Islamism

The biggest threat to the safety and freedom of those living in the West today is an extreme form of Islam called Islamism. The ambition of its votaries is to impose strict Islamic law, sharia, on the entire world, including Europe and the United States.

These fanatics realize that they can't persuade Westerners to adopt Islam and sharia through the free exchange of ideas and rational argument because their religion, based as it is on a strict fundamentalist totalitarianism, has very little appeal to people who are accustomed to the freedoms enjoyed in the West for the last two and a half centuries.

Their hope, therefore, is that by overwhelming democratic states with refugees and other immigrants who will eventually be given the right to vote they can gradually acquire sufficient political power to enact at least some of the strictures of sharia legislatively.

If and when they succeed the very freedom they exploited to gain their ends will be curtailed or even abolished and people will one day awaken to find themselves under the thumb of an alien, fascistic theocracy with the power to dictate every aspect of their lives and to compel everyone to conform to the teachings of the Koran.

Meanwhile, the Islamists know that in the postmodern West the highest values of millions of people are mere peace and security. Believing in little else, many Westerners would rather submit to the dominance of the Islamists than live with the anxiety of being second class citizens.

Thus, the will to resist the capitulation of the West to the Islamo-fascists is being steadily eroded, especially in Europe, by acts of terror committed by religious zealots willing to die in order to sap whatever confidence remains among Westerners in their values and institutions.

We're often told that terrorists are a small number of those who adhere to Islam, and in relative terms that's probably true, but in absolute terms they number in the millions.

Prager U. has a helpful primer on Islamism which packs a lot of facts into a five minute video. Give it a look:

Russian Morale

As winter sets in along the war front in Ukraine news reports are full of stories about how the war is going nowhere and the Ukrainians and Russians are at a stalemate or the Ukrainians are being slowly ground down.

A report from Strategy Page has a different take, however. To be sure, there are no quick victories on the horizon, but it seems, if SP is correct, that it's the Russians who are being ground down.

Here's an excerpt:

January 8, 2024: The morale and willingness to fight among Russian troops continues to plummet. One reason for this is the heavy losses, about 350,000 dead, Russia has suffered in Ukraine so far.

Since late 2023 Ukrainian troops have increasingly encountered Russian troops who would surrender at the first opportunity and often do it in a dramatic fashion. This included dropping their weapons during their first encounter with Ukrainian soldiers. In other cases, Russian troops were encountered who had already dropped their weapons and were looking for someone to surrender to.

While troops can be motivated or compelled to fight, they are often ineffective. That means they suffer a lot of casualties while still unable to gain much ground.

Russian commanders are aware of this and had orders to do something to prevent these surrenders and efforts to avoid combat. That proved to be an impossible order to comply with. Physical punishments did not improve morale and willingness to fight.

The main problem was that troops had no confidence in their commanders (assuming they had any at all). These officers were often just as dismayed at the situations they faced on the battlefield. The government was often not supplying food, ammunition, and medical care for the troops.

It is now winter in Ukraine and once more the government has not supplied enough cold weather clothing and equipment for the troops. Worse, the clothes and equipment were often almost useless cheap imitations instead of purported standard issue.

There's much more at the link. The Russians have superior numbers and firepower, but morale counts for far more than either of those. Troops who are hungry, cold and sick, fighting in a war that none of them really understands, aren't usually eager to give their all for a government which they have good reason to believe is betraying them.

Toward the end of their report SP adds this:

Numerous veterans are no longer in the military because they refused to renew their contracts. Many more soldiers remained in the army but refused to return to Ukraine and got away with it.

Putin ordered that these soldiers be officially described, in their military records and military ID, as unreliable and unwilling to fight. In any other country a soldier who refuses to fight during wartime is subject to severe punishment, often execution.

That still happens to reluctant Russian soldiers inside Ukraine where officers have the authority to shoot reluctant troops.

Initially, as Russian casualties grew and progress was nonexistent, some officers did shoot troops refusing to fight. That soon changed as the troops threatened to and sometimes did shoