QC. Shortly after September 11, Baroness Kennedy argued on a BBC show that it was too easy to disparage “Islamic fundamentalists.” “We as western liberals too often are fundamentalist ourselves,” she complained. “We don’t look at our own fundamentalisms.”
Well, said the interviewer, what exactly would those western liberal fundamentalisms be? “One of the things that we are too ready to insist upon is that we are the tolerant people and that the intolerance is something that belongs to other countries like Islam. And I’m not sure that’s true.”
Hmm. Lady Kennedy was arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people’s intolerance, which is intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So you’re nice to gays and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists. In other words, just as the AIDS pandemic greatly facilitated societal surrender to the gay agenda, so 9/11 is greatly facilitating our surrender to the most extreme aspects of the multicultural agenda.
For example, one day in 2004, a couple of Canadians returned home, to Lester B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto. They were the son and widow of a fellow called Ahmed Said Khadr, who back on the Pakistani-Afghan frontier was known as “al-Kanadi.” Why? Because he was the highest-ranking Canadian in al Qaeda—plenty of other Canucks in al Qaeda but he was the Numero Uno. In fact, one could argue that the Khadr family is Canada’s principal contribution to the war on terror. Granted they’re on the wrong side (if you’ll forgive me being judgmental) but no can argue that they aren’t in the thick of things. One of Mr. Khadr’s sons was captured in Afghanistan after killing a U.S. Special Forces medic. Another was captured and held at Guantanamo. A third blew himself up while killing a Canadian soldier in Kabul. Pa Khadr himself died in an al Qaeda shoot-out with Pakistani forces in early 2004. And they say we Canadians aren’t doing our bit in this war!
In the course of the fatal shoot-out of al-Kanadi, his youngest son was paralyzed. And, not unreasonably, Junior didn’t fancy a prison hospital in Peshawar. So Mrs. Khadr and her boy returned to Toronto so he could enjoy the benefits of Ontario government healthcare. “I’m Canadian, and I’m not begging for my rights,” declared the widow Khadr. “I’m demanding my rights.”
As they always say, treason’s hard to prove in court, but given the circumstances of Mr. Khadr’s death it seems clear that not only was he providing “aid and comfort to the Queen’s enemies” but that he was, in fact, the Queen’s enemy. The Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, the Royal 22nd Regiment, and other Canucks have been participating in Afghanistan, on one side of the conflict, and the Khadr family had been over there participating on the other side. Nonetheless, the Prime Minister of Canada thought Boy Khadr’s claims on the public health system was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate his own deep personal commitment to “diversity.” Asked about the Khadrs’ return to Toronto, he said, “I believe that once you are a Canadian citizen, you have the right to your own views and to disagree.”
That’s the wonderful thing about multiculturalism: you can choose which side of the war you want to fight on. When the draft card arrives, just tick “home team” or “enemy,” according to taste. The Canadian Prime Minister is a typical late-stage western politician: He could have said, well, these are contemptible people and I know many of us are disgusted at the idea of our tax dollars being used to provide health care for a man whose Canadian citizenship is no more than a flag of convenience, but unfortunately that’s the law and, while we can try to tighten it, it looks like this lowlife’s got away with it. Instead, his reflex instinct was to proclaim this as a wholehearted demonstration of the virtues of the multicultural state. Like many enlightened western leaders, the Canadian Prime Minister will be congratulating himself on his boundless tolerance even as the forces of intolerance consume him.
That, by the way, is the one point of similarity between the jihad and conventional terrorist movements like the IRA or ETA. Terror groups persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets: the IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that while they could never win militarily, they also could never be defeated. The Islamists have figured similarly. The only difference is that most terrorist wars are highly localized. We now have the first truly global terrorist insurgency because the Islamists view the whole world the way the IRA view the bogs of Fermanagh: they want it and they’ve calculated that our entire civilization lacks the will to see them off.
We spend a lot of time at The New Criterion attacking the elites and we’re right to do so. The commanding heights of the culture have behaved disgracefully for the last several decades. But, if it were just a problem with the elites, it wouldn’t be that serious: the mob could rise up and hang ’em from lampposts—a scenario that’s not unlikely in certain Continental countries. But the problem now goes way beyond the ruling establishment. The annexation by government of most of the key responsibilities of life—child-raising, taking care of your elderly parents—has profoundly changed the relationship between the citizen and the state. At some point—I would say socialized health care is a good marker—you cross a line, and it’s very hard then to persuade a citizenry enjoying that much government largesse to cross back. In National Review recently, I took issue with that line Gerald Ford always uses to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” Actually, you run into trouble long before that point: A government big enough to give you everything you want still isn’t big enough to get you to give anything back. That’s what the French and German political classes are discovering.
Go back to that list of local conflicts I mentioned. The jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you’re not shy about taking on the Israelis, the Russians, the Indians, and the Nigerians, why wouldn’t you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Danes and New Zealanders?
So the jihadists are for the most part doing no more than giving us a prod in the rear as we sleepwalk to the cliff. When I say “sleepwalk,” it’s not because we’re a blasé culture. On the contrary, one of the clearest signs of our decline is the way we expend so much energy worrying about the wrong things. If you’ve read Jared Diamond’s bestselling book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, you’ll know it goes into a lot of detail about Easter Island going belly up because they chopped down all their trees. Apparently that’s why they’re not a G8 member or on the UN Security Council. Same with the Greenlanders and the Mayans and Diamond’s other curious choices of “societies.” Indeed, as the author sees it, pretty much every society collapses because it chops down its trees.
Poor old Diamond can’t see the forest because of his obsession with the trees. (Russia’s collapsing even as it’s undergoing reforestation.) One way “societies choose to fail or succeed” is by choosing what to worry about. The western world has delivered more wealth and more comfort to more of its citizens than any other civilization in history, and in return we’ve developed a great cult of worrying. You know the classics of the genre: In 1968, in his bestselling book The Population Bomb, the eminent scientist Paul Ehrlich declared: “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” In 1972, in their landmark study The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead, and gas by 1993.
None of these things happened. In fact, quite the opposite is happening. We’re pretty much awash in resources, but we’re running out of people—the one truly indispensable resource, without which none of the others matter. Russia’s the most obvious example: it’s the largest country on earth, it’s full of natural resources, and yet it’s dying—its population is falling calamitously.
The default mode of our elites is that anything that happens—from terrorism to tsunamis—can be understood only as deriving from the perniciousness of western civilization. As Jean-François Revel wrote, “Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.”
And even though none of the prognostications of the eco-doom blockbusters of the 1970s came to pass, all that means is that thirty years on, the end of the world has to be rescheduled. The amended estimated time of arrival is now 2032. That’s to say, in 2002, the United Nations Global Environmental Outlook predicted “the destruction of 70 percent of the natural world in thirty years, mass extinction of species… . More than half the world will be afflicted by water shortages, with 95 percent of people in the Middle East with severe problems … 25 percent of all species of mammals and 10 percent of birds will be extinct …”
Etc., etc., for 450 pages. Or to cut to the chase, as The Guardian headlined it, “Unless We Change Our Ways, The World Faces Disaster.”
Well, here’s my prediction for 2032: unless we change our ways the world faces a future … where the environment will look pretty darn good. If you’re a tree or a rock, you’ll be living in clover. It’s the Italians and the Swedes who’ll be facing extinction and the loss of their natural habitat.
There will be no environmental doomsday. Oil, carbon dioxide emissions, deforestation: none of these things is worth worrying about. What’s worrying is that we spend so much time worrying about things that aren’t worth worrying about that we don’t worry about the things we should be worrying about. For thirty years, we’ve had endless wake-up calls for things that aren’t worth waking up for. But for the very real, remorseless shifts in our society—the ones truly jeopardizing our future—we’re sound asleep. The world is changing dramatically right now and hysterical experts twitter about a hypothetical decrease in the Antarctic krill that might conceivably possibly happen so far down the road there’s unlikely to be any Italian or Japanese enviro-worriers left alive to be devastated by it.
In a globalized economy, the environmentalists want us to worry about First World capitalism imposing its ways on bucolic, pastoral, primitive Third World backwaters. Yet, insofar as “globalization” is a threat, the real danger is precisely the opposite—that the peculiarities of the backwaters can leap instantly to the First World. Pigs are valued assets and sleep in the living room in rural China—and next thing you know an unknown respiratory disease is killing people in Toronto, just because someone got on a plane. That’s the way to look at Islamism: we fret about McDonald’s and Disney, but the big globalization success story is the way the Saudis have taken what was eighty years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of Islam practiced by Bedouins of no fixed abode and successfully exported it to the heart of Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Manchester, Buffalo …
What’s the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of its culture? When it comes to forecasting the future, the birth rate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2006, it’s hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026 (or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data on babies around the western world is that they’re running out a lot faster than the oil is. “Replacement” fertility rate—i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller—is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?
Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and you’ll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada’s fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That’s to say, Spain’s population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy’s population will have fallen by 22 percent, Bulgaria’s by 36 percent, Estonia’s by 52 percent. In America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of the EU: in the 2004 election, John Kerry won the sixteen with the lowest birth rates; George W. Bush took twenty-five of the twenty-six states with the highest. By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans—and mostly red-state Americans.
As fertility shrivels, societies get older—and Japan and much of Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever been. And we know what comes after old age. These countries are going out of business—unless they can find the will to change their ways. Is that likely? I don’t think so. If you look at European election results—most recently in Germany—it’s hard not to conclude that, while voters are unhappy with their political establishments, they’re unhappy mainly because they resent being asked to reconsider their government benefits and, no matter how unaffordable they may be a generation down the road, they have no intention of seriously reconsidering them. The Scottish executive recently backed down from a proposal to raise the retirement age of Scottish public workers. It’s presently sixty, which is nice but unaffordable. But the reaction of the average Scots worker is that that’s somebody else’s problem. The average German worker now puts in 22 percent fewer hours per year than his American counterpart, and no politician who wishes to remain electorally viable will propose closing the gap in any meaningful way.
This isn’t a deep-rooted cultural difference between the Old World and the New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. If one wanted to allocate blame, one could argue that it’s a product of the U.S. military presence, the American security guarantee that liberated European budgets: instead of having to spend money on guns, they could concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. If Washington’s problem with Europe is that these are not serious allies, well, whose fault is that? Who, in the years after the Second World War, created NATO as a post-modern military alliance? The “free world,” as the Americans called it, was a free ride for everyone else. And having been absolved from the primal responsibilities of nationhood, it’s hardly surprising that European nations have little wish to re-shoulder them. In essence, the lavish levels of public health care on the Continent are subsidized by the American taxpayer. And this long-term softening of large sections of the west makes them ill-suited to resisting a primal force like Islam.
There is no “population bomb.” There never was. Birth rates are declining all over the world—eventually every couple on the planet may decide to opt for the western yuppie model of one designer baby at the age of thirty-nine. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage. Even in 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his ilk should have understood that their so-called “population explosion” was really a massive population adjustment. Of the increase in global population between 1970 and 2000, the developed world accounted for under 9 percent of it, while the Muslim world accounted for 26 percent of the increase. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30 percent of the world’s population to just over 20 percent, the Muslim nations increased from about 15 percent to 20 percent.
1970 doesn’t seem that long ago. If you’re the age many of the chaps running the western world today are wont to be, your pants are narrower than they were back then and your hair’s less groovy, but the landscape of your life—the look of your house, the lay-out of your car, the shape of your kitchen appliances, the brand names of the stuff in the fridge—isn’t significantly different. Aside from the Internet and the cellphone and the CD, everything in your world seems pretty much the same but slightly modified.
And yet the world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald statistics: In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30 percent to 15 percent. By 2000, they were the same: each had about 20 percent.
And by 2020?
So the world’s people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less “western.” Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)—or the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark, and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the west: in the UK, more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.
Can these trends continue for another thirty years without having consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: the grand buildings will still be standing but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.
What will Europe be like at the end of this process? Who knows? On the one hand, there’s something to be said for the notion that America will find an Islamified Europe more straightforward to deal with than Monsieur Chirac, Herr Schröder, and Co. On the other hand, given Europe’s track record, getting there could be very bloody. But either way this is the real battlefield. The al Qaeda nutters can never find enough suicidal pilots to fly enough planes into enough skyscrapers to topple America. But, unlike us, the Islamists think long-term, and, given their demographic advantage in Europe and the tone of the emerging Muslim lobby groups there, much of what they’re flying planes into buildings for they’re likely to wind up with just by waiting a few more years. The skyscrapers will be theirs; why knock ’em over?
The latter half of the decline and fall of great civilizations follows a familiar pattern: affluence, softness, decadence, extinction. You don’t notice yourself slipping through those stages because usually there’s a seductive pol on hand to provide the age with a sly, self-deluding slogan—like Bill Clinton’s “It’s about the future of all our children.” We on the right spent the 1990s gleefully mocking Clinton’s tedious invocation, drizzled like syrup over everything from the Kosovo war to highway appropriations. But most of the rest of the west can’t even steal his lame bromides: A society that has no children has no future.
Permanence is the illusion of every age. In 1913, no one thought the Russian, Austrian, German, and Turkish empires would be gone within half a decade. Seventy years on, all those fellows who dismissed Reagan as an “amiable dunce” (in Clark Clifford’s phrase) assured us the Soviet Union was likewise here to stay. The CIA analysts’ position was that East Germany was the ninth biggest economic power in the world. In 1987 there was no rash of experts predicting the imminent fall of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact, and the USSR itself.
Yet, even by the minimal standards of these wretched precedents, so-called “post-Christian” civilizations—as a prominent EU official described his continent to me—are more prone than traditional societies to mistake the present tense for a permanent feature. Religious cultures have a much greater sense of both past and future, as we did a century ago, when we spoke of death as joining “the great majority” in “the unseen world.” But if secularism’s starting point is that this is all there is, it’s no surprise that, consciously or not, they invest the here and now with far greater powers of endurance than it’s ever had. The idea that progressive Euro-welfarism is the permanent resting place of human development was always foolish; we now know that it’s suicidally so.
To avoid collapse, European nations will need to take in immigrants at a rate no stable society has ever attempted. The CIA is predicting the EU will collapse by 2020. Given that the CIA’s got pretty much everything wrong for half a century, that would suggest the EU is a shoo-in to be the colossus of the new millennium. But even a flop spook is right twice a generation. If anything, the date of EU collapse is rather a cautious estimate. It seems more likely that within the next couple of European election cycles, the internal contradictions of the EU will manifest themselves in the usual way, and that by 2010 we’ll be watching burning buildings, street riots, and assassinations on American network news every night. Even if they avoid that, the idea of a childless Europe ever rivaling America militarily or economically is laughable. Sometime this century there will be 500 million Americans, and what’s left in Europe will either be very old or very Muslim. Japan faces the same problem: its population is already in absolute decline, the first gentle slope of a death spiral it will be unlikely ever to climb out of. Will Japan be an economic powerhouse if it’s populated by Koreans and Filipinos? Very possibly. Will Germany if it’s populated by Algerians? That’s a trickier proposition.
Best-case scenario? The Continent winds up as Vienna with Swedish tax rates.
Worst-case scenario: Sharia, circa 2040; semi-Sharia, a lot sooner—and we’re already seeing a drift in that direction.
In July 2003, speaking to the United States Congress, Tony Blair remarked: “As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible but, in fact, it is transient. The question is: What do you leave behind?”
Excellent question. Britannia will never again wield the unrivalled power she enjoyed at her imperial apogee, but the Britannic inheritance endures, to one degree or another, in many of the key regional players in the world today—Australia, India, South Africa—and in dozens of island statelets from the Caribbean to the Pacific. If China ever takes its place as an advanced nation, it will be because the People’s Republic learns more from British Hong Kong than Hong Kong learns from the Little Red Book. And of course the dominant power of our time derives its political character from eighteenth-century British subjects who took English ideas a little further than the mother country was willing to go.
A decade and a half after victory in the Cold War and end-of-history triumphalism, the “what do you leave behind?” question is more urgent than most of us expected. “The west,” as a concept, is dead, and the west, as a matter of demographic fact, is dying.
What will London—or Paris, or Amsterdam—be like in the mid-Thirties? If European politicians make no serious attempt this decade to wean the populace off their unsustainable thirty-five-hour weeks, retirement at sixty, etc., then to keep the present level of pensions and health benefits the EU will need to import so many workers from North Africa and the Middle East that it will be well on its way to majority Muslim by 2035. As things stand, Muslims are already the primary source of population growth in English cities. Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?
This ought to be the left’s issue. I’m a conservative—I’m not entirely on board with the Islamist program when it comes to beheading sodomites and so on, but I agree Britney Spears dresses like a slut: I’m with Mullah Omar on that one. Why then, if your big thing is feminism or abortion or gay marriage, are you so certain that the cult of tolerance will prevail once the biggest demographic in your society is cheerfully intolerant? Who, after all, are going to be the first victims of the west’s collapsed birth rates? Even if one were to take the optimistic view that Europe will be able to resist the creeping imposition of Sharia currently engulfing Nigeria, it remains the case that the Muslim world is not notable for setting much store by “a woman’s right to choose,” in any sense. I watched that big abortion rally in Washington last year, where Ashley Judd and Gloria Steinem were cheered by women waving “Keep your Bush off my bush” placards, and I thought it was the equivalent of a White Russian tea party in 1917. By prioritizing a “woman’s right to choose,” western women are delivering their societies into the hands of fellows far more patriarchal than a 1950s sitcom dad. If any of those women marching for their “reproductive rights” still have babies, they might like to ponder demographic realities: A little girl born today will be unlikely, at the age of forty, to be free to prance around demonstrations in Eurabian Paris or Amsterdam chanting “Hands off my bush!”
Just before the 2004 election, that eminent political analyst Cameron Diaz appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to explain what was at stake:
“Women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our bodies… . If you think that rape should be legal, then don’t vote. But if you think that you have a right to your body,” she advised Oprah’s viewers, “then you should vote.”
Poor Cameron. A couple of weeks later, the scary people won. She lost all rights to her body. Unlike Alec Baldwin, she couldn’t even move to France. Her body was grounded in Terminal D.
But, after framing the 2004 Presidential election as a referendum on the right to rape, Miss Diaz might be interested to know that men enjoy that right under many Islamic legal codes around the world. In his book The Empty Cradle, Philip Longman asks: “So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world. Such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an anti-market culture dominated by fundamentalism—a new Dark Ages.”
Bottom line for Cameron Diaz: There are worse things than John Ashcroft out there.
Longman’s point is well taken. The refined antennae of western liberals mean that, whenever one raises the question of whether there will be any Italians living in the geographical zone marked as Italy a generation or three hence, they cry, “Racism!” To fret about what proportion of the population is “white” is grotesque and inappropriate. But it’s not about race, it’s about culture. If 100 percent of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it doesn’t matter whether 70 percent of them are “white” or only 5 percent are. But, if one part of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy and the other doesn’t, then it becomes a matter of great importance whether the part that does is 9 percent of the population or only 60, 50, 45 percent.
Since the President unveiled the so-called Bush Doctrine—the plan to promote liberty throughout the Arab world—innumerable “progressives” have routinely asserted that there’s no evidence Muslims want liberty and, indeed, Islam is incompatible with democracy. If that’s true, it’s a problem not for the Middle East today but for Europe the day after tomorrow. According to a poll taken in 2004, over 60 percent of British Muslims want to live under sharia—in the United Kingdom. If a population “at odds with the modern world” is the fastest-breeding group on the planet—if there are more Muslim nations, more fundamentalist Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in more and more transnational institutions—how safe a bet is the survival of the “modern world”?
Not good.
“What do you leave behind?” asked Tony Blair. There will only be very few and very old ethnic Germans and French and Italians by the midpoint of this century. What will they leave behind? Territories that happen to bear their names and keep up some of the old buildings? Or will the dying European races understand that the only legacy that matters is whether the peoples who will live in those lands after them are reconciled to pluralist, liberal democracy? It’s the demography, stupid. And, if they can’t muster the will to change course, then “what do you leave behind?” is the only question that matters.
Source:
It's the demography Stupid
The New Criterion
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Here's one from the left. (Also - at the bottom of the page - a couple of other GREAT articles)
http://www.abc.net.au/cgi-bin/common/pr … 603430.htm
And Middle of the Road
http://www.cfr.org/publication/8252/europe.htmlSparkling Jewel - when you ask the question this way - as do almost all Westerners and Muslims not knowledgeable about Islamic Prophecies - you are implying the future from the present. But we are talking about the Future from the Future. (First your question)
QUOTE """And what about the seeming fact that the majority of Muslims don't seem to be of the same ilk as the fanatics of violent Islam? Do you think they (majority of Muslims) are just waiting patiently for the chance to rise up and join the take over crowd...?? Or do you think that they are genuinely not interested in being a part of that violent perspective of Islam?"""
Good question - wrong issue. Here's why (from a writer I will post)
""Islam sees itself as the primal and sole true religion. Islam is the pure religion of Adam and has preceded all others. The Koran uses biblical names like Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Moses, David, Solomon, Jesus and others but they represent different people than those in the Bible – and all are considered to have been Muslim prophets who preached Islam. Jesus is also a Muslim prophet called Isa, endowed with a different life; he brought a book: the Gospel, in which he preached Islam. We have, in fact, a Jesus named Isa, a Muslim prophet, and Yeshua, the Jewish Jesus, “born in Bethlehem of Judea” (Matthew 2:1). According to several hadiths, Isa has a mission: at the end of time he will return to destroy Christianity and impose Islam as the sole religion over the whole world. These hadiths, often quoted in sermons, speak of him killing the pig, (Jews) and breaking the cross – which means destroying Christianity""
Preceding Isa will be the Mahdi - the savior - that wars against the western world and destroys it stupendously.
This is why you hear Achmadenijad, Iran's President, talk about him so much. They are expecting him and when he comes - he is a conquering warrior. They believe this destruction is what actually brings on the Resurrection. In other words, the world has to be destroyed in order to revive it. When this Mahdi figure comes - all Islam will embrace him - and the wars that result will force decisions everywhere along the historic Islamic line. (Think Fundamentalism - Sharia law)
Imagine that world - and the answer to your question seems imminently more possible.
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This particular website has a point by point analysis of the view. It is one among very many but it is coherently expressed and in a very teachable format. If you are familiar with the Bible's verses about end times - it will readily become apparent to you that their fulfillment rests in the Islamic Paradigm.
If you are not familiar with the Bible's verses - it will be tough reading for awhile because the Koranic verses are alien to us as Westerners - and you have no point of reference Biblically. However, be patient and read along and the conclusions will make a lot of sense to you. At the very least - you will understand the argument - which will become increasingly more debated, both in secular and religious circles.
http://al-mahdi.atspace.com/al-mahdi.html
http://al-mahdi.atspace.com/index.htmlThis author - Bat Ye’or - is very relevant as well to the Eurabia Demographic issue among others. I can not overstate the clarity she has of the world predicament. She is bold in her views of Islam and what it means to the Western world and to the future. She is balanced - and talks of reconciliation - not war and destruction.
She is very literate in both prophetic views - Islamic and Christian.
First her bio - and then an article of interest.
Bat Ye’or, born in Egypt, is a pioneer researcher on ‘dhimmitude’ and ‘Eurabia’. Her four major books translated from French into English are: The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam, (1985); The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, (1996), German edition: Der Niedergang des Orientalischen Christentums unter dem Islam, (2002); Islam and dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (2002), and Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, (2005). German translation in preparation.
From Frontpage Magazine
Speech given,
November 8, 2006
Bat Ye'or: Europe and the Ambiguities of Multiculturalism
Ladies and Gentlemen
It is for me a great honour to be invited by CSI, an organization that has been so active on so many humanitarian fronts in order to denounce slavery, war crimes and genocide, and to alleviate human suffering. And I am thinking particularly of its struggle on behalf of human rights and dignity in Sudan since 1992, and CSI’s freeing over 80.000 Christian and other Sudanese slaves under the leadership of John Eibner and Gunnar Wielback.
The globalization of our world and the policies that have led to large-scale Muslim immigration, adopted by the European Community from 1973, has introduced into Europe conflictual situations and prejudices common in the Muslim world against non-Muslims that have been documented by Orientalists familiar with Islamic theology, law and history. But the politization of history initiated by Edward Said has obfuscated the root causes of Islam’s traditional hostility toward Jews and Christians from the seven century onward. Edward Said was a Christian raised in Egypt and educated in America; he taught English literature at Columbia University. A great admirer of Arafat and a member of the PLO’s top Committee, he endeavored to destroy the whole scientific accumulation of Orientalist knowledge of Islam and replace it with a culture of Western guilt and inferiority toward Muslims victims. The obliteration of the historical truth that he constantly pursued from 1978 – starting with his book Orientalism – as well as his hostility to Israel, has prevented an understanding and the resolution of problems that today assail Europe and challenge its own survival.
I will examine the relations between Islam and Christianity, Islam and Judaism, Judaism and Christianity and the tensions created by a Muslim immigration into a European Judeo-Christian civilization. I will speak of those issues in that order.
In the relationship between Islam and Christianity, we can examine both the theological and the political levels. The theological pillars of Islam are: the Koran which is Muhammad’s revelation; the Hadiths, a compilation of his acts and sayings which have a theological and normative value; and the early biographies written about him. According to these three sources, Islam sees itself as the primal and sole true religion. Islam is the pure religion of Adam and has preceded all others. The Koran uses biblical names like Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Moses, David, Solomon, Jesus and others but they represent different people than those in the Bible – and all are considered to have been Muslim prophets who preached Islam. Jesus is also a Muslim prophet called Isa, endowed with a different life; he brought a book: the Gospel, in which he preached Islam. We have, in fact, a Jesus named Isa, a Muslim prophet, and Yeshua, the Jewish Jesus, “born in Bethlehem of Judea” (Matthew 2:1). According to several hadiths, Isa has a mission: at the end of time he will return to destroy Christianity and impose Islam as the sole religion over the whole world. These hadiths, often quoted in sermons, speak of him killing the pig, breaking the cross – which means destroying Christianity – and the hadiths continue: he will suppress the jizya or poll-tax and the booty will be boundless. The suppression of the jizya refers to the suppressions of all religion other than Islam. In the Islamic optic, what is Christianity? Christianity is a falsification of Islam and of the true message of Isa, which is the same as that revealed to Muhammad: Islam. It follows that a good Christian is a Muslim. True Christianity is therefore Islam.
And what about Muslim-Jewish relations? They are more complex but they follow the same pattern. When Muhammad emigrated from Mecca to Medina, he found there large Jewish tribes well organized with their synagogues and scholars. On their festive days they assembled and studied the Bible. Pagan Arabs were jealous and complained that they were illiterate and ignorant and didn’t have a book like the Jews and the Christians. Hence, Muhammad proclaimed himself to be the prophet whom the Jews were awaiting, an Arab prophet sent with a revelation in Arabic given by Gabriel, which was the same as that revealed to the Jews and Christians. The discrepancies between the Koran and the Bible were noticed by the Jews. Muhammad answered by accusing the Jews of hiding the truth and by saying that their Bible was a later falsification of the Islamic revelation given to the Muslim prophets: Abraham, Jacobs, Moses, and all the others. The true Bible was the Koran. Since Jewish objections hampered his predication, Muhammad decided to get rid of the Jews of Medina. Some were expelled and their belongings confiscated and shared among Muhammad and his followers; others – from 600 to 900 males, according to Muslim sources – were beheaded and their wives and children enslaved. This is the origin of Islamic hatred and accusations against Jews. Muhammad’s various decisions against the Jews in Arabia also set the theological jihadic laws against Christians and other non-Muslims. Muslim law gives to Jews and Christians the same legal status. That means that, in Islam, Jews and Christians are treated identically as “the People of the Book” (ahl al-khitab). Christians, whatever their efforts to dissociate themselves from Jews or from Israel, are put into the same category of the Jews by Islamic law.
In short: Jews and Christians are left with what? The true Bible is the Koran, the Holy Scriptures of Jews and Christians are just falsifications, and all the biblical figures are Muslim prophets who preached Islam. In practice, what are the consequences?
1) Biblical narrative in the Holy Land is Muslim history, and Jews and Christians had no history there as they came after Islam. Their history and their sacred scriptures are in the Koran. This motivates Muslim opposition to the legitimacy of the State of Israel. The Bible is considered a travesty of Muslim history.
2) Because Judaism and Christianity originate from one unique trunk, which is Islam, these two religions are unrelated. It is false to assert that Christianity unfolded from Judaism. This is why the Islamized Churches in the Muslim world have developed a kind of Marcionism, abandoning the Jewish Jesus in order to link Christianity to the Palestinian Arab Muslim Isa. This trend which originated in the Palestinian and Arab Churches (Sabeel Centre in Bethlehem) is growing in Europe, supported by the antisemitic/anti-Zionist wave created by Palestinianism.
Palestinianism is the new European salvific theology created to help the Arabs destroy Israel, but which in fact is eating away at the roots of Christianity. Palestinianism teaches that if justice is granted to the Palestinians, suddenly the global jihad and the persecution of Christians in Muslim lands will disappear. “Justice for the Palestinians” in reality means the elimination of Israel. This elimination will bring peace to the world. Since 1973, this has become a joint Euro-Arab policy. The cultural and media war to delegitimize Israel accredits also the Muslim belief that Jews and, therefore, Christians have no historical roots in the Holy Land. Another consequence of Muslim replacement theology is that when we speak of Judeo-Christian values, we are in fact referring to Muslim values. And when we refer to biblical narratives and figures, or to their iconography, we offend Muslims because they do not fit in the koranic model.
Now let us see the political context. Since Muhammad was a prophet, a legislator and a war leader, legislation and politics are united in the service of the religious expansion and domination of Islam. The ultimate goal is to impose Islamic rule over the whole world. In this perspective, Muslim political doctrine divides the world into two eternal enemies: the land of Islam (dar al-Islam) and the land of war (dar al-harb) inhabited by the infidels which must – in the end – be conquered by Islam. Between them no peace is possible, but only temporary truces in case Muslims are too weak to conquer them. This is the doctrine of jihad which is a comprehensive legal system of war based on theology that regulates every aspect of Muslim behaviour toward non-Muslims. Jihad is a religious duty incumbent on Muslims, individually and collectively, and this is preached regularly by imams in sermons worlwide.
Jihad covers several fields: military actions, terrorism, abductions, ransoming, enslavement, and armistice conditions, the jihad by the pen – that is to say, propaganda – and the jihad of the hearts, which means corruption. Jihad has been waged for thirteen centuries against non-Muslims and huge geographical areas have been conquered and their population subdued, enslaved, deported or massacred. The non-Muslim population targeted by jihad is given a choice: conversion to Islam or the payment of a ransom to the Muslim authority and recognition of its sovereignty. If they refuse both they will face war. After a land has been conquered and its population accepts to submit and pay a tribute for its security this population becomes a dhimmi people. It is “protected” by a pact of submission, called the dhimma. Protected from what? From the jihad onslaught. Non-Muslims dhimmis are protected only as long as they pay the tribute, which is a poll-tax, and submit to oppressive and discriminatory shari’a regulations.
Islamic law covers the rights and obligations of dhimmis in great details. This has been the subject of my research. I call dhimmitude the Islamic system of governing the non-Muslim peoples subjected by jihad. This system is linked to jihad and like jihad it is a theological, political and legal institution. Dhimmitude is, in fact, the peaceful continuation of jihad because it is dhimmitude that destroyed the massive non-Muslim majorities that were conquered.
It is my opinion that we are now living in a period of reactivated jihad and dhimmitude. Those of you who have laboured in South Sudan and Darfur and have seen the atrocities there will recognize these legal tactics of jihad described in my books or in any Muslim texts on jihad. What is happening in Iraq evokes the events in the 8th century described in Mesopotamia by the Christian Syriac cleric Pseudo-Dyonisos of Tell Mahre, quoted in my study on The Decline of Eastern Christianity which is available here in a German edition. These events are confirmed at that same period by Armenian chronicles and by Egyptian priests describing Muslim internal feuds and atrocities in Egypt against dhimmis, or by Jews in Palestine, and with the passing centuries the chronicle of the Jacobite Patriarch of Antioche (in Syria), Michael the Syrian, that covers a period till the end of the 12 century. We have countless accounts on the devastation by the Arabs and Turks in Anatolia, in the Balkans, and all along the European Mediterranean coasts and islands.
Today, as in the past, jihadist terror is waged not only against Israel, Judaism, but also against the West, that is Christianity. Beheading the enemies of Islam, like the prophet did when he set a sacred model by beheading the Jews who refused to convert – was repeatedly done by jihadists during all the jihad conquests of Christian lands. Abducting infidels for ransom fills up countless historical accounts. Suppressing by terror all criticism by infidels of the Muslim religion or policy is mandated in the land of dhimmitude. Jihad and dhimmitude are the two forces that have eliminated the indigenous non-Muslim populations from their Islamized homeland. Jihad today is displayed in all its traditional manifestations: military and economic warfare, terror, abductions, corruption for the control of the Western media, the universities and public opinion.
Dhimmitude is applied now against non Muslims – mainly Christians – in most Muslim countries. Shari’a laws or laws inspired by shari’a discriminate against non-Muslims, mainly Christians, the Jews having fled or been expelled. Now it is the Christians – in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and elsewhere – who are leaving because in Islam anti-Jewish hate is always connected to anti-Christian hate and vice-versa as it grows from the same source. Hence, anti-Zionist European policies adopted in order to protect Europe and local Christians from Islamism is useless.
Why have we regressed to a situation all too common throughout history till the 19th century and in some countries, the 20th? It is my opinion that 1973 was the fatidic date when political decisions were made that would lead Europe along the path to dhimmitude. It was the period – after the Kippur War – when European independent states, threatened with PLO terrorism and an Arab oil boycott, accepted to submit and adapt their foreign policies to Arab and Palestinian political demands. This is when the European Palestinian appeasement policy began. Europe helped spread the new death cult: Palestinianism, which is the sacralisation and legitimisation of the jihad against Israel. For decades Europeans have been conditioned by Euro-Arab Palestinian propaganda and Israel’s demonisation. To achieve this end a whole culture of denial of historic jihad and dhimmitude has been conceived and propagated throughout Europe. The responsibility for terror and war was deliberately shifted from the jihad ideology to Israel’s right of existence. Palestinianism is just the modern continuation against the Jews of the jihad onslaught waged against Christianity for over a millennium.
By justifying the Palestinian jihad against Israel, Europe entered into a suicidal dynamic. The repudiation of Israel’s historical legitimacy and its replacement by a jihadist world order with its own Islamic conception of justice denies Europe’s own sovereignty and legitimacy. In the Islamic context, Palestinians incarnate jihadist ideology against infidels and Muslim replacement theology; whereas, in fact, Israel represents the liberation of the Jewish people from the yoke of dhimmitude. For decades the European Union has provided the Palestinians with the intellectual, cultural and media ammunitions against Israel. It was Arafat, the subsidised “mignon” of Europe, who invented modern international terrorism – including air piracy against Israel in 1968 – and created a culture of hate and a policy of chaos since September 2000 that have now become global. Europe’s alliance with the Palestinians and the Arab world against Israel and America was based on its own denial of jihad ideology. Because of this denial Europe encourage a large-scale Muslim immigration for economic and strategic interests. This is why Europe is today deeply submerged by an anti-American and anti-Zionist culture.
For Christians, Israel is central in this context, because jihad is waged in the name of Islamic replacement theology, whereby Isa replaces Yeshua or Jesus, and the Koran replaces the Gospel. Christians are linked to the Jews by the Bible. If Christians want to break from this bond, they will have to forego the First Testament, including the Ten Commandments, the Prophets, and the Psalms and somehow, link the Gospel to the Palestinian Muslim Isa of the Koran. This is the challenge that Christians are facing now. And this is the spiritual meaning of Israel for Christians now: either Christians will resist or they will convert and Europe will become one more Islamized Christian territory. The jihad against Israel is also a war against the Christian world.
It is my opinion that Europe has become the new land of dhimmitude and I will explain why. I have described in Eurabia, my last book, the causes that have triggered the dhimmitude of Europe. I will not develop this theme now but I will explain why politically and intellectually we have become dhimmis.
We accept to have our life continuously disturbed and threatened by the global jihad. From the moment the European Community, instead of fighting terror, submitted to the Palestinian threats, it lost the control over its own security. European policy with the Palestinians is a total failure because it was deliberately based on false assumptions and the denial that the PLO’s war against Israel was a jihad. Europe gave an unconditional support for Arafat, and paid billions of euros without any control to the Palestinian Authority. The result of European’s unilateral solicitude for the Palestinians has resulted in the election of Hamas, a terrorist jihadist movement. Europeans behave like dhimmis who have to pay tribute money for their security and the development of Muslim economies without even being thanked. Massive Muslim immigration, linked with the 56 Muslim countries weighs heavily on European policy. We have seen it during the Danish Cartoons Affair. According to Islamic law, dhimmis cannot criticise the Prophet or say that Islamic law has a defect without risking death. Hence, the Islamic blasphemy laws – even at the United Nations – have been imposed on us, and particularly on the Western media. The Islamists control the foreign, domestic and security policy of Europe through terror, the ongoing intifadas in France and the policy of chaos in the suburbs, jihadist-martyrdom bombings in Spain and England and persistent threats everywhere. It is such threats that keep the level of anti-Americanism and the hate against Israel so high in Europe.
The European policy of symbiosis with the Arab-Muslim world which I have described in Eurabia has set up a vast Euro-Arab demographic, political, economic and cultural zone encompassing immigration and multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is a crucial dimension of the Euro-Arab strategic alliance. Since 1975 the texts of Euro-Arab meetings and of the EU require the establishment of cultural and political Muslim centres in European cities. The problem is that Muslims and Europeans have contradictory views on their common history. Europeans consider jihad a barbarous war causing huge massacres and enslavement, while for Muslims jihad represents a peaceful progression of Islam. Dhimmitude is a dehumanizing system, but for Muslims it is a generous tolerance offered to non-Muslims. In order to accommodate the Muslims and their integration in Europe, European leaders have promoted the Islamic view of history. Therefore, they have justified and lauded the tolerance of dhimmitude, as for instance the Andalusian myth. For this reason, Europeans ignore totally what is jihad and what is dhimmitude. While we are currently living a period of jihad, and while Europeans are already conditioned to dhimmitude, they do not realise it because the historical framework has been obfuscated.
Cultural jihad with its antisemitic, anti-American and anti-Western characteristics develops within the context of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism thus becomes the instrument for the subversion of Western thought, aimed at imposing Islamic historical and theological thinking such as the justification of Islamist terrorism – based on the Muslim self-perception of victimhood. The erroneous affirmation that it was Islamic culture that has triggered European civilization in medieval period, is an attempt to prove Islam historical, cultural and demographical legitimacy in Europe, and consequently the implementation of shari’a principles today. It also affirms Islam cultural superiority over the West.
To conclude: There has been several interfaith dialogues but with poor results. Europe has paid billions to Muslim countries worldwide but the culture of jihad is flowering in spite of Europe’s appeasement policy. Palestinianism which is a replacement theology was the tool that led to Europe’s Islamisation and dhimmitude. By joining the Muslim jihad against Israel, the Christian West has obfuscated its own history, and now faced with a global jihad it is unable to assess correctly the situation and defend itself. Israel represents the liberation of man from dhimmitude, whereas Palestinianism represents jihad and dhimmitude ideology based on replacement theology. Europe, enslaved by Palestinianism, has chosen servitude instead of freedom. If we want peace to prevail, the Muslim world must abandon the jihadist ideology, it must recognise Jews and Christians as different and not see them as apostate Muslims. And this must start with Muslim recognition of the legitimacy of Israel, because jihad started against the Jews and it can only end with the rehabilitation of the Jews and Israel, which will bring the rehabilitation of all non-Muslims. We can achieve it if we speak the truth, if we teach in our schools and universities jihad and dhimmitude. Then, masses of peaceful Muslims, liberated from the jihadist ideology of hate, will join us to build together peace. But we cannot help them if, ourselves, we are doomed in dhimmitude.So, my next question is...what has been the response by peacful Muslims to her perspective? Do they understand (the majority of peacful Muslims) the roots and history and the "whole story" and are willing to not perpetuate the violence? What's the "score" now?
This information is crucial to help change occur toward a peaceful solution...is it getting out there to enough of the populations of Muslims and Americans...or is it still getting "spun"? Are the Christians, all of them, in their varied concepts of Christianity are they getting the story or a hateful spin?
Are politicians ( the presidents and prime ministers, etc of other countries) "informed" on this perspective...or only bits and pieces of spin?
'Islam sees itself as the primal and sole true religion.'
Christianity sees itself as the primal and sole true religion.
'Islam is the pure religion of Adam and has preceded all others.'
Christianity is the pure religion of Christ and has preceded all others.
Christ has a mission: at the end of time he will return to destroy Islam and impose Christianity as the sole religion over the whole world.
Or how does it go, he just destroys everyone not christian? As I said before you all are just the same.How does it go?
The difference between the two views is a little starker than you project. In the Islamic Paradigm, Islam attempts to kill primarily all the Christians and Jews (and any other infidel) - in an attempt to take over the world and spread their view. In the process, the world must pass though a destruction.
That's an act of vengeance.
In the Christian Paradigm, Jesus stops this killing and the war resulting from it (which according to Matthew - no life would be left if it were not stopped)
That's an act of mercy.
During the judgment of the offending nations and then - AFTERWARDS - anything in his kingdom which had offended is removed.
That's an act of justice.
In the transition between this age and the next - the world realizes the Judeo/Christian paradigm was right. The prophecies were correct and were fulfilled before their eyes, the Islamic Paradigm had been destroyed, and the world as a result of the new order - enters a period of peace, prosperity and longevity. The world will be ruled from Jerusalem.
In the Christian view - it is not the Christians that do the killing - but rather it is the Christians that are slaughtered.
***
By grouping all Christians together, you miss the salient points. The Christian world will be in complete apostasy (rebellion). They will not be Christian in fact - but in name only. True followers of Jesus - worldwide - will be hunted and persecuted brutally - we accept this event. It will not be hard in those days to spot one; and they will not be the ones bringing the world into ruin and judgment.
The two spheres - the Western world apostatized from the God of our fathers - and the Eastern Islamic world in Jihad Revival - will BOTH persecute Christians. It is because of the apostasy, the evil and sin - that God allows Radical Islam to be his Judgment against the West. And then afterwards does God judge Islam once and for all.
The Christian and Jewish prophecies preceded the Islamic ones by 600 yrs (Christian) and by 1000-2500 years (Judaic)
Within the Christian world - there is debate as to whether or not Jesus actually literal comes back at the end of the war (Amillennial) and sets up the transition - or whether it is symbolic - and He comes back at the end of 1000 years (Postmillennial)
Most Christians believe it's literal at the end of this age. I am undecided but leaning at the end of the 1000 yrs.
The world will be renewed and ruled from Jerusalem and most of the world will be governed in a Christian government. (It is understandable why those Christian Founding Fathers will make a Christian Theocracy and not a secular Republic - His truth will indeed be marching on)
Christianity which has blessed this continent since it's colonization - will bless the world in the Millennium. (Atheists - after you stop laughing - please insert snide remark - HERE)
The Islamic nations convert and the rest of the world either joins the New Order or is Evangelized over a period of time. The technological world we now know will recover and grow throughout the 1000 years.
The future East West war - ends the conflict between Islam and Judeo/Christianity once and for all - and the Peace on Earth that Quincy Adams talks about - not being able to happen as long as Islam rules - can finally come about. Adams did not see this prophetically - he reasoned it from observation.
Islam will have such an upper hand in the war - that it takes China, India and the combined reduced apostate nations of the West to defeat it - a truly global conflict. But in the end, the West survives and prevails.
I think here - a quote from General Douglas MacArthur is appropriate.
"""“Military alliances, balances of power, leagues of nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be the way of the crucible of war. The utter destructiveness of war now blocks out this alternative. We have had our last chance. If we will not devise some greater and more equitable system, our Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature and all material and cultural developments of the past two thousand years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.”"""
On September 2, 1945,
End of World War II, speech aboard the USS Missouri surrender ceremony
U.S. Army General Douglas MacArthur , summarizing the historic lesson of war:
He is referring to Jesus Christ
I also think prophecy is an indicator of what could be, but can be changed. I don't believe that we are to wait around for it all to happen...we are to do something !!!
Knowledge and prayer are key...prophecy can be changed...it is the "cow consciousness" that allows prophecy to unfold unchecked...action is the answer...take action to get knowledge, take action in praying for God's will. Take action by communicating. Take action to ask what is the Christ truly all about...
It is not God's will that the world goes through a literal, materialistic destuction...it is God's will for humanity to rise above her primal instincts of fight and flight...to communicate. There are many more intelligent and peace driven people than there are violent ones.
With this kind of information people can wake up to their dhimmitude consciousness and change.Christianity is exclusive. Therefore Christian government can only be fascist, and like Israel, from outside only Jews can become citizens. I think you forgot the part about, Christians love Israel because they are suppose to start this epic war. And for their trouble they will be doomed to hell, because they are not christian. Well they are trying. They want the US to attack Iran. In fact they were warned by US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen not to pull another Israeli attack on the USS Liberty in 1967. That means don't attack an American ship disguised as Iranians. I'll be durned, must be all Prophisized.
We will all stand before a Rightous God and answer for what we have said and done, Christain,Jew,Muslim,Buddist,Hindi,or Athest .Lets not forget Pagens, Gods desire is all mankind be saved.."All are called,but only a few decide to follow."
I honestly don't know why you are bothering to say anything at all if you cannot add something useful to the discussion.
And this software has a built-in spell chequer
*About Islam:
1-Islam is simply being grateful by worshiping the creator.
2-Muslims are asked to defend themselves and not attack others.
3-In the past, they had to make wars to spread their message since leaders of those lands didn't allow them to do so peacefully.
4-Muslims were requested to leave worshipers, women , children and peaceful people alone when entering a city.
5-At the end of days, they say that Jessus come and fight for the right thing. they don't say he will kill christians.
it is just said that he would spread peace everywhere.
*American governements attack muslims for several reasons:
1-oill
2-protecting israil.
3-because defending attitude is in their religion and they would die for it.and America requires nations to follow them.
4-islam cultural impact and this is derived by Israil.
MohammedWell, I am sure no one is interested in what I think, but I think they are all as bad as each other.
Do the "Real Believers" need a Closer Look At The Bible?
Get the facts - Know the Truth about the Real Bible
- Real Answers to Real Questions:
Jesus, Trinity, Bible, Holy Ghost - Son of Who?
Christianity today, how it all started & more . . .
Be sure to "share" this link with all your contacts...
All this & more - internets site to compare İslam & aChristianity: www.911Bible.com
How did Yusuf Estes, an American Chaplain - discover the truth?
What is the Bible - REALLY?
Do Muslims doubt the English KJV Bible is from God?
(Quran says, "Yes!")
Jesus? - Did He Really Die on the Cross? (Evidence says, NO!.)
Bible - Is It the Word of God? (Experts say, NO!.)
Tinity- Did Jesus or anyone teach this? (Bible says, NO!.)
"Only Begotten Son of God"? Was this Jesus? (Bible, says - NO!).
Are children born in original sin? (Bible says, "Yes!" - but Jesus says, "NO!")
http://www.islamnewsroom.com/content/view/121/42/I am interested. Been wonderin' where you been. Excellent photo comparison.
Especially for prophecy teacher,from the mouth of a previous Christian chaplain.Im quoting this just as you have misquoted somethings regarding to islamic teachings.This was interesting for me to know how he thought about islam perhaps 100 times more radical than you people.
My name is Yusuf Estes and I am the National Muslim Chaplain for American Muslims, sponsored by a number of organizations here in Washington, DC. As such, I travel around the entire world lecturing and sharing the message of the Christ of the Quran in Islam. We hold dialogs and discussion groups with all faiths and enjoy the opportunity to work alongside of rabbis, ministers, preachers and priests everywhere. Most of our work is in the institutional area, military, universities and prisons. Primarily our goal is to educate and communicate the correct message of Islam and who the Muslims really are. Although Islam has grown now to tie Christianity as the largest of religions on earth, we see many of those who claim Islam as Muslims, that do not correctly understand nor properly represent the message of "Peace, Surrender and Obedience to God" (Arabic = 'Islam').
Dear me, I am afraid that I got a bit ahead of myself, I was trying to give a bit of background on my own personal experience to see if it would in anyway benefit you in your ministry. This may seem quite strange that I would offer to help you, while we perhaps share a few different perspectives and concepts of God, Jesus, prophet hood, sin and salvation. But you see, at one time I was in the same boat as you. Really, I was. Let me explain.
I was born into a very strong Christian family in the Midwest. Our family
Christian Musician Minister - 1988
and their ancestors not only built the churches and schools across this land, but actually were the same ones who came here in the first place. While I was still in elementary we relocated in Houston, Texas in 1949 (I'm old). We attended church regularly and I was baptized at the age of 12 in Pasadena, Texas. As a teenager, I wanted to visit other churches to learn more of their teachings and beliefs. The Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Charismatic movements, Nazarene, Church of Christ, Church of God, Church of God in Christ, Full Gospel, Agape, Catholic, Presbyterian and many more. I developed quite a thirst for the "Gospel" or as we say; "Good News." My research into religion did not stop with Christianity. Not at all. Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Metaphysics, native American beliefs were all a part of my studies. Just about the only one that I did not look into seriously was "Islam". Why? Good question.
Anyway, I became very interested in different types of music, especially Gospel and Classical. Because my whole family was religious and musical it followed that I too would begin my studies in both areas. All this set me for the logical position of Music Minister in many of the churches that I became affiliated with over the years. I started teaching keyboard instruments in 1960 and by 1963 owned my own studios in Laurel, Maryland, called "Estes Music Studios."
Over the next 30 years my father and I worked together in many business projects. We had entertainment programs, shows and attractions. We opened piano and organ stores all the way from Texas and Oklahoma to Florida. I made millions of dollars in those years, but could not find the peace of mind that can only come through knowing the truth and finding the real plan of salvation. I'm sure you have asked yourself the question; "Why did God create me?" or "What is it that God wants me to do?" or "Exactly who is God, anyway?" "Why do we believe in 'original sin?" and "Why would the sons of Adam be forced to accept his 'sins' and then as a result be punished forever. But if you asked anyone these questions, they would probably tell you that you have to believe without asking, or that it is a 'mystery' and you shouldn't ask.
And then there is the concept of the 'Trinity.' If I would ask preachers or ministers to give me some sort of an idea how 'one' could figure out to become 'three' or how God Himself, Who can do anything He Wills to do, cannot just forgive people's sins, but rather and had to become a man, come down on earth, be a human, and then take on the sins of all people. Keeping in mind that all along He is still God of the whole universe and does as He Wills to do, both in and outside of the universe as we know it.
Then one day in 1991, I came to know that the Muslims believed in the Bible. I was shocked. How could this be? But that's not all, they believe in Jesus as:
* a true messenger of God;
* prophet of God;
* miracle birth without human intervention;
* he was the 'Christ' or Messiah as predicted in the Bible;
* he is with God now and most important;
* He will be coming back in the Last Days to lead the believers against the 'Antichrist.'
This was too much for me. Especially since the evangelists that we used to travel around with all hated Muslims and Islam very much. They even said things that were not true to make people afraid of Islam. So, why would I want anything to do with these people?
My father was very active in supporting church work, especially church school programs. He became and ordained minister in the 1970s. He and his wife (my stepmother) knew many of the TV evangelists and preachers and even visited Oral Roberts and helped in the building of the "Prayer Tower" in Tulsa, OK. They also were strong supporters of Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Fae Bakker, Jerry Fallwell, John Haggi and the biggest enemy to Islam in America, Pat Robertson.
Dad and his wife worked together and were most active in recording "Praise" tapes and distributing them for free to people in retirement homes, hospitals and homes for the elderly. And then in 1991 he began doing business with a man from Egypt and told me that he wanted me to meet him. This idea appealed to me when I thought about the idea of having an international flavor. You know, the pyramids, sphinx, Nile River and all that. Then my father mentioned that this man was a 'Moslem.'
I couldn't believe my ears.
A 'Moslem?'
No way!
I reminded my dad of the various different things that we had heard about these people, how they are -
Terrorists; hijackers; kidnappers; bombers and who knows what else?
Not only that but:
They don't believe in God
They kiss the ground five times a day and
They worship a black box in the desert.
No!
I did not want to meet this 'Moslem' man. No way!
My father insisted that I meet him and reassured me that he was a very nice person. So, I gave in and agreed to the meeting.
But on my terms.
I agreed to meet him on a Sunday after church so we would be all prayed up and in good standing with the Lord. I would be carrying my Bible under my arm as usual. I would have my big shiny cross dangling and I would have on my cap which says: "Jesus is Lord" right across the front. My wife and two young daughters came along and we were ready for our first encounter with the 'Moslems.'
When I came into the shop and asked my father where the 'Moslem' was, he pointed and said: "He's right over there."
I was confused. That couldn't be the Moslem. No way.
I'm looking for a huge man with flowing robes and big turban on his head, a beard half way down his shirt and eyebrows that go all the way across his forehead.
This man had no beard. In fact, he didn't even have any hair on his head at all. He was very close to bald. And he was very pleasant with a warm welcome and handshake. This didn't make sense. I thought they are terrorists and bombers. What is this all about?
Never mind. I'll get right to work on this guy. He needs to be 'saved' and me and the Lord are going to do it.
So, after a quick introduction, I asked him:
"Do you believe in God?"
He said:
"Yes."
(Good!)
Then I said:
"Do you believe in Adam and Eve?"
He said:
"Yes."
I said: "What about Abraham? You believe in him and how he tried to sacrifice his son for God?"
He said:
"Yes."
Then I asked:
"What about Moses?"
"Ten Commandments?"
"Parting the Red Sea?"
Again he said:
"Yes."
Then:
"What about the other prophets, David, Solomon and John the Baptist?"
He said:
"Yes."
I asked:
"Do you believe in the Bible?"
Again, he said:
"Yes."
So, now it was time for the big question:
"Do you believe in Jesus? That he was the Messiah (Christ) of God?"
Again the said:
"Yes."
Well now:
"This was going to be easier than I had thought."
He was just about ready to be baptized only he didn't know it.
And I was just the one to do it, too.
I was winning souls to the Lord day after day and this would be a big achievement for me, to catch one of these 'Moslems' and 'convert' him to Christianity.
I asked him if he liked tea and he said he did. So off we went to a little shop in the mall to sit and talk about my favorite subject: Beliefs.
While we sat in that little coffee shop for hours talking (I did most of the talking) I came to know that he was very nice, quiet and even a bit shy. He listened attentively to every word that I had to say and did not interrupt even one time. I liked this man's way and thought that he had definite potential to become a good Christian.
Little did I know the course of events about to unravel in front of my eyes.
First of all, I agreed with my father that we should do business with this man and even encouraged the idea of him traveling along with me on my business trips across the northern part of Texas. Day after day we would ride together and discuss various issues pertaining to different beliefs that people have. And along the way, I could of course interject some of my favorite radio programs of worship and praise to help bring the message to this poor individual. We talked about the concept of God; the meaning of life; the purpose of creation; the prophets and their mission and how God reveals His Will to mankind. We also shared a lot of personal experiences and ideas as well.
One day I came to know that my friend Mohamed was going to move out of the home he have been sharing with a friend of his and was going to be living in the mosque for a time. I went to my dad and asked him if we could invite Mohamed to come out to our big home in the country and stay there with us. After all, he could share some of the work and some expenses and he would be right there when we were ready to go to out traveling around. My father agreed and Mohamed moved in.
Of course I still would find time to visit my fellow preachers and evangelists around the state of Texas. One of them lived on the Texas -- Mexico border and another lived near lived Oklahoma border. One preacher liked to a huge wooden cross that was bigger than a car. He would carry it over his shoulder and drag the bottom on the ground and go down the road or freeway hauling these two beams formed in the shape of a cross. People would stop their cars and come over to him and ask him what was going on and he would give them pamphlets and booklets on Christianity.
One day my friend with the cross had a heart attack and had to go to the Veterans Hospital where he stayed for quite a long while. I used to visit him in the hospital several times a week and I would take Mohamed with me with the hopes that we could all share together in the subject of beliefs and religions. My friend was not very impressed and it was obvious that he did not want to know anything about Islam. Then one day a man who was sharing the room with my friend came rolling into the room in his wheelchair. I went to him and asked him his name and he said that it didn't matter and when I asked him where he was from he said he was from the planet Jupiter. I thought about what he said and then began to wonder if I was in the cardiac ward or the mental ward.
I knew the man was lonely and depressed and needed someone in his life. So, I began to 'witness' to him about the Lord. I read to him out of the book of Jonah in the Old Testament. I shared the story of the prophet Jonah who had been sent by the Lord to call his people to the correct way. Jonah had left his people and escaped by boat to leave his city and head out to sea. A storm came up and the ship almost capsized and the people on board threw Jonah over the side of the ship. A whale came up to the surface and grabbed Jonah, swallowed him and then went down to the bottom of the sea, where he stayed for 3 days and 3 nights. Yet because of God's Mercy, He caused the whale to rise to the surface and then spit Jonah out to return back home safely to his city of Nineveh. And the idea was that we can't really run away from our problems because we always know what we have done. And what is more, God also always knows what we have done.
After sharing this story with the man in the wheel chair, he looked up and me and apologized. He told me he was sorry for his rude behavior and that he had experienced some real serious problems recently. Then he said that he wanted to confess something to me. And I said that I was not a Catholic priest and I don't handle confessions. He replied back to me that he knew that. In fact, he said: "I am a Catholic priest."
I was shocked. Here I had been trying to preach Christianity to a priest. What in the world was happening here?
The priest began to share his story of being a missionary for the church for over 12 years to south and Central America and Mexico and even in New York's 'Hell's Kitchen.' When he was released from the hospital he needed a place to go to recover and rather than let him go to stay with a Catholic family, I told my dad that we should invite him to come out and live with us in the country along with our families and Mohamed. It was agreed by all that he would so, he moved out right away.
During the trip out to our home, I talked with the priest about some of the concepts of beliefs in Islam and to my surprise he agreed and then shared even more about this with me. I was shocked when he told me that Catholic priests actually study Islam and some even carry doctors degrees in this subject. This was all very enlightening to me. But there was still a lot more to come.
After settling in, we all began to gather around the kitchen table after dinner every night to discuss religion. My father would bring his King James Version of the Bible, I would bring out my Revised Standard Version of the Bible, my wife had another version of the Bible (maybe something like Jimmy Swaggart's 'Good News For Modern Man." The priest of course, had the Catholic Bible which has 7 more books in it that the Protestant Bible. So we spent more time talking about which Bible was the right one or the most correct one, than we did trying to convince Mohamed about becoming a Christian.
At one point I recall asking him about the Quran and how many versions of it there were in the last 1,400 years. He told me that there was only ONE QURAN. And that it had never been changed. Yet he let me know that the Quran had been memorized by hundreds of thousands of people, in it's entirety and were scattered about the earth in many different countries. Over the centuries since the Quran was revealed millions have memorized it completely and have taught it to others who have memorized it completely, from cover to cover, letter perfect without mistakes.
This did not seem possible to me. After all, the original languages of the Bible have all been dead languages for centuries and the documents themselves have been lost in their originals for hundreds and thousands of years. So, how could it be that something like this could be so easy to preserve and to recite from cover to cover.
Anyway, one day the priest asked the Mohamed if he might accompany him to the mosque to see what it was like there. They came back talking about their experience there and we could not wait to ask the priest what it was like and what all types of ceremonies they performed. He said they didn't really 'do' anything. They just came and prayed and left. I said: "They left? Without any speeches or singing?" He said that was right.
A few more days went by and the Catholic priest asked Mohamed if he might join him again for a trip to the mosque which they did. But this time it was different. They did not come back for a very long time. It became dark and we worried that something might have happened to them. Finally they arrived and when they came in the door I immediately recognized Mohamed, but who was this alongside of him? Someone wearing a white robe and a white cap. Hold on a minute! It was the priest. I said to him: "Pete? -- Did you become a 'Moslem?'
He said that he had entered into Islam that very day. THE PRIEST BECAME A MUSLIM!! What next? (You'll see).
So, I went upstairs to think things over a bit and began to talk to my wife about the whole subject. She then told me that she too was going to enter into Islam, because she knew it was the truth. I was really shocked now. I went downstairs and woke up Mohamed and asked him to come outside with me for a discussion. We walked and talked that whole night through. By the time he was ready to pray Fajr (the morning prayer of the Muslims) I knew that the truth had come at last and now it was up to me to do my part. I went out back behind my father's house and found an old piece of plywood lying under an overhang and right there I put my head down on the ground facing the direction that the Muslims pray five times a day.
Now then in that position, with my body stretched out on the plywood and my head on the ground, I asked: "O God. If you are there, guide me, guide me." And then after a while I raised up my head and I noticed something. No, I didn't see birds or angels coming out of the sky nor did I hear voices or music, nor did I see bright lights and flashes. What I did notice was a change inside of me. I was aware now more than ever before that it was time for me to stop lying and cheating and doing sneaky business deals. It was time that I really work at being an honest and upright man. I knew now what I had to do. So I went upstairs and took a shower with the distinct idea that I was 'washing' away the sinful old person that I had become over the years. And I was now coming into a new, fresh life. A life based on truth and proof.
Around 11:00 A.M. that morning, I stood before two witnesses, one the ex-priest, formerly known as Father Peter Jacob's, and the other Mohamed Abel Rehman and announced my 'shahadah' (open testimony to the Oneness of God and the prophethood of Muhammad, peace be upon him).
A few minutes later, my wife follow along and gave the same testimony. But hers was in front of 3 witnesses (me being the third).
My father was a bit more reserved on the subject and waited a few more months before he made his shahadah (public testimony). But he did finally commit to Islam and began offering prayers right along with me and the other Muslims in the local masjid (mosque).
The children were taken out of the Christian school and placed in Muslim schools. And now ten years later, they are memorizing much of the Quran and the teachings of Islam.
My father's wife was the last of all to acknowledge that Jesus could not be a son of God and that he must have been a mighty prophet of God, but not God.
Now stop and think. A whole entire household of people from varying backgrounds and ethnic groups coming together in truth to learn how to know and worship the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe. Think. A Catholic priest. A minister of music and preacher. An ordained minister and builder of Christian schools. And they all come into Islam! Only by His Mercy were we all guided to see the real truth of Islam without any blinders on their eyes any longer.
If I were to stop right here, I'm sure that you would have to admit that at least, this is an amazing story, right? After all, three religious leaders of three separate denominations all going into one very opposite belief at the same time and then soon after the rest of the household.
But that is not all. There is more! The same year, while I was in Grand Prairie, Texas (near Dallas) I met a Baptist seminary student from Tennessee named Joe, who also came to Islam after reading the Holy Quran while in BAPTIST SEMINARY COLLEGE!
There are others as well. I recall the case of the Catholic priest in a college town who talked about the good things in Islam so much that I was forced to ask him why he didn't enter Islam. He replied: "What? And loose my job?" - His name is Father John and there is still hope for him yet.
More? Yes. The very next year I met a former Catholic priest who had been a missionary for 8 years in Africa. He learned about Islam while he was there and entered into Islam. He then changed his name to Omar and moved to Dallas Texas.
Any more? Again, yes. Two years later, while in San Antonio, Texas I was introduced to a former Arch Bishop of the Orthodox Church of Russia who learned about Islam and gave up his position to enter Islam.
After accepting Islam-Year 2000
And since my own entrance into Islam and becoming a chaplain to the Muslims throughout the country and around the world, I have encountered many more individuals who were leaders, teachers and scholars in other religions who learned about Islam and entered into it. They came from Hindus, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Jehovah's Witnesses, Greek and Russian Orthodox, Coptic Christians from Egypt, non-denominational churches and even scientists who had been atheists.
Why? Good question.
May I suggest to the seeker of truth do the following NINE STEPS to purification of the mind:
1.) Clean their mind, their heart and their soul real good.
2.) Clear away all the prejudices and biases
3.) Read a good translation of the meaning of the Holy Quran in a language that they can understand best.
4.) Take some time.
5.) Read and reflect.
6.) Think and pray.
7.) And keep on asking the One who created you in the first place, to guide you to the truth.
8.) Keep this up for a few months. And be regular in it.
9.) Above all, do not let others who are poisoned in their thinking influence you while your are in this state of "rebirth of the soul."
The rest is between you and the Almighty Lord of the Universe. If you truly love Him, then He already Knows it and He will deal with each of us according to our hearts.
So, now you have the introduction to the story of my coming into Islam and becoming Muslim. There is more on the Internet about this story and there are more pictures there as well. Please take the time to visit it and then please take the time to email me and let us come together to share in all truths based on proofs for understanding our origins and our purpose and goals in this life and the Next Life.
And once again I thank you for your email today. If you hadn't sent it, I probably would still not have completed this task of putting down the story once and for all of how "Priest and Preachers Are Coming to Islam."
May Allah guide you on your journey to all truth. Ameen. And May He open your heart and your mind to the reality of this world and the purpose of this life, ameen.
Peace to you and Guidance from Allah the One Almighty God, Creator and Sustainer of all that exists.
Your friend,
Chaplain Yusuf Estes
source My name is Yusuf Estes and I am the National Muslim Chaplain for American Muslims, sponsored by a number of organizations here in Washington, DC. As such, I travel around the entire world lecturing and sharing the message of the Christ of the Quran in Islam. We hold dialogs and discussion groups with all faiths and enjoy the opportunity to work alongside of rabbis, ministers, preachers and priests everywhere. Most of our work is in the institutional area, military, universities and prisons. Primarily our goal is to educate and communicate the correct message of Islam and who the Muslims really are. Although Islam has grown now to tie Christianity as the largest of religions on earth, we see many of those who claim Islam as Muslims, that do not correctly understand nor properly represent the message of "Peace, Surrender and Obedience to God" (Arabic = 'Islam').
Dear me, I am afraid that I got a bit ahead of myself, I was trying to give a bit of background on my own personal experience to see if it would in anyway benefit you in your ministry. This may seem quite strange that I would offer to help you, while we perhaps share a few different perspectives and concepts of God, Jesus, prophet hood, sin and salvation. But you see, at one time I was in the same boat as you. Really, I was. Let me explain.
I was born into a very strong Christian family in the Midwest. Our family
Christian Musician Minister - 1988
and their ancestors not only built the churches and schools across this land, but actually were the same ones who came here in the first place. While I was still in elementary we relocated in Houston, Texas in 1949 (I'm old). We attended church regularly and I was baptized at the age of 12 in Pasadena, Texas. As a teenager, I wanted to visit other churches to learn more of their teachings and beliefs. The Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Charismatic movements, Nazarene, Church of Christ, Church of God, Church of God in Christ, Full Gospel, Agape, Catholic, Presbyterian and many more. I developed quite a thirst for the "Gospel" or as we say; "Good News." My research into religion did not stop with Christianity. Not at all. Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Metaphysics, native American beliefs were all a part of my studies. Just about the only one that I did not look into seriously was "Islam". Why? Good question.
Anyway, I became very interested in different types of music, especially Gospel and Classical. Because my whole family was religious and musical it followed that I too would begin my studies in both areas. All this set me for the logical position of Music Minister in many of the churches that I became affiliated with over the years. I started teaching keyboard instruments in 1960 and by 1963 owned my own studios in Laurel, Maryland, called "Estes Music Studios."
Over the next 30 years my father and I worked together in many business projects. We had entertainment programs, shows and attractions. We opened piano and organ stores all the way from Texas and Oklahoma to Florida. I made millions of dollars in those years, but could not find the peace of mind that can only come through knowing the truth and finding the real plan of salvation. I'm sure you have asked yourself the question; "Why did God create me?" or "What is it that God wants me to do?" or "Exactly who is God, anyway?" "Why do we believe in 'original sin?" and "Why would the sons of Adam be forced to accept his 'sins' and then as a result be punished forever. But if you asked anyone these questions, they would probably tell you that you have to believe without asking, or that it is a 'mystery' and you shouldn't ask.
And then there is the concept of the 'Trinity.' If I would ask preachers or ministers to give me some sort of an idea how 'one' could figure out to become 'three' or how God Himself, Who can do anything He Wills to do, cannot just forgive people's sins, but rather and had to become a man, come down on earth, be a human, and then take on the sins of all people. Keeping in mind that all along He is still God of the whole universe and does as He Wills to do, both in and outside of the universe as we know it.
Then one day in 1991, I came to know that the Muslims believed in the Bible. I was shocked. How could this be? But that's not all, they believe in Jesus as:
* a true messenger of God;
* prophet of God;
* miracle birth without human intervention;
* he was the 'Christ' or Messiah as predicted in the Bible;
* he is with God now and most important;
* He will be coming back in the Last Days to lead the believers against the 'Antichrist.'
This was too much for me. Especially since the evangelists that we used to travel around with all hated Muslims and Islam very much. They even said things that were not true to make people afraid of Islam. So, why would I want anything to do with these people?
My father was very active in supporting church work, especially church school programs. He became and ordained minister in the 1970s. He and his wife (my stepmother) knew many of the TV evangelists and preachers and even visited Oral Roberts and helped in the building of the "Prayer Tower" in Tulsa, OK. They also were strong supporters of Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Fae Bakker, Jerry Fallwell, John Haggi and the biggest enemy to Islam in America, Pat Robertson.
Dad and his wife worked together and were most active in recording "Praise" tapes and distributing them for free to people in retirement homes, hospitals and homes for the elderly. And then in 1991 he began doing business with a man from Egypt and told me that he wanted me to meet him. This idea appealed to me when I thought about the idea of having an international flavor. You know, the pyramids, sphinx, Nile River and all that. Then my father mentioned that this man was a 'Moslem.'
I couldn't believe my ears.
A 'Moslem?'
No way!
I reminded my dad of the various different things that we had heard about these people, how they are -
Terrorists; hijackers; kidnappers; bombers and who knows what else?
Not only that but:
They don't believe in God
They kiss the ground five times a day and
They worship a black box in the desert.
No!
I did not want to meet this 'Moslem' man. No way!
My father insisted that I meet him and reassured me that he was a very nice person. So, I gave in and agreed to the meeting.
But on my terms.
I agreed to meet him on a Sunday after church so we would be all prayed up and in good standing with the Lord. I would be carrying my Bible under my arm as usual. I would have my big shiny cross dangling and I would have on my cap which says: "Jesus is Lord" right across the front. My wife and two young daughters came along and we were ready for our first encounter with the 'Moslems.'
When I came into the shop and asked my father where the 'Moslem' was, he pointed and said: "He's right over there."
I was confused. That couldn't be the Moslem. No way.
I'm looking for a huge man with flowing robes and big turban on his head, a beard half way down his shirt and eyebrows that go all the way across his forehead.
This man had no beard. In fact, he didn't even have any hair on his head at all. He was very close to bald. And he was very pleasant with a warm welcome and handshake. This didn't make sense. I thought they are terrorists and bombers. What is this all about?
Never mind. I'll get right to work on this guy. He needs to be 'saved' and me and the Lord are going to do it.
So, after a quick introduction, I asked him:
"Do you believe in God?"
He said:
"Yes."
(Good!)
Then I said:
"Do you believe in Adam and Eve?"
He said:
"Yes."
I said: "What about Abraham? You believe in him and how he tried to sacrifice his son for God?"
He said:
"Yes."
Then I asked:
"What about Moses?"
"Ten Commandments?"
"Parting the Red Sea?"
Again he said:
"Yes."
Then:
"What about the other prophets, David, Solomon and John the Baptist?"
He said:
"Yes."
I asked:
"Do you believe in the Bible?"
Again, he said:
"Yes."
So, now it was time for the big question:
"Do you believe in Jesus? That he was the Messiah (Christ) of God?"
Again the said:
"Yes."
Well now:
"This was going to be easier than I had thought."
He was just about ready to be baptized only he didn't know it.
And I was just the one to do it, too.
I was winning souls to the Lord day after day and this would be a big achievement for me, to catch one of these 'Moslems' and 'convert' him to Christianity.
I asked him if he liked tea and he said he did. So off we went to a little shop in the mall to sit and talk about my favorite subject: Beliefs.
While we sat in that little coffee shop for hours talking (I did most of the talking) I came to know that he was very nice, quiet and even a bit shy. He listened attentively to every word that I had to say and did not interrupt even one time. I liked this man's way and thought that he had definite potential to become a good Christian.
Little did I know the course of events about to unravel in front of my eyes.
First of all, I agreed with my father that we should do business with this man and even encouraged the idea of him traveling along with me on my business trips across the northern part of Texas. Day after day we would ride together and discuss various issues pertaining to different beliefs that people have. And along the way, I could of course interject some of my favorite radio programs of worship and praise to help bring the message to this poor individual. We talked about the concept of God; the meaning of life; the purpose of creation; the prophets and their mission and how God reveals His Will to mankind. We also shared a lot of personal experiences and ideas as well.
One day I came to know that my friend Mohamed was going to move out of the home he have been sharing with a friend of his and was going to be living in the mosque for a time. I went to my dad and asked him if we could invite Mohamed to come out to our big home in the country and stay there with us. After all, he could share some of the work and some expenses and he would be right there when we were ready to go to out traveling around. My father agreed and Mohamed moved in.
Of course I still would find time to visit my fellow preachers and evangelists around the state of Texas. One of them lived on the Texas -- Mexico border and another lived near lived Oklahoma border. One preacher liked to a huge wooden cross that was bigger than a car. He would carry it over his shoulder and drag the bottom on the ground and go down the road or freeway hauling these two beams formed in the shape of a cross. People would stop their cars and come over to him and ask him what was going on and he would give them pamphlets and booklets on Christianity.
One day my friend with the cross had a heart attack and had to go to the Veterans Hospital where he stayed for quite a long while. I used to visit him in the hospital several times a week and I would take Mohamed with me with the hopes that we could all share together in the subject of beliefs and religions. My friend was not very impressed and it was obvious that he did not want to know anything about Islam. Then one day a man who was sharing the room with my friend came rolling into the room in his wheelchair. I went to him and asked him his name and he said that it didn't matter and when I asked him where he was from he said he was from the planet Jupiter. I thought about what he said and then began to wonder if I was in the cardiac ward or the mental ward.
I knew the man was lonely and depressed and needed someone in his life. So, I began to 'witness' to him about the Lord. I read to him out of the book of Jonah in the Old Testament. I shared the story of the prophet Jonah who had been sent by the Lord to call his people to the correct way. Jonah had left his people and escaped by boat to leave his city and head out to sea. A storm came up and the ship almost capsized and the people on board threw Jonah over the side of the ship. A whale came up to the surface and grabbed Jonah, swallowed him and then went down to the bottom of the sea, where he stayed for 3 days and 3 nights. Yet because of God's Mercy, He caused the whale to rise to the surface and then spit Jonah out to return back home safely to his city of Nineveh. And the idea was that we can't really run away from our problems because we always know what we have done. And what is more, God also always knows what we have done.
After sharing this story with the man in the wheel chair, he looked up and me and apologized. He told me he was sorry for his rude behavior and that he had experienced some real serious problems recently. Then he said that he wanted to confess something to me. And I said that I was not a Catholic priest and I don't handle confessions. He replied back to me that he knew that. In fact, he said: "I am a Catholic priest."
I was shocked. Here I had been trying to preach Christianity to a priest. What in the world was happening here?
The priest began to share his story of being a missionary for the church for over 12 years to south and Central America and Mexico and even in New York's 'Hell's Kitchen.' When he was released from the hospital he needed a place to go to recover and rather than let him go to stay with a Catholic family, I told my dad that we should invite him to come out and live with us in the country along with our families and Mohamed. It was agreed by all that he would so, he moved out right away.
During the trip out to our home, I talked with the priest about some of the concepts of beliefs in Islam and to my surprise he agreed and then shared even more about this with me. I was shocked when he told me that Catholic priests actually study Islam and some even carry doctors degrees in this subject. This was all very enlightening to me. But there was still a lot more to come.
After settling in, we all began to gather around the kitchen table after dinner every night to discuss religion. My father would bring his King James Version of the Bible, I would bring out my Revised Standard Version of the Bible, my wife had another version of the Bible (maybe something like Jimmy Swaggart's 'Good News For Modern Man." The priest of course, had the Catholic Bible which has 7 more books in it that the Protestant Bible. So we spent more time talking about which Bible was the right one or the most correct one, than we did trying to convince Mohamed about becoming a Christian.
At one point I recall asking him about the Quran and how many versions of it there were in the last 1,400 years. He told me that there was only ONE QURAN. And that it had never been changed. Yet he let me know that the Quran had been memorized by hundreds of thousands of people, in it's entirety and were scattered about the earth in many different countries. Over the centuries since the Quran was revealed millions have memorized it completely and have taught it to others who have memorized it completely, from cover to cover, letter perfect without mistakes.
This did not seem possible to me. After all, the original languages of the Bible have all been dead languages for centuries and the documents themselves have been lost in their originals for hundreds and thousands of years. So, how could it be that something like this could be so easy to preserve and to recite from cover to cover.
Anyway, one day the priest asked the Mohamed if he might accompany him to the mosque to see what it was like there. They came back talking about their experience there and we could not wait to ask the priest what it was like and what all types of ceremonies they performed. He said they didn't really 'do' anything. They just came and prayed and left. I said: "They left? Without any speeches or singing?" He said that was right.
A few more days went by and the Catholic priest asked Mohamed if he might join him again for a trip to the mosque which they did. But this time it was different. They did not come back for a very long time. It became dark and we worried that something might have happened to them. Finally they arrived and when they came in the door I immediately recognized Mohamed, but who was this alongside of him? Someone wearing a white robe and a white cap. Hold on a minute! It was the priest. I said to him: "Pete? -- Did you become a 'Moslem?'
He said that he had entered into Islam that very day. THE PRIEST BECAME A MUSLIM!! What next? (You'll see).
So, I went upstairs to think things over a bit and began to talk to my wife about the whole subject. She then told me that she too was going to enter into Islam, because she knew it was the truth. I was really shocked now. I went downstairs and woke up Mohamed and asked him to come outside with me for a discussion. We walked and talked that whole night through. By the time he was ready to pray Fajr (the morning prayer of the Muslims) I knew that the truth had come at last and now it was up to me to do my part. I went out back behind my father's house and found an old piece of plywood lying under an overhang and right there I put my head down on the ground facing the direction that the Muslims pray five times a day.
Now then in that position, with my body stretched out on the plywood and my head on the ground, I asked: "O God. If you are there, guide me, guide me." And then after a while I raised up my head and I noticed something. No, I didn't see birds or angels coming out of the sky nor did I hear voices or music, nor did I see bright lights and flashes. What I did notice was a change inside of me. I was aware now more than ever before that it was time for me to stop lying and cheating and doing sneaky business deals. It was time that I really work at being an honest and upright man. I knew now what I had to do. So I went upstairs and took a shower with the distinct idea that I was 'washing' away the sinful old person that I had become over the years. And I was now coming into a new, fresh life. A life based on truth and proof.
Around 11:00 A.M. that morning, I stood before two witnesses, one the ex-priest, formerly known as Father Peter Jacob's, and the other Mohamed Abel Rehman and announced my 'shahadah' (open testimony to the Oneness of God and the prophethood of Muhammad, peace be upon him).
A few minutes later, my wife follow along and gave the same testimony. But hers was in front of 3 witnesses (me being the third).
My father was a bit more reserved on the subject and waited a few more months before he made his shahadah (public testimony). But he did finally commit to Islam and began offering prayers right along with me and the other Muslims in the local masjid (mosque).
The children were taken out of the Christian school and placed in Muslim schools. And now ten years later, they are memorizing much of the Quran and the teachings of Islam.
My father's wife was the last of all to acknowledge that Jesus could not be a son of God and that he must have been a mighty prophet of God, but not God.
Now stop and think. A whole entire household of people from varying backgrounds and ethnic groups coming together in truth to learn how to know and worship the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe. Think. A Catholic priest. A minister of music and preacher. An ordained minister and builder of Christian schools. And they all come into Islam! Only by His Mercy were we all guided to see the real truth of Islam without any blinders on their eyes any longer.
If I were to stop right here, I'm sure that you would have to admit that at least, this is an amazing story, right? After all, three religious leaders of three separate denominations all going into one very opposite belief at the same time and then soon after the rest of the household.
But that is not all. There is more! The same year, while I was in Grand Prairie, Texas (near Dallas) I met a Baptist seminary student from Tennessee named Joe, who also came to Islam after reading the Holy Quran while in BAPTIST SEMINARY COLLEGE!
There are others as well. I recall the case of the Catholic priest in a college town who talked about the good things in Islam so much that I was forced to ask him why he didn't enter Islam. He replied: "What? And loose my job?" - His name is Father John and there is still hope for him yet.
More? Yes. The very next year I met a former Catholic priest who had been a missionary for 8 years in Africa. He learned about Islam while he was there and entered into Islam. He then changed his name to Omar and moved to Dallas Texas.
Any more? Again, yes. Two years later, while in San Antonio, Texas I was introduced to a former Arch Bishop of the Orthodox Church of Russia who learned about Islam and gave up his position to enter Islam.
After accepting Islam-Year 2000
And since my own entrance into Islam and becoming a chaplain to the Muslims throughout the country and around the world, I have encountered many more individuals who were leaders, teachers and scholars in other religions who learned about Islam and entered into it. They came from Hindus, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Jehovah's Witnesses, Greek and Russian Orthodox, Coptic Christians from Egypt, non-denominational churches and even scientists who had been atheists.
Why? Good question.
May I suggest to the seeker of truth do the following NINE STEPS to purification of the mind:
1.) Clean their mind, their heart and their soul real good.
2.) Clear away all the prejudices and biases
3.) Read a good translation of the meaning of the Holy Quran in a language that they can understand best.
4.) Take some time.
5.) Read and reflect.
6.) Think and pray.
7.) And keep on asking the One who created you in the first place, to guide you to the truth.
8.) Keep this up for a few months. And be regular in it.
9.) Above all, do not let others who are poisoned in their thinking influence you while your are in this state of "rebirth of the soul."
The rest is between you and the Almighty Lord of the Universe. If you truly love Him, then He already Knows it and He will deal with each of us according to our hearts.
So, now you have the introduction to the story of my coming into Islam and becoming Muslim. There is more on the Internet about this story and there are more pictures there as well. Please take the time to visit it and then please take the time to email me and let us come together to share in all truths based on proofs for understanding our origins and our purpose and goals in this life and the Next Life.
And once again I thank you for your email today. If you hadn't sent it, I probably would still not have completed this task of putting down the story once and for all of how "Priest and Preachers Are Coming to Islam."
May Allah guide you on your journey to all truth. Ameen. And May He open your heart and your mind to the reality of this world and the purpose of this life, ameen.
Peace to you and Guidance from Allah the One Almighty God, Creator and Sustainer of all that exists.
Your friend,
Chaplain Yusuf Estes
Source
http://www.famousmuslims.com/Yusuf%20Estes.htm
Couldn't resist as we are into the long post:
"They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars."
"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat."
"Maybe they're like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."
"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take too long. Do you have any idea the life span of meat?"
"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."
"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads like the Weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat!"
"So... what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"
"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."
"Finally, Yes. They are indeed made out meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."
"So what does the meat have in mind?"
"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the universe, contact other sentients, swap ideas and information. The usual."
"We're supposed to talk to meat?"
"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there? Anyone home?' That sort of thing."
"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
"I thought you just told me they used radio."
"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
"Officially or unofficially?"
"Both."
"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in the quadrant, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."
"I was hoping you would say that."
"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say?" `Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"
"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."
"So we just pretend there's no one home in the universe."
"That's it."
"Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you have probed? You're sure they won't remember?"
"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them."
"A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream."
"And we can mark this sector unoccupied."
"Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"
"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again."
"They always come around."
"And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the universe would be if one were all alone."
Terry BissonI apologize about posting the very long Mark Steyn article: I thought I was posting only the demographic part - after reading it - I noticed I had accidentally included the multiculturlism part. I am reposting here only the demographics. - some may have quit reading because of the length.
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That, by the way, is the one point of similarity between the jihad and conventional terrorist movements like the IRA or ETA. Terror groups persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets: the IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that while they could never win militarily, they also could never be defeated. The Islamists have figured similarly. The only difference is that most terrorist wars are highly localized. We now have the first truly global terrorist insurgency because the Islamists view the whole world the way the IRA view the bogs of Fermanagh: they want it and they’ve calculated that our entire civilization lacks the will to see them off.
We spend a lot of time at The New Criterion attacking the elites and we’re right to do so. The commanding heights of the culture have behaved disgracefully for the last several decades. But, if it were just a problem with the elites, it wouldn’t be that serious: the mob could rise up and hang ’em from lampposts—a scenario that’s not unlikely in certain Continental countries. But the problem now goes way beyond the ruling establishment. The annexation by government of most of the key responsibilities of life—child-raising, taking care of your elderly parents—has profoundly changed the relationship between the citizen and the state. At some point—I would say socialized health care is a good marker—you cross a line, and it’s very hard then to persuade a citizenry enjoying that much government largesse to cross back. In National Review recently, I took issue with that line Gerald Ford always uses to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” Actually, you run into trouble long before that point: A government big enough to give you everything you want still isn’t big enough to get you to give anything back. That’s what the French and German political classes are discovering.
Go back to that list of local conflicts I mentioned. The jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you’re not shy about taking on the Israelis, the Russians, the Indians, and the Nigerians, why wouldn’t you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Danes and New Zealanders?
So the jihadists are for the most part doing no more than giving us a prod in the rear as we sleepwalk to the cliff. When I say “sleepwalk,” it’s not because we’re a blasé culture. On the contrary, one of the clearest signs of our decline is the way we expend so much energy worrying about the wrong things. If you’ve read Jared Diamond’s bestselling book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, you’ll know it goes into a lot of detail about Easter Island going belly up because they chopped down all their trees. Apparently that’s why they’re not a G8 member or on the UN Security Council. Same with the Greenlanders and the Mayans and Diamond’s other curious choices of “societies.” Indeed, as the author sees it, pretty much every society collapses because it chops down its trees.
Poor old Diamond can’t see the forest because of his obsession with the trees. (Russia’s collapsing even as it’s undergoing reforestation.) One way “societies choose to fail or succeed” is by choosing what to worry about. The western world has delivered more wealth and more comfort to more of its citizens than any other civilization in history, and in return we’ve developed a great cult of worrying. You know the classics of the genre: In 1968, in his bestselling book The Population Bomb, the eminent scientist Paul Ehrlich declared: “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” In 1972, in their landmark study The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead, and gas by 1993.
None of these things happened. In fact, quite the opposite is happening. We’re pretty much awash in resources, but we’re running out of people—the one truly indispensable resource, without which none of the others matter. Russia’s the most obvious example: it’s the largest country on earth, it’s full of natural resources, and yet it’s dying—its population is falling calamitously.
The default mode of our elites is that anything that happens—from terrorism to tsunamis—can be understood only as deriving from the perniciousness of western civilization. As Jean-François Revel wrote, “Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.”
And even though none of the prognostications of the eco-doom blockbusters of the 1970s came to pass, all that means is that thirty years on, the end of the world has to be rescheduled. The amended estimated time of arrival is now 2032. That’s to say, in 2002, the United Nations Global Environmental Outlook predicted “the destruction of 70 percent of the natural world in thirty years, mass extinction of species… . More than half the world will be afflicted by water shortages, with 95 percent of people in the Middle East with severe problems … 25 percent of all species of mammals and 10 percent of birds will be extinct …”
Etc., etc., for 450 pages. Or to cut to the chase, as The Guardian headlined it, “Unless We Change Our Ways, The World Faces Disaster.”
Well, here’s my prediction for 2032: unless we change our ways the world faces a future … where the environment will look pretty darn good. If you’re a tree or a rock, you’ll be living in clover. It’s the Italians and the Swedes who’ll be facing extinction and the loss of their natural habitat.
There will be no environmental doomsday. Oil, carbon dioxide emissions, deforestation: none of these things is worth worrying about. What’s worrying is that we spend so much time worrying about things that aren’t worth worrying about that we don’t worry about the things we should be worrying about. For thirty years, we’ve had endless wake-up calls for things that aren’t worth waking up for. But for the very real, remorseless shifts in our society—the ones truly jeopardizing our future—we’re sound asleep. The world is changing dramatically right now and hysterical experts twitter about a hypothetical decrease in the Antarctic krill that might conceivably possibly happen so far down the road there’s unlikely to be any Italian or Japanese enviro-worriers left alive to be devastated by it.
In a globalized economy, the environmentalists want us to worry about First World capitalism imposing its ways on bucolic, pastoral, primitive Third World backwaters. Yet, insofar as “globalization” is a threat, the real danger is precisely the opposite—that the peculiarities of the backwaters can leap instantly to the First World. Pigs are valued assets and sleep in the living room in rural China—and next thing you know an unknown respiratory disease is killing people in Toronto, just because someone got on a plane. That’s the way to look at Islamism: we fret about McDonald’s and Disney, but the big globalization success story is the way the Saudis have taken what was eighty years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of Islam practiced by Bedouins of no fixed abode and successfully exported it to the heart of Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Manchester, Buffalo …
What’s the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of its culture? When it comes to forecasting the future, the birth rate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2006, it’s hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026 (or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data on babies around the western world is that they’re running out a lot faster than the oil is. “Replacement” fertility rate—i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller—is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?
Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and you’ll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada’s fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That’s to say, Spain’s population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy’s population will have fallen by 22 percent, Bulgaria’s by 36 percent, Estonia’s by 52 percent. In America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of the EU: in the 2004 election, John Kerry won the sixteen with the lowest birth rates; George W. Bush took twenty-five of the twenty-six states with the highest. By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans—and mostly red-state Americans.
As fertility shrivels, societies get older—and Japan and much of Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever been. And we know what comes after old age. These countries are going out of business—unless they can find the will to change their ways. Is that likely? I don’t think so. If you look at European election results—most recently in Germany—it’s hard not to conclude that, while voters are unhappy with their political establishments, they’re unhappy mainly because they resent being asked to reconsider their government benefits and, no matter how unaffordable they may be a generation down the road, they have no intention of seriously reconsidering them. The Scottish executive recently backed down from a proposal to raise the retirement age of Scottish public workers. It’s presently sixty, which is nice but unaffordable. But the reaction of the average Scots worker is that that’s somebody else’s problem. The average German worker now puts in 22 percent fewer hours per year than his American counterpart, and no politician who wishes to remain electorally viable will propose closing the gap in any meaningful way.
This isn’t a deep-rooted cultural difference between the Old World and the New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. If one wanted to allocate blame, one could argue that it’s a product of the U.S. military presence, the American security guarantee that liberated European budgets: instead of having to spend money on guns, they could concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. If Washington’s problem with Europe is that these are not serious allies, well, whose fault is that? Who, in the years after the Second World War, created NATO as a post-modern military alliance? The “free world,” as the Americans called it, was a free ride for everyone else. And having been absolved from the primal responsibilities of nationhood, it’s hardly surprising that European nations have little wish to re-shoulder them. In essence, the lavish levels of public health care on the Continent are subsidized by the American taxpayer. And this long-term softening of large sections of the west makes them ill-suited to resisting a primal force like Islam.
There is no “population bomb.” There never was. Birth rates are declining all over the world—eventually every couple on the planet may decide to opt for the western yuppie model of one designer baby at the age of thirty-nine. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage. Even in 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his ilk should have understood that their so-called “population explosion” was really a massive population adjustment. Of the increase in global population between 1970 and 2000, the developed world accounted for under 9 percent of it, while the Muslim world accounted for 26 percent of the increase. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30 percent of the world’s population to just over 20 percent, the Muslim nations increased from about 15 percent to 20 percent.
1970 doesn’t seem that long ago. If you’re the age many of the chaps running the western world today are wont to be, your pants are narrower than they were back then and your hair’s less groovy, but the landscape of your life—the look of your house, the lay-out of your car, the shape of your kitchen appliances, the brand names of the stuff in the fridge—isn’t significantly different. Aside from the Internet and the cellphone and the CD, everything in your world seems pretty much the same but slightly modified.
And yet the world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald statistics: In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30 percent to 15 percent. By 2000, they were the same: each had about 20 percent.
And by 2020?
So the world’s people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less “western.” Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)—or the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark, and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the west: in the UK, more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.
Can these trends continue for another thirty years without having consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: the grand buildings will still be standing but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.
What will Europe be like at the end of this process? Who knows? On the one hand, there’s something to be said for the notion that America will find an Islamified Europe more straightforward to deal with than Monsieur Chirac, Herr Schröder, and Co. On the other hand, given Europe’s track record, getting there could be very bloody. But either way this is the real battlefield. The al Qaeda nutters can never find enough suicidal pilots to fly enough planes into enough skyscrapers to topple America. But, unlike us, the Islamists think long-term, and, given their demographic advantage in Europe and the tone of the emerging Muslim lobby groups there, much of what they’re flying planes into buildings for they’re likely to wind up with just by waiting a few more years. The skyscrapers will be theirs; why knock ’em over?
The latter half of the decline and fall of great civilizations follows a familiar pattern: affluence, softness, decadence, extinction. You don’t notice yourself slipping through those stages because usually there’s a seductive pol on hand to provide the age with a sly, self-deluding slogan—like Bill Clinton’s “It’s about the future of all our children.” We on the right spent the 1990s gleefully mocking Clinton’s tedious invocation, drizzled like syrup over everything from the Kosovo war to highway appropriations. But most of the rest of the west can’t even steal his lame bromides: A society that has no children has no future.
Permanence is the illusion of every age. In 1913, no one thought the Russian, Austrian, German, and Turkish empires would be gone within half a decade. Seventy years on, all those fellows who dismissed Reagan as an “amiable dunce” (in Clark Clifford’s phrase) assured us the Soviet Union was likewise here to stay. The CIA analysts’ position was that East Germany was the ninth biggest economic power in the world. In 1987 there was no rash of experts predicting the imminent fall of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact, and the USSR itself.
Yet, even by the minimal standards of these wretched precedents, so-called “post-Christian” civilizations—as a prominent EU official described his continent to me—are more prone than traditional societies to mistake the present tense for a permanent feature. Religious cultures have a much greater sense of both past and future, as we did a century ago, when we spoke of death as joining “the great majority” in “the unseen world.” But if secularism’s starting point is that this is all there is, it’s no surprise that, consciously or not, they invest the here and now with far greater powers of endurance than it’s ever had. The idea that progressive Euro-welfarism is the permanent resting place of human development was always foolish; we now know that it’s suicidally so.
To avoid collapse, European nations will need to take in immigrants at a rate no stable society has ever attempted. The CIA is predicting the EU will collapse by 2020. Given that the CIA’s got pretty much everything wrong for half a century, that would suggest the EU is a shoo-in to be the colossus of the new millennium. But even a flop spook is right twice a generation. If anything, the date of EU collapse is rather a cautious estimate. It seems more likely that within the next couple of European election cycles, the internal contradictions of the EU will manifest themselves in the usual way, and that by 2010 we’ll be watching burning buildings, street riots, and assassinations on American network news every night. Even if they avoid that, the idea of a childless Europe ever rivaling America militarily or economically is laughable. Sometime this century there will be 500 million Americans, and what’s left in Europe will either be very old or very Muslim. Japan faces the same problem: its population is already in absolute decline, the first gentle slope of a death spiral it will be unlikely ever to climb out of. Will Japan be an economic powerhouse if it’s populated by Koreans and Filipinos? Very possibly. Will Germany if it’s populated by Algerians? That’s a trickier proposition.
Best-case scenario? The Continent winds up as Vienna with Swedish tax rates.
Worst-case scenario: Sharia, circa 2040; semi-Sharia, a lot sooner—and we’re already seeing a drift in that direction.
In July 2003, speaking to the United States Congress, Tony Blair remarked: “As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible but, in fact, it is transient. The question is: What do you leave behind?”
Excellent question. Britannia will never again wield the unrivalled power she enjoyed at her imperial apogee, but the Britannic inheritance endures, to one degree or another, in many of the key regional players in the world today—Australia, India, South Africa—and in dozens of island statelets from the Caribbean to the Pacific. If China ever takes its place as an advanced nation, it will be because the People’s Republic learns more from British Hong Kong than Hong Kong learns from the Little Red Book. And of course the dominant power of our time derives its political character from eighteenth-century British subjects who took English ideas a little further than the mother country was willing to go.
A decade and a half after victory in the Cold War and end-of-history triumphalism, the “what do you leave behind?” question is more urgent than most of us expected. “The west,” as a concept, is dead, and the west, as a matter of demographic fact, is dying.
What will London—or Paris, or Amsterdam—be like in the mid-Thirties? If European politicians make no serious attempt this decade to wean the populace off their unsustainable thirty-five-hour weeks, retirement at sixty, etc., then to keep the present level of pensions and health benefits the EU will need to import so many workers from North Africa and the Middle East that it will be well on its way to majority Muslim by 2035. As things stand, Muslims are already the primary source of population growth in English cities. Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?
This ought to be the left’s issue. I’m a conservative—I’m not entirely on board with the Islamist program when it comes to beheading sodomites and so on, but I agree Britney Spears dresses like a slut: I’m with Mullah Omar on that one. Why then, if your big thing is feminism or abortion or gay marriage, are you so certain that the cult of tolerance will prevail once the biggest demographic in your society is cheerfully intolerant? Who, after all, are going to be the first victims of the west’s collapsed birth rates? Even if one were to take the optimistic view that Europe will be able to resist the creeping imposition of Sharia currently engulfing Nigeria, it remains the case that the Muslim world is not notable for setting much store by “a woman’s right to choose,” in any sense. I watched that big abortion rally in Washington last year, where Ashley Judd and Gloria Steinem were cheered by women waving “Keep your Bush off my bush” placards, and I thought it was the equivalent of a White Russian tea party in 1917. By prioritizing a “woman’s right to choose,” western women are delivering their societies into the hands of fellows far more patriarchal than a 1950s sitcom dad. If any of those women marching for their “reproductive rights” still have babies, they might like to ponder demographic realities: A little girl born today will be unlikely, at the age of forty, to be free to prance around demonstrations in Eurabian Paris or Amsterdam chanting “Hands off my bush!”
Just before the 2004 election, that eminent political analyst Cameron Diaz appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to explain what was at stake:
“Women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our bodies… . If you think that rape should be legal, then don’t vote. But if you think that you have a right to your body,” she advised Oprah’s viewers, “then you should vote.”
Poor Cameron. A couple of weeks later, the scary people won. She lost all rights to her body. Unlike Alec Baldwin, she couldn’t even move to France. Her body was grounded in Terminal D.
But, after framing the 2004 Presidential election as a referendum on the right to rape, Miss Diaz might be interested to know that men enjoy that right under many Islamic legal codes around the world. In his book The Empty Cradle, Philip Longman asks: “So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world. Such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an anti-market culture dominated by fundamentalism—a new Dark Ages.”
Bottom line for Cameron Diaz: There are worse things than John Ashcroft out there.
Longman’s point is well taken. The refined antennae of western liberals mean that, whenever one raises the question of whether there will be any Italians living in the geographical zone marked as Italy a generation or three hence, they cry, “Racism!” To fret about what proportion of the population is “white” is grotesque and inappropriate. But it’s not about race, it’s about culture. If 100 percent of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it doesn’t matter whether 70 percent of them are “white” or only 5 percent are. But, if one part of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy and the other doesn’t, then it becomes a matter of great importance whether the part that does is 9 percent of the population or only 60, 50, 45 percent.
Since the President unveiled the so-called Bush Doctrine—the plan to promote liberty throughout the Arab world—innumerable “progressives” have routinely asserted that there’s no evidence Muslims want liberty and, indeed, Islam is incompatible with democracy. If that’s true, it’s a problem not for the Middle East today but for Europe the day after tomorrow. According to a poll taken in 2004, over 60 percent of British Muslims want to live under sharia—in the United Kingdom. If a population “at odds with the modern world” is the fastest-breeding group on the planet—if there are more Muslim nations, more fundamentalist Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in more and more transnational institutions—how safe a bet is the survival of the “modern world”?
Not good.
“What do you leave behind?” asked Tony Blair. There will only be very few and very old ethnic Germans and French and Italians by the midpoint of this century. What will they leave behind? Territories that happen to bear their names and keep up some of the old buildings? Or will the dying European races understand that the only legacy that matters is whether the peoples who will live in those lands after them are reconciled to pluralist, liberal democracy? It’s the demography, stupid. And, if they can’t muster the will to change course, then “what do you leave behind?” is the only question that matters.
Source:
It's the demography Stupid
The New CriterionQUOTE from Sparkiling Jewel - So, my next question is...what has been the response by peacful Muslims to her perspective? Do they understand (the majority of peacful Muslims) the roots and history and the "whole story" and are willing to not perpetuate the violence? What's the "score" now?
This information is crucial to help change occur toward a peaceful solution...is it getting out there to enough of the populations of Muslims and Americans...or is it still getting "spun"? Are the Christians, all of them, in their varied concepts of Christianity are they getting the story or a hateful spin?
Are politicians ( the presidents and prime ministers, etc of other countries) "informed" on this perspective...or only bits and pieces of spin? (end quote)
There has been very little response. Most Muslims like most Westerners - believe we are misunderstanding them when we point out history as our standard. The West is losing ground dramatically. It is unknowable what everyone thinks, Governments , ministers - etc. But one thing is knowable - and that is actions. By their actions - it appears they don't understand. However, if they DO UNDERSTAND - what action would we expect?
I suggest - we would expect to see them attempt to cut off the most radical elements of the theology - Such as Iran; unify the Sunnis into a regional block against them; and try to keep them divided while we wait for Capitalism, Globalization and Western values to overcome their will and ability to fight.
In fact - that's exactly what we see happening. It is a race - and I think both sides know it.
The latest attempt to get the Sunnis to unite into a regional block allied with the West - was last week. It's called the Mediterranean Union. It's attempt is to bind the largest Sunni Middle eastern nations into a union with Israel and Europe. 43 nations I believe.
(map)
http://endtimesworldnews.punt.nl/upload … _union.JPG
PTBut this is really the greater objective -
A Union of the West!!!!! And it is this union the Bible talks about. The world will be drawn into East West unions - one Islamic - and the other Apostate Formerly Christian nations.
International Herald Tribune
A Union of the West? Balladur says it's time
By John Vinocur
Monday, January 7, 2008
PARIS: And now for something radical. It's an idea that comes from a dour-looking man with an acute political mind whose ecclesiastically scarlet or royally purple socks peak out from under the dark trousers of Savile Row suits.
Here's his notion: The United States and Europe soon risk being overtaken by the rest of the world. To hold on to their place and value system, they ought to form an organic alliance, a Union of the West.
The time to get moving is now.
The idea comes from Edouard Balladur, the former French prime minister whose belly-of-the-beast Gaullist establishment credentials stretch back 40 years. Today, part of his pertinence lies in a close relationship with Nicolas Sarkozy, once his budget minister and spokesman, who a decade ago argued that Balladur would make a better president than Jacques Chirac.
For all its deliberately provocative and spiky aura, Balladur's Union of the West concept is not a bolt out of the blue.
Rather, it extends into a Great Notion a current, but still hesitant, attempt to bring the United States and the European Union closer together.
That project involves the sketchy outlines of a trans-Atlantic economic zone. Pushed by Angela Merkel, and backed in principle by Gordon Brown, it led last year to promising meetings between groups of EU commissioners and U.S. cabinet-level officials aimed at a vast harmonization of trade-related issues.
Worthy stuff, not radical or sexy, yet an undertaking that, an American participant said, "I think has legs."
But its wide, underlying premise has been left without substantial articulation by Merkel and Brown - and avoided by the Bush administration:
Europe and the United States acting in concert can best deal with China and Russia's advance, and the instability brought by radical Islam. Reality insists that alone, the Americans and Europeans have growing disadvantages in a world where the rule of law and democracy are not serving as controls over newly distributed economic and political power.
Balladur confronts the issue. He makes the case that half-measures that fail to bundle the West's strengths won't be a sufficient response. In a 120-page essay titled "Pour une Union occidentale entre l'Europe et les États-Unis," he says:
"History is starting to be made without the West, and perhaps one day it will be made against it.
"There's a simple method for avoiding this. The people of the West must become aware of the risk and convince themselves that the greatest possible solidarity between them is the only means for dealing with it."
For Balladur, there must be "a new alliance between Europe and America, and even more - a true union."
Twenty years ago, he told me, the idea was premature. That was just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and in the midst of the Soviet Union's implosion, when Secretary of State James Baker called for the development of a new, organic relationship between the European Union and the United States.
America was too uniquely all-powerful, and Europe too weak and suspicious of American dominance, for it to happen then. Now, in a new context, with the limits of U.S. power more apparent, and Europe's chances as a go-it-alone superstate limited or rejected, the concept has become actual.
Last autumn, Merkel, heightening the tone of her interest, said Europeans and Americans mistook "the mission of the trans-Atlantic relationship" if they did not to see that "combining our strengths goes in our interests, to our conception of being able to live by certain values."
Now, according to Balladur, France, as a former symbol of anti-Americanism, which realizes a weakened America disserves European interests, must take the initiative in creating a Union of the West.
The practicalities: a permanent Union secretariat to prepare common positions for international meetings; gradual creation of a common trans-Atlantic market; linkage between the dollar and euro; converging policies on energy supply and its security; and the creation of a trans-Atlantic executive council of leaders that would convene every three months.
Balladur won't say if that council should have decision-making powers. But he insists it would represent "immense progress" if it met frequently, and if "neither Europeans nor Americans could decide anything about common problems without having talked them through beforehand."
Drivel born out of desperation? An escapist proposal that excuses the rich and comfortable from looking closer and less indulgently at their own failures?
"Too great an ambition?" Balladur asks the question himself, and sounds Oswald Spengler-ish in providing an answer.
"There aren't any others that will allow the West to escape the decline threatening it." America's indispensability has a 20-year time frame; Europe has to stop "nourishing" its "illusion of power."
Sarkozy's old mentor sent his essay to the president, and he has telephoned Balladur to thank him for it.
For a politician who lives his life and makes policy outside the confines of convention, great ambitions don't confront much inhibition.
Seven months into a five-year term, Sarkozy has already struck a claim to European leadership, proposed a Mediterranean Union for the European and Arab countries along its shores and readied France's reintegration in NATO on the condition it gets its share of prestigious commands.
He plays big.
Sarkozy's New Year's to-do list includes making France the "soul" of a "new renaissance" with "a policy of civilization" required by "our old world."
On a Union of the West, if Sarkozy played a little smaller against the background of a leadership change in America, reaching not so much for effect but for the proposal's nuggets of practicality and general good sense, it might just have a long-shot chance at some success.
Notes:
International Herald Tribune Copyright © 2008 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.comDemographics. Guess you'll have to get your F___king head in gear.
TOPSTUFF - that was an incredibly long post and after an hour and a half - I quit reading it.
I got as far as the Catholic priest with not a single instance of Prophecy or Islamic corrections (which is what this topic is and what you said the post would do. Please, be more specific.) ptDaniel Chapter 2 depicts the entire EMPIRE history of man - from Babylon until the beginning of the 1000 years of peace. It shows the world split in two during the Roman Empire and staying that way until the great war.
I have posted here a very simplistic view and interpretation of the relevant verses for an overview. This is what the Bible says - Koran and Hadith say the opposite.
Revelation 17 shows the two players - EAST AND WEST - this way.
"Come, I will show you the punishment of the great prostitute, (the West) who sits on many waters. 2With her the kings of the earth committed adultery (Became apostate and sinful) and the inhabitants of the earth were intoxicated with the wine of her adulteries." (Total decadence against God)
3Then the angel carried me away in the Spirit into a desert. There I saw a woman (The West) sitting on a scarlet beast (The East) that was covered with blasphemous names (Islam) and had seven heads and ten horns. 4The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet,(Colors of Wealth and religion) and was glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls. She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries. ( she was fabulously rich, sinful and decadent)
5 This title was written on her forehead:
MYSTERY
BABYLON THE GREAT (A Type of secular decadence)
THE MOTHER OF PROSTITUTES (Former Christian Countries)
AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. (Intense Immorality)
6 I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of those who bore testimony to Jesus.(She will ultimately persecute and slaughter true believers)
When I saw her, I was greatly astonished. 7Then the angel said to me: "Why are you astonished? I will explain to you the mystery of the woman and of the beast she rides, which has the seven heads and ten horns. 8The beast, which you saw, once was, now is not, and will come up out of the Abyss and go to his destruction. The inhabitants of the earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the creation of the world will be astonished when they see the beast, because he once was, (The Spirit of the Persian Empire) now is not, and yet will come.
9"This calls for a mind with wisdom. The seven heads are seven hills on which the woman sits. 10They are also seven kings. Five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come; but when he does come, he must remain for a little while. 11The beast who once was, and now is not, is an eighth king. He belongs to the seven and is going to his destruction.
12"The ten horns you saw are ten kings who have not yet received a kingdom, but who for one hour will receive authority as kings along with the beast. 13They have one purpose and will give their power and authority to the beast. (The 10 horns are 10 nations which unify - they are the 7th Empire to rule over the Middle East)(They agree to give their power to the Antichrist - who then makes a greater Islamic empire and becomes the 8th)
14They (Islam) will make war against the Lamb, (Christians and Jews) but the Lamb will overcome them because he is Lord of lords and King of kings—and with him will be his called, chosen and faithful followers."
15Then the angel said to me, "The waters you saw, where the prostitute sits, are peoples, multitudes, nations and languages. 16The beast and the ten horns you saw will hate the prostitute. (The EAST will HATE the WEST)
They (the Muslims) will bring her (The Apostate Christians) to ruin and leave her naked; they will eat her flesh and burn her with fire. 17For God has put it into their hearts to accomplish his purpose by agreeing to give the beast their power to rule, until God's words are fulfilled. (Because she is sinful)
18The woman you saw is the great city that rules over the kings of the earth." (Rome - which the Muslims believe they will destroy according to their prophecies - just as these prophecies say it will happen)
(According to chapter 18 next, this woman made the whole world rich and enticed them away into decadence by not only becoming apostate - but by making the world apostate too - through consumerism - which is detailed by an account of buying and selling on a massive scale and of every luxury item - living "deliciously" above the nations - her system is destroyed in a single day and the verse says the merchants of the world say "who will buy our goods now")
This comes as a complete surprise.'TOPSTUFF - that was an incredibly long post and after an hour and a half - I quit reading it.' Look who's talkin'. Who woulda guessed. 'great prostitute' means west. No strike that, 'a woman' means west. 'scarlet beast' means east. 'blasphemous names' means islam. And so forth. Can't say I ever heard a single mortal my whole life define the word 'woman' to mean west. Guess to figure this kind stuff out - have to be a pro-fit. Guess anything could be anything. So what's what?
I said:
""""I have posted here a very simplistic view and interpretation of the relevant verses for an overview."""
simplistic....
I doubted you would have wanted a full Biblical exegesis of all the relevant chapters and verse that identify these symbols etc. But if you want one - we can talk. This topic is Prophecy Interpretation after allJewel, here is a link to a website by a former Islamic terrorist - who converted to Christianity. He is one of the people you are looking for. Quite a biography. The link is at the bottom. Below is a biography of a man who works for the foundation.
Biography of Zachariah Anani
Zachariah Anani was a teenage militia fighter. Born into a family of Muslim clergy in Beirut, Lebanon, he began Islamic school at age three. His grandfather and great grandfather had been imams (religious authorities), and his family expected him to carry the torch.
At 13 he joined one of the many military groups that existed in the early '70s. "All the religious fragments had their own secret militia," he says. "I was trained to fight and kill Jews, and to hate Christians and Americans."
His family was pleased with his decision because according to Islamic teaching, those who die in battle against "unbelievers" are assured of reaching heaven. Ironically, Anani faced the Israelis only once. Most of the time, though, the Muslim groups fought among themselves.
By the time he turned 16, "life meant nothing," he says.
Soon after enlisting, he made his first kill. By the time he turned 16, "life meant nothing," he says. "Every time I killed someone and two or three fighters witnessed it, they would give me a point on my chart. I carried 223 points."
Even his comrades feared him. "Although we had a sense of loyalty to each other," he says, "we were ready to take out enemies or friends." When a fanatical Muslim joined his regiment and began knocking on doors to wake the others for prayer at 3 A.M., Anani warned him: "I don't want to pray. Don't come and wake me." When he heard the knock early the next morning, Anani picked up his gun, shot him, and went back to sleep.
Anani was soon promoted to troop leader and then formed his own regiment. But "life seemed painful and empty," he says.
Anani met a Christian missionary and had a spiritual journey and converted to Christainity which became a turning point in Zak’s life.
Zak initially tried to keep secret his new faith, apart from one professor, no one at his univerisity suspected he was a Christian. But in the Muslim neighborhood where he grew up, everyone knew it. He moved to the city's Christian sector, but the persecution continued. Even his father hired assassins to kill him.
After Anani debated with a Muslim scholar in the United States, his family was attacked in Lebanon.
Finally church leaders convinced him to leave Lebanon because his presence endangered others. In 1996 Anani entered Canada as a refugee. It took another three difficult years before his wife and three children could join him. After Anani debated with a Muslim scholar in the United States, his family was attacked in Lebanon. Two of his children required surgery.
Zak has been attacked numerous times for his faith as a Christian, even in Canada.
When in Lebanon he was nearly beheaded and was only saved when an army patrol came by and the Islamist gang dispersed leaving Zak with huge wound on his neck. Zak nearly blead to death and was actually technically dead for 7 minutes before being revived.
In Canada where he now lives, his house and car have been burnt, his family attacked physically as well as Zak himself. Speaking out in a free country sometimes is not as safe as it should be.
http://www.shoebat.com/index.phpAlso, here are a couple of links for literature on the subject of the Islamic Antichrist - and a website of one of the Major Christian Speakers. (You can also do a Google search and read forever. 6 years ago - you couldn't find a single one.)
As for me, I realized in 1983 that the Bible was talking about a huge confederation of states surrounding Israel - that were to attack her. I could never reconcile that to the Papacy view. I talked for years but no one I knew would listen - even when you proved it to them. They were always fascinated by it - but didn't see it with their own eyes. Today of course, it appears obvious. I didn't know it at the time - but there were many others like me. We just couldn't communicate until the internet.
Joel's Trumpet
http://www.joelstrumpet.com/
Books and Writers
http://astore.amazon.com/joestru-20/105 … amp;node=1Just donot read the so called scholars telling you europe will disappear and islam will take over.Tell me whats your biggest fear from Islam,and your very main problem caused by islam thats effecting your life badly.
By reading Marks demography i conclude that its his fear from islam.He says if muslims come in majority they will demand sharia law and once the world will again turn to dark ages.Perhaps you will also support it, if that time comes.come on
His every word is based on possibilities,there is lack of facts,he just says this will happen and that will happen.How...?no answer
Take this now,France,Italy and Germany will remain behind and all other european countries will disappear.
Suppose if its true as its something about the demography and i dont want to be stupid.Then what next..?
The Prophet (peace be on him) said in a report by Imams Ahmad and Al-Nissaie:
"Beware of excesses in matters of religion. For, as a matter of fact, those before you were destroyed by religious immoderation."
Prophecy Teacher -
I wish to state clearly that I profoundly disagree with most of what you say. However, I have no intention of arguing because all you would do is attempt to wear me down with verbiage. I don't have time to type screeds and screeds of detailed refutation of your views. Nevertheless, if you accept me as a thinking man, you must also accept that this thinking man thinks you are deluded and, which is worse, hell-bent on trying to delude others.lol
paraglider - you cannot have a sensible discussion with some one who just posts reams and reams of arguments copied from elsewhere.
prophecy liar - I have no idea what you are trying to prove by doing this. Other than the fact that you are incapable of having a discussion. You lost me about 5000 words ago lol
But keep on preaching the WORD
Unless he'd agree to the equivalent of lightning chess - an agreed maximum of 100 words per post, argument deemed lost if exceeded
If "islams" come into power and demand sharia law, how is that any more frightening than the Dominionists coming to power and demanding Biblical law?
A pox on both their houses.
JennyWho imposed democracy in many countries?
Who threw out communism and imposed capitalism over the world?
So tell me whose created sytem is prevailing over the world.
Secondly,dominionists will cannt bring biblical law under such circumstances.Lets consider one aspect here
US
1)The California Supreme Court ruled that banning gay and lesbian couples from marrying is unconstitutional on May 15, 2008.
2)On May 17th, 2004, Massachusetts began marrying gay and lesbian couples.
Europe
Gay priests 'marry' in London.
1)Netherlands (Holland) has full marriage and registered partnership rights for same sex or opposite sex couples.
2)Belgium in 2003 became the second country in the world to allow gay and lesbian couples to marry. Since 2006, gay and lesbian couples have been allowed to adopt children.
3)Spain voted in June 2005 to extend full marriage rights to gay and lesbian citizens.
Is this all not a part of dark ages or is it the beauty of current modern world?How nonsense is it to say dominated islam will send world into dark ages.That is why our forefathers (predominantly Protestant Christians) established a government that allows freedom of speech, thought, and religion to all men.
One thing that should be noted, no matter how many flaws, sins, and errors the United States has, we still have the freedom to post opposing views on this forum.
If we ever lose the freedom of religion due to "political correctness" we will lose the freedom of speech with it.
I know I am not up to anyone's standards here, but please, bear with me. I'm a little nervous around most atheists. They make me feel inadequate.
I promise I'll do better.Better is always debatable. Shorter is absolute. Go for shorter and let better follow in its wake
In Daniel Chapter 7 - he has a vision where he sees 4 separate beasts come up out of the sea. He sees beasts that look like...
1-A Lion
2-A Bear
3-A Leopard
4-A Fierce and terrible Beast
After Daniel sees this - an angel explains the vision to him, and tells him what it means. The interesting point of this vision - is that it was written 600 years before the Book of Revelation - which has a similar Beast. Whatever the angel explains these Beasts as - most likely relates to the one the Woman in Revelation is riding. First, the verses...
Daniel 7
1 In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon, Daniel had a dream, and visions passed through his mind as he was lying on his bed. He wrote down the substance of his dream.
2 Daniel said: "In my vision at night I looked, and there before me were the four winds of heaven churning up the great sea. 3 Four great beasts, each different from the others, came up out of the sea.
4 "The first was like a lion, and it had the wings of an eagle. I watched until its wings were torn off and it was lifted from the ground so that it stood on two feet like a man, and the heart of a man was given to it.
5 "And there before me was a second beast, which looked like a bear. It was raised up on one of its sides, and it had three ribs in its mouth between its teeth. It was told, 'Get up and eat your fill of flesh!'
6 "After that, I looked, and there before me was another beast, one that looked like a leopard. And on its back it had four wings like those of a bird. This beast had four heads, and it was given authority to rule.
7 "After that, in my vision at night I looked, and there before me was a fourth beast—terrifying and frightening and very powerful. It had large iron teeth; it crushed and devoured its victims and trampled underfoot whatever was left. It was different from all the former beasts, and it had ten horns.
8 "While I was thinking about the horns, there before me was another horn, a little one, which came up among them; and three of the first horns were uprooted before it. This horn had eyes like the eyes of a man and a mouth that spoke boastfully.
11 "Then I continued to watch because of the boastful words the horn was speaking. I kept looking until the beast was slain and its body destroyed and thrown into the blazing fire. 12 The other beasts had been stripped of their authority, but were allowed to live for a period of time.
13 "In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. 14 He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations and men of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.So, we have a beast with 10 horns. Then an eleventh horn sprouts, unfortunately knocking out three horns. 10 + 1 - 3 = 8. So we have an 8-horned beast now. But this 8th horn has eyes and a mouth, and starts boasting. This is clearly a premonition of Margaret Thatcher addressing the European Parliament. No other explanation is possible.
Then the Angel interprets:
15 "I, Daniel, was troubled in spirit, and the visions that passed through my mind disturbed me. 16 I approached one of those standing there and asked him the true meaning of all this.
"So he told me and gave me the interpretation of these things: 17 'The four great beasts are four kingdoms that will rise from the earth. 18 But the saints of the Most High will receive the kingdom and will possess it forever—yes, for ever and ever.'
19 "Then I wanted to know the true meaning of the fourth beast, which was different from all the others and most terrifying, with its iron teeth and bronze claws—the beast that crushed and devoured its victims and trampled underfoot whatever was left. 20 I also wanted to know about the ten horns on its head and about the other horn that came up, before which three of them fell—the horn that looked more imposing than the others and that had eyes and a mouth that spoke boastfully. 21 As I watched, this horn was waging war against the saints and defeating them, 22 until the Ancient of Days came and pronounced judgment in favor of the saints of the Most High, and the time came when they possessed the kingdom.
23 "He gave me this explanation: 'The fourth beast is a fourth kingdom that will appear on earth. It will be different from all the other kingdoms and will devour the whole earth, trampling it down and crushing it. 24 The ten horns are ten kings who will come from this kingdom. After them another king will arise, different from the earlier ones; he will subdue three kings. 25 He will speak against the Most High and oppress his saints and try to change the set times and the laws. The saints will be handed over to him for a time, times and half a time. [a]
26 " 'But the court will sit, and his power will be taken away and completely destroyed forever. 27 Then the sovereignty, power and greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven will be handed over to the saints, the people of the Most High. His kingdom will be an everlasting kingdom, and all rulers will worship and obey him.'
28 "This is the end of the matter. I, Daniel, was deeply troubled by my thoughts, and my face turned pale, but I kept the matter to myself."
***********
So here we learn that Beasts = Empires. From Daniel 2,4 and 8 - we learn the first 3 Beasts represent these 3 Empires: (without going into detail)
Babylon
Media/Persia
Greece
And then , there is a 4th Beast - and nowhere are we exactly told what it is - except that it has 10 Horns, and later a Little Horn.
************
And here is the Beast we saw in Revelation - he is first mentioned in 13, and then in 17
Revelation 13
By John The Apostle
1And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.
2And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.
**********
And that is how we know it is an empire.
The peculiar thing about this Beast - is that even though he is the last Beast Empire to come upon the earth - he has all the elements of the first 3.
Lion, Leopard, Bear
So Daniel's dream and John's vision match - with the exception that John sees an empire that will include all the other 3 - but is different from them. (And Daniel saw them looking forward, one at a time)
When the Little Horn - small kingdom comes - the 10 horns (kingdoms) give him their power - and it/they will persecute the Christians for 3 and a half years.
Next, I want to show you the maps. Jewel, these maps are not special, you can Google any map of the Babylonian, Persian or Grecian Empires and see the same.If you'd be kind enough to hold your thoughts until I'm finished , I'd appreciate it.
Jewel, the Dream/Vision shows Empires that will Successively rule over Jerusalem
Look at the maps here. These are the land mass the 3 Empires controlled.
If you look at the Islamic Empire - it absorbed all 3 of the others and it ruled over Jerusalem for 1200 years, and then it died in WW1
Babylon (Lion)
Media/Persia (Bear)
Greece (Leopard)
Islam (Lion,Leopard,Bear - with 10 horns and a Little Horn))
{Out of this one in the last days ten unified Kings will come - Then a little one that rules them all)
http://www.joelstrumpet.com/?p=1383#comments (you may have to scroll up for them)
I will discuss Rome later.Now look at Revelation 13 again concerning this verse
"""3. One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed. The whole world was astonished and followed the beast."""
This fatal wound - is the wound inflicted upon the Islamic Empire at the end of WW1 - which they lost. The Islamic Caliphate was abolished - and it was dissolved into numerous countries of Kings, Dictators and Monarchs.
Here is a map of the last 100 years of the last gasp of the Ottoman Islamic Empire
http://www.naqshbandi.org/ottomans/maps/declinemap.gif
And here is a map of the Post War Islamic Nation States - now declaring themselves Islamic States, and States that have made Islam the State Religion.
http://www.zindamagazine.com/html/archi … sonMap.jpg
This verse is telling us, that this last Empire to rule over Jerusalem - the 4th Beast - will appear to have died. But it will astonishingly come back to life - and have even greater power in the form of UNITY - and then World conquest through a Great and Blasphemous Dictator.
These are those days.
(From other areas of the Bible - it is universally agreed that Heads = the Empires which have ruled over Jerusalem - they are)
Egypt
Assyria
Babylon
Persia
Greece
Rome
Islamic
7 heads - one is wounded as if dead - but comes back to life when 10 kings - from within the older kingdom unify with "One Purpose".
The 10 United Kings - give their power to the Last King (Antichrist) but he overthrows and destroys 3 of them (Some believe these 3 are not Islamic)
Only the Islamic Empire is capable of coming back to life. It is the daily clarion call of the Fundamentalists.
At this point - all hell breaks loose.Prophecy Teacher -
I don't believe these 'explanations' of the meaning of a reported dream, but I'm prepared to believe that you do. So please tell me what you are advocating? Do we sit back and watch the story unfold, because it has been thus prophesied, or do we take up arms before it's too late and bomb the hell out of everybody we don't like?
While I was joking about Margaret Thatcher, I'm now perfectly serious - do you think it is better to make your prophecy self-fulfilling by starting a great war, or make it self-fulfilling by not starting one? Because either way, you will always be able to say 'I told you so'.
In this respect 'revelationists' are just like the marxists - if the capitalists win out, it's the inevitable oppression before the inevitable revolution. If the revolution comes, well that was inevitable too.
Predict everything - predict nothing.I don't know about all that.
And I am advocating nothing except morality and repentance. God has always warned before Judgment and the only solution against his coming judgments were always the same.
Personal repentance and humility before God.
If we were Righteous before God we would not have to do anything about the problem, God would do it for our sakes. That's why I am not advocating war.
I don't know about you, but the 6 months following 9/11 - I barely recognized most people I knew while they contemplated - if this - then what else.
Going to bed. Nite..I'm glad you're not (advocating war). I'm advocating common sense, which doesn't include belief in 10, sorry 11, whoops 8 horned beasties!
Good nightThis is a tenet of Islam. Muslims do this everyday. (Just thought you'd like to know.)
RFox - I am not against Muslims although I believe Islam is wrong. There are many many moral people in it. Some are my friends. I am against what I know is coming. I fear for all of us. All of us will pay the price.
Your photography is spectacular. Your soul is deep and sensitive.
(I was a photographer in the Navy.)Thank you for your compliment.
You say you are not against Muslims, however, you are on here promoting bigotry and hatred towards Muslims because of a prophecy about a future that may never come to pass.
If we are to ever live in peace then we must all recognize the truth of our own behavior.
And your behavior is bigoted. (I don't say this in anger or with any negativity towards you. Just stating the facts as I see them.)
You say you are not against Muslims, but your "actions" are portraying this ideal. You are stirring up hatred and spreading false information about Islam.
If this is not your intention then you need understand how your sentiments are being received by others.
There are moral people in all religions and all walks of life. One way is not the only way.
Christians and Muslims both believe in God and Jesus. Both believe in repentance and humility before God. Both believe in Moses and the ten commandments.
Are these fundamental similarities not enough to allow acceptance to flow from both sides?
Before looking out we must look deeply within.
Allow me to paraphrase the entire discussion.
Repent! The end is nigh!This must be some new meaning of the word "nigh", of which I was previously unaware.
Particularly since people have been saying it in tones of great urgency ever since Jesus predicted the end would come within the lifetimes of people listening to the Sermon on The Mount.
If "nigh" means 2000+ years from now, pass me that cute-looking tenor soloist, because I feel a sin coming on ...
Jenny
P.S. Prophecy Teacher clearly hasn't read the thread where I pointed out all the evidence that the word DID end within the lifetime of the people listening to Jesus speak (how could it not? Jesus IS God, and God is both omniscient and infallible) - the next 1000 years, until the Crusades, were the Rule of Satan, and since then it has been the 1000 years of the Rule Of Jesus.
If you don't experience life on Earth as a blessed sojourn in the gentle care of Our Lord Jesus, it is because you - or one of your ancestors in the past 7 generations - failed to believe the right thing, and were passed over for the Rapture.
I personally DO experience life on Earth as a blessed sojourn in the gentle care of Our Lord Jesus - or an equivalent panentheist version thereof - my life is filled with miracles, blessings, and almost painfully intense gratitude - and I pity those people like Prophecy Teacher, who are so, so lost and live with a painful and pointless sense of desperate urgency ...
... not to mention the painful smugness which simply cannot co-exist with true gratitude and humility ...
... if you would but open your eyes and your heart to Jesus, Prophecy Teacher, the world would transform before you.Well, I guess in evolutionist's terms, the word nigh could be considered "any time in the next few billion years"
And I have no doubt it is correct The end is "nigh" Jenny you're right. I didn't read the thread you mentioned. If you'll post a link I will.
In any event, I believe the Matthew 24 prophecies were dual in nature. I believe they were fulfilled within that specific generation which heard them - and I believe they were a type of a greater prophecy - for the future.
The view you are talking about is called Preterism.
There are two types of that view.
1) Full Preterist
2) Partial Preterists
Full Preterism (which you seem to be advocating) has few advocates as their argument falls apart in the verses which are clearly predicting the end of the age. Since the Resurrection of the Just has not happened yet - this view is untenable So the view arose called...
Partial Preterism - mostly fulfilled partially future - does have quite a following (but not among most Evangelicals who typically follow Dispensationalism - almost all future) (Perhaps since you see 2 additional 1000 year periods - this is what you are saying)
In the partial Preterist view, most prophecies have already been fulfilled - with some still waiting future fulfillment.
I am knowledgeable about the points you made concerning past fulfillment and agree with them to a point. I DO believe many of them were fulfilled at the time of the 70ad Roman Destruction. I also believe this CAN NOT explain the many verses which were not fulfilled.
If I had to wear a label, I am a Historical Futurist. The prophecies are best understood as explained throughout history, from Christ until now - (Historical) and many are waiting to be fulfilled in the future.(Futurist)
Concerning the 1000 yrs of Satan and the 1000 yrs of Jesus you allude to - I have no idea about that. But this - below - would seem to disallow it....
In Daniel Chapter 2 - King Nebuchadnezzar has a dream Daniel interprets for him. The dream is of a statue which has:
A Head of Gold (Babylon)
Breast and Arms of Silver (Media/Persia)
Belly and Thighs of Brass (Greece)
Legs of Iron (Rome)
Feet and Toes of Iron And Clay. (Rome divided East and West - Islam comes up in the East - The Woman riding the Beast comes up in the West. (I will explain this later)
Then a Stone strikes the image on it's feet - shattering it - and the Kingdom is given to the Saints of the most High God. When Daniel explains the image to the King - there can be no doubt as to most of it's meaning so it is considered the foundational Prophetic Vision - that all others must begin with and harmonize to. This is almost a universal View - across 100's of denominational lines.
The Gold,Silver and Brass - correspond to the Lion,Bear, Leopard of Dan 7 and Rev 13/17. Daniel says the vision was by God telling Nebuchadnezzar what was to happen until the last days.
Daniel shows successive empires from Babylon that will rule over the world (and Jerusalem) until the kingdom of God comes. There is no break.
In the next post - I will post the entire dream - and Daniel's interpretation - and in the following, I will analyze it point by point.(From the New Int'l Version - for simplicty)
Daniel 2
Nebuchadnezzar's Dream
1 In the second year of his reign, Nebuchadnezzar had dreams; his mind was troubled and he could not sleep. 2 So the king summoned the magicians, enchanters, sorcerers and astrologers [a] to tell him what he had dreamed. When they came in and stood before the king, 3 he said to them, "I have had a dream that troubles me and I want to know what it means. [b] "
4 Then the astrologers answered the king in Aramaic, [c] "O king, live forever! Tell your servants the dream, and we will interpret it."
5 The king replied to the astrologers, "This is what I have firmly decided: If you do not tell me what my dream was and interpret it, I will have you cut into pieces and your houses turned into piles of rubble. 6 But if you tell me the dream and explain it, you will receive from me gifts and rewards and great honor. So tell me the dream and interpret it for me."
7 Once more they replied, "Let the king tell his servants the dream, and we will interpret it."
8 Then the king answered, "I am certain that you are trying to gain time, because you realize that this is what I have firmly decided: 9 If you do not tell me the dream, there is just one penalty for you. You have conspired to tell me misleading and wicked things, hoping the situation will change. So then, tell me the dream, and I will know that you can interpret it for me."
10 The astrologers answered the king, "There is not a man on earth who can do what the king asks! No king, however great and mighty, has ever asked such a thing of any magician or enchanter or astrologer. 11 What the king asks is too difficult. No one can reveal it to the king except the gods, and they do not live among men."
12 This made the king so angry and furious that he ordered the execution of all the wise men of Babylon. 13 So the decree was issued to put the wise men to death, and men were sent to look for Daniel and his friends to put them to death.
14 When Arioch, the commander of the king's guard, had gone out to put to death the wise men of Babylon, Daniel spoke to him with wisdom and tact. 15 He asked the king's officer, "Why did the king issue such a harsh decree?" Arioch then explained the matter to Daniel. 16 At this, Daniel went in to the king and asked for time, so that he might interpret the dream for him.
17 Then Daniel returned to his house and explained the matter to his friends Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah. 18 He urged them to plead for mercy from the God of heaven concerning this mystery, so that he and his friends might not be executed with the rest of the wise men of Babylon. 19 During the night the mystery was revealed to Daniel in a vision. Then Daniel praised the God of heaven 20 and said:
"Praise be to the name of God for ever and ever;
wisdom and power are his.
21 He changes times and seasons;
he sets up kings and deposes them.
He gives wisdom to the wise
and knowledge to the discerning.
22 He reveals deep and hidden things;
he knows what lies in darkness,
and light dwells with him.
23 I thank and praise you, O God of my fathers:
You have given me wisdom and power,
you have made known to me what we asked of you,
you have made known to us the dream of the king."
Daniel Interprets the Dream
24 Then Daniel went to Arioch, whom the king had appointed to execute the wise men of Babylon, and said to him, "Do not execute the wise men of Babylon. Take me to the king, and I will interpret his dream for him."
25 Arioch took Daniel to the king at once and said, "I have found a man among the exiles from Judah who can tell the king what his dream means."
26 The king asked Daniel (also called Belteshazzar), "Are you able to tell me what I saw in my dream and interpret it?"
27 Daniel replied, "No wise man, enchanter, magician or diviner can explain to the king the mystery he has asked about, 28 but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries. He has shown King Nebuchadnezzar what will happen in days to come. Your dream and the visions that passed through your mind as you lay on your bed are these:
29 "As you were lying there, O king, your mind turned to things to come, and the revealer of mysteries showed you what is going to happen. 30 As for me, this mystery has been revealed to me, not because I have greater wisdom than other living men, but so that you, O king, may know the interpretation and that you may understand what went through your mind.
31 "You looked, O king, and there before you stood a large statue—an enormous, dazzling statue, awesome in appearance. 32 The head of the statue was made of pure gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, 33 its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of baked clay. 34 While you were watching, a rock was cut out, but not by human hands. It struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay and smashed them. 35 Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver and the gold were broken to pieces at the same time and became like chaff on a threshing floor in the summer. The wind swept them away without leaving a trace. But the rock that struck the statue became a huge mountain and filled the whole earth.
36 "This was the dream, and now we will interpret it to the king. 37 You, O king, are the king of kings. The God of heaven has given you dominion and power and might and glory; 38 in your hands he has placed mankind and the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. Wherever they live, he has made you ruler over them all. You are that head of gold.
39 "After you, another kingdom will rise, inferior to yours. Next, a third kingdom, one of bronze, will rule over the whole earth. 40 Finally, there will be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron—for iron breaks and smashes everything—and as iron breaks things to pieces, so it will crush and break all the others. 41 Just as you saw that the feet and toes were partly of baked clay and partly of iron, so this will be a divided kingdom; yet it will have some of the strength of iron in it, even as you saw iron mixed with clay. 42 As the toes were partly iron and partly clay, so this kingdom will be partly strong and partly brittle. 43 And just as you saw the iron mixed with baked clay, so the people will be a mixture and will not remain united, any more than iron mixes with clay.
44 "In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever. 45 This is the meaning of the vision of the rock cut out of a mountain, but not by human hands—a rock that broke the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver and the gold to pieces.
"The great God has shown the king what will take place in the future. The dream is true and the interpretation is trustworthy."
46 Then King Nebuchadnezzar fell prostrate before Daniel and paid him honor and ordered that an offering and incense be presented to him. 47 The king said to Daniel, "Surely your God is the God of gods and the Lord of kings and a revealer of mysteries, for you were able to reveal this mystery."
48 Then the king placed Daniel in a high position and lavished many gifts on him. He made him ruler over the entire province of Babylon and placed him in charge of all its wise men. 49 Moreover, at Daniel's request the king appointed Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego administrators over the province of Babylon, while Daniel himself remained at the royal court.v 28 - He has shown King Nebuchadnezzar what will happen in days to come. (the literal interpretation says, "herafter" - ie, now and afterwards).
Daniel is telling us what each of the metals represent when he first explains the GOLD. What holds for the Gold - holds for the rest.
v37...The God of heaven has given you dominion and power and might and glory; 38 in your hands he has placed mankind and the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. Wherever they live, he has made you ""ruler over them all"". You are that head of gold.
So then, “rule over them all” describes what a Metal does.
39 "After you, another kingdom will rise, (that will rule over them all) inferior to yours.
At this point, we also learn about SUCCESSION of empires ruling over the earth and Jerusalem - because Daniel inserts the words “after you, another.”
So Daniel is saying “after you” after your empire, the next to bear rule over the whole earth will be a 2nd and a 3rd and a 4th.
40 Finally, there will be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron—for iron breaks and smashes everything—and as iron breaks things to pieces, so it will crush and break all the others.
The 4th empire bearing world rule was Rome - which later divided (285ad) and bore rule over the earth. From History we know it divided into East and West - Rome and Constantinople (later Istanbul)
The Western Half led from Rome became Christian - and filled the Western World
The Eastern Half led from Constantinople eventually became Islamic. When Constantinople fell in 1453, it's name was changed to Istanbul - and the Ottoman Islamic Turks ruled the Islamic world from there as it's Capital.
"""from 1517 onwards the Ottoman Sultan came to be viewed as the de facto leader and representative of the Islamic world. From Constantinople (now Istanbul), the Ottomans ruled over an empire"""" (Wikipedia)
So at this point - 1517 - we still have the world divided East and West - Christian and Muslim - ruled from both the former capitals of the Old Roman Empire (Rome and Istanbul). The dream explains it this way.
""""42 As the toes were partly iron and partly clay, so this kingdom (after it is divided) will be partly strong and partly brittle. 43 And just as you saw the iron mixed with baked clay, so the people will be a mixture (of nations) and will not remain united, any more than iron mixes with clay.""""
The world stayed this way from 1517-1923 - in various forms - until control of Jerusalem was relinquished by the Muslims.
Daniel tells us what happens during the days - when the nations are mixed but can not unify like before....
44 "In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever. 45 This is the meaning of the vision of the rock cut out of a mountain, but not by human hands—a rock that broke the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver and the gold to pieces. "The great God has shown the king what will take place in the future. The dream is true and the interpretation is trustworthy"
Later, in Chapter 4 and 7 - as we discussed above - we learn that near the end of the days when the kings are like this - a unified group of 10 nations comes up out of the Eastern Half - after it looks like it is dead - and from that - comes the Antichrist.Also Jenny, I do not believe the Rapture Views of most Dispensationalist Evangelicals. This is a very bad teaching that came into the Evangelical movement around the turn of the century. I discovered the error of it in 1983 from my own studies and have taught everyone I know - it is in error. When explained correctly almost everyone I know gives it up. But it's ok to be wrong sometimes right? It's only a view - a doctrine - not Theology.
Or is there no room for error in a panetheistic world view? (no need to answer, I'm being smug)
There are many Christians who hold wrong ideas. But they are still Christian. I have a brief HUB explaining my views on the subject - but it is only a small part of the overall argument. Most Christians who recognize the Islamic Paradigm do not believe in the Rapture during the Tribulation.
Furthermore, many who believed this teaching in the past - are giving it up. Prior to the internet, it was difficult to find and read competing views.
http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Rapture-and-PersecutionUp until now, I've attempted to show world history "AS IT RELATES TO ISRAEL".
4 Successive Empires will rule over Jerusalem.
Babylon
Persia
Greece
Rome
The 4th one will split in two - East and West and stay that way - in various forms.
In the 4th Empire Rome - in it's Eastern Half - a Beast Empire (Islamic Caliphate) will arise (which we later find out) includes the territory of the previous 3 Empires, Babylon, Persia and Greece.
Islam's first 100 years of the Caliphate absorbed those areas as clearly shown here:
http://www.gl.iit.edu/govdocs/maps/Midd … aliphs.gif
We know from History that control of Jerusalem passed from the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) to the Islamic Caliphate in 638 and stayed in Islamic Caliphate hands until 1924.
A period of 1286 years!
The last official remnant of the Ottoman Empire—the title of caliphate—was constitutionally abolished on 3 March 1924.
At this point - the 4th Beast appears to die. But it is miraculously healed when 10 Kings come together and reform the Caliphate. After a short time, this Caliphate is given to the Antichrist. We are told he is blasphemous speaking loud and angry words - and it persecutes the saints of God - and makes war on the world.
From here - I want to show you several things.
1) The History of the Caliphate 638-1924 (The 4th Beast)
2) The worldwide attempt within Islam to re-establish it - both Radically through the Islamists - and efforts through more traditional means. In any event - it is a very big movement.
3) A 2004 intelligence report made by the CIA - outlining a fictional future scenario where the Caliphate comes back into being in 2020 - as an analytical paper for Government study. Not surprisingly - it outlines the rise and consequent result - almost exactly the way the Bible lays out.Historical Time line of the Caliphate
* 1.1 Rashidun, 632-661
* 1.2 Umayyads, 7th-8th century
* 1.3 Abbasids, 8th-13th century
* 1.4 Shadow Caliphate, 13th-16th century
* 1.5 Ottomans, 16th-20th century
* 1.6 Khilafat Movement, 1920
* 1.7 End of the Caliphate, 1924
In any event, the Islamic Empire in many forms - always had a Caliphate. This Empire which ruled over the land mass of the Babylonian, Persian and Grecians - was truly "diverse" from them. It believed in a ONE GOD - not many idols, Leadership was not passed down in a succession of heirs, and it lasted much longer.
But from the day the Caliphate was abolished - there has always been movements to re-establish it. Namely because - the Koran and Hadith require it. These quotes below dramatically show: (after this, I'll post about the current attempts to re-establish it)
The Sahaba of Muhammad
Al-Habbab Ibn ul-Munthir said, when the Sahaba met in the wake of the death of Muhammad, (at the thaqifa hall) of Bani Sa’ida:
Let there be one Amir from us and one Amir from you (meaning one from the Ansar and one from the Mohajireen).
Upon this Abu Bakr replied:
It is forbidden for Muslims to have two Amirs (rulers)...
Then he got up and addressed the Muslims.
It has additionally been reported that Abu Bakr went on to say on the day of Al-Saqifa:
It is forbidden for Muslims to have two Amirs for this would cause differences in their affairs and concepts, their unity would be divided and disputes would break out amongst them. The Sunnah would then be abandoned, the bida’a (innovations) would spread and Fitna would grow, and that is in no one’s interests.
The Sahaba agreed to this and selected Abu Bakr as their first Khaleef. Habbab ibn Mundhir who suggested the idea of two Ameers corrected himself and was the first to give Abu Bakr the Bay'ah. This indicates an Ijma as-Sahaba of all of the Sahaba. Ali ibni abi Talib, who was attending the body of Muhammad at the time, also consented to this.
Imam Ali whom the Shia revere said:
People must have an Amir...where the believer works under his Imara (rule) and under which the unbeliever would also benefit, until his rule ended by the end of his life (ajal), the booty (fay’i) would be gathered, the enemy would be fought, the routes would be made safe, the strong one will return what he took from the weak till the tyrant would be contained, and not bother anyone.
The sayings of Islamic scholars
Al-Mawardi says:
It is forbidden for the Ummah (Muslim world) to have two leaders at the same time.
Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi (Al-Nawawi) says:
It is forbidden to give an oath to two leaders or more, even in different parts of the world and even if they are far apart.
Ahmad al-Qalqashandi says:
It is forbidden to appoint two leaders at the same time.
Ibnu Hazm says:
It is permitted to have only one leader (of the Muslims) in the whole of the world.
Al-sha’rani says:
It is forbidden for Muslims to have in the whole world and at the same time two leaders whether in agreement or discord.
Al-Qadhi Abdul-Jabbar (he is a Mu’tazela scholar), says:
It is forbidden to give the oath to more than one.
Al-Joziri says:
The Imams (scholars of the four schools of thought)- may Allah have mercy on them- agree that the Caliphate is an obligation, and that the Muslims must appoint a leader who would implement the injunctions of the religion, and give the oppressed justice against the oppressors. It is forbidden for Muslims to have two leaders in the world whether in agreement or discord.
The Shia schools of thought and others expressed the same opinion about this.
Al-Qurtubi said in his Tafsir of the verse, "Indeed, man is made upon this earth a Caliph" that:
This Ayah is a source in the selection of an Imaam, and a Khaleef, he is listened to and he is obeyed, for the word is united through him, and the Ahkam (laws) of the Caliph are implemented through him, and there is no difference regarding the obligation of that between the Ummah, nor between the Imams except what is narrated about al-Asam, the Mu'tazzili ...
Al-Qurtubi also said:
The Khilafah is the pillar upon which other pillars rest
An-Nawawi said:
(The scholars) consented that it is an obligation upon the Muslims to select a Khalif
Al-Ghazali when writing of the potential consequences of losing the Caliphate said:
The judges will be suspeneded, the Wilayaat (provinces) will be nullified, ... the decrees of those in authority will not be executed and all the people will be on the verge of Haraam
Ibn Taymiyyah said:
It is obligatory to know that the office in charge of commanding over the people (ie: the post of the Khaleefah) is one of the greatest obligations of the Deen. In fact, there is no establishment of the Deen except by it....this is the opinion of the salaf, such as al-Fadl ibn 'Iyaad, Ahmad ibn Hanbal and others
Source for the above quotes is here - with footnotes to original material
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliphate# … 08-presentU.S. President Bush has said that al-Qaeda terrorists and those that share their ideology
hope to establish a violent political utopia across the Middle East, which they call caliphate, where all would be ruled according to their hateful ideology ... This caliphate would be a totalitarian Islamic empire encompassing all current and former Muslim lands, stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
(These desires by Al Qaeda - PRECEDED the war on terrorism)
***********
(Wikipedia)
Reestablishment of the Caliphate
Once the subject of intense conflict and rivalry amongst Muslim rulers, the caliphate has lain dormant and largely unclaimed since the 1920s. In recent years though, interest among Muslims in international unity and the Caliphate has grown. For many ordinary Muslims the caliph as leader of the community of believers, "is cherished both as memory and ideal"[34] as a time when Muslims "enjoyed scientific and military superiority globally,"[35] though "not an urgent concern" compared to issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.[34]
Tight restrictions on political activity in many Muslim countries, coupled with the obstacles to uniting over 50 nation-states under a single institution, have prevented efforts to revive the caliphate. Popular apolitical Islamic movements such as the Tablighi Jamaat identify a lack of spirituality and decline in personal religious observance as the root cause of the Muslim world's problems, and claim that the caliphate cannot be successfully revived until these deficiencies are addressed. No attempts at rebuilding a power structure based on Islam were successful anywhere in the Muslim world until the Iranian Revolution in 1979, which was based on Shia principles and whose leaders did not outwardly call for the restoration of a global Caliphate.
Islamist Call
A number of Islamist political parties and Islamist guerrilla groups have called for the restoration of the caliphate by uniting Muslim nations, either through peaceful political action (e.g., Hizb ut-Tahrir) or through force (e.g., al-Qaeda).[36] Various Islamist movements have gained momentum in recent years with the ultimate aim of establishing a Caliphate; however, they differ in their methodology and approach. Some are locally-oriented, mainstream political parties that have no apparent transnational objectives.
Pioneer Islamist Abul Ala Maududi believed the caliph was not just an individual ruler who had to be restored, but was man's representation of God's authority on earth;
Khilafa means representative. Man, according to Islam is the representative of "people", His (God's) viceregent; that is to say, by virtue of the powers delegated to him, and within the limits prescribed by the Qu'ran and the teaching of the prophet (peace upon him), the caliph is required to exercise Divine authority.[37]
One of al-Qaeda's clearly stated goals is the re-establishment of a caliphate.[38] Bin Laden has called for Muslims to "establish the righteous caliphate of our umma."[39] Al Qaeda recently named its Internet newscast from Iraq "The Voice of the Caliphate."[40]
According to author Lawrence Wright, Ayman al-Zawahiri, an active member of the Muslim Brotherhood, "sought to restore the caliphate, the rule of Islamic clerics, which had formally ended in 1924 following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire but which had not exercised real power since the thirteenth century. Once caliphate was established, Zawahiri believed, Egypt would become a rallying point for the rest of the Islamic world, leading the jihad against the West. "Then history would make a new turn, God willing," Zawahiri later wrote, "in the opposite direction against the empire of the United States and the world’s Jewish government.""[41]
In Pakistan the Tanzeem-e-Islami, an Islamist organization founded by Dr. Israr Ahmed, calls for a Caliphate.
The Muslim Brotherhood advocates pan-Islamic unity and implementing Sharia, it is the largest and most influential Islamic group in the world, and its offshoots form the largest opposition parties in most Arab governments.[42] Founder Hassan al-Banna wrote about the restoration of the Caliphate,[43] but officially sanctioned Islamic institutions in the Muslim world generally do not consider the Caliphate a top priority and have instead focused on other issues. Islamists argue it is because they are tied to the current Muslim regimes.
One transnational group whose ideology is based specifically on restoring the caliphate as a pan-Islamic state, is Hizb ut-Tahrir (literally: "party of liberation"). It is particularly strong in Central Asia, Europe and growing in strength in the Arab world and is based on the claim that Muslim can prove that God exists[44] and that the Qur'an is the word of God.[45][46]
Hizb-Ut-Tahrir believes in a non-violent political and intellectual struggle, that is both a ground up and top down approach in the Muslim world, whilst in the Western world its aim is an intellectual struggle to show Islam as an alternative system to capitalism and a solution to regulate the natural environment and global warming. In the Muslim world view of this party, foundations of beliefs, rationality and causes are looked into rather than plain political analysis, which can be ideologically biased.With that in mind, read these.
"""""So I say that, in general, our concern is that our umma unites either under
the Words of the Book of God or His Prophet, and that his nation should
establish the righteous caliphate of our umma, which has been prophesied
by our Prophet in his authentic hadith: that the righteous caliph will return
with the permission of God""""
(Bin Laden Oct 2001)
Here is how bin Laden described
the deed perpetrated by the nineteen hijackers of 9/11:
"""""They struck at the very heart of the Ministry of Defense, and they hit the
American economy right at its heart, too. They rubbed America's nose in
the dirt, and wiped its arrogance in the mud. As the twin towers of New
York collapsed, something even greater and more enormous collapsed
with them: the myth of the great America and the myth of democracy. It
became clear to all that America’s values are the lowest, and the myth of
the “land of the free” was destroyed, as was the myth of American
national security and the CIA, all praise and glory to God. One of the
most important positive effects of our attacks on New York and
Washington was to expose the reality of the struggle between the
Crusaders and the Muslims, and to demonstrate the enormous hostility that
the Crusaders feel towards us. The attacks revealed the American wolf in
its true ugliness. The entire world woke up from its slumber, and the
Muslims realized the importance of the doctrine of friendship and the
enmity in God. The spirit of brotherhood in faith amongst Muslims was
strengthened, which can be considered a great step towards unification of
the Muslims under the word of God and establishing the rightly guided
Caliphate with the permission of God.""""
"""to expose the reality of the struggle between the Crusaders (Christians) and the Muslims"""
So according to Bin Laden - the re-establishing of the Caliphate would result in the final war between the Christians and the Muslims.
***********************
Louis Attiya Allah,
a frequent spokesman for al-Qaeda, who wrote in the online magazine, sawt al-jihad (The
Voice of Jihad),
"""The (Arab) nation states…are a Western model that the West created to
allow it to build up its general colonialist plan for the Islamic East. These
countries have no religious foundation, and have neither a right to exist
nor a popular base. They were forced upon the Muslim peoples, and their
survival is linked to the Western forces that created them. Therefore, the
general aim of the jihad and the Mujahideen is to strike at the foundations
and infrastructure of the Western colonialist program or at the so-called
world order—or, to put it bluntly, to defeat the Crusaders in the battle that
has been going on for over a century.{{Since the abolition of the Caliphate}}
Their defeat means, simply, the elimination of all forms of nation-states, such that all that remains is the natural existence familiar to Islam—the regional entity under the great
Islamic state.{{The Re-established Caliphate-}}
************************
Zawahiri wrote:
""""...we must understand the realities and
dimensions of the conflict. The reality of the conflict is that the Israeli
occupation of Palestine is in the forefront of the Crusaders’ mission
against Islam and Muslims. The dimensions of the conflict include the
confrontations between the world-wide Muslim community on one side
and the Christian West on the other side. So Palestine is the worry for all
Muslims.
So if the faith is all to Allah and the word of God is highest, then
earth is liberated, injustices are lifted, and all that is sacred is protected.
But if we sacrifice our Sharia rule, and legitimize those who sell their
nations and sign agreements of surrender, in hopes of liberating earth,
alleviating injustice or protecting, then we will lose our faith and our lives.
In the meantime, earth will still be occupied, injustices present and
sacredness violated.
*******One can clearly see from these - but a few quotes - the Islamists have no qualms about calling the war:
East against West
Muslim against Christian
Prophecy against Prophecy
Furthermore, they see it not as something that started with the war on terror, but rather, they see it starting with the dissolution of the Caliphate in 1924. America's response to 9/11 - right or wrongly - came after many attempts by these Islamists to humiliate the West. According to their own words - it was not because of Bush, or wars against terror or any other such naive and Western Liberal mindset causes; it was a war between Christians and Muslims - ordained by Islamic Prophecy and prophecied to come to a head - when the Mahdi - the Righteous Caliph arrives - to receive the Caliphate.
To be sure, not all or most Muslims accept this. But the violent ones do and that is surely significant.
So the question arises - are Christians making this a self fulfilling prophecy simply by recognizing the Bible said it would happen this way.? Or are they rather warning us that it has been known for 2500 years it would come this way just at a time when the West was in total decadence from the precepts of the Christian God and the Founding of our country; and as a sure and just punishment from a Righteous and Jealous God?
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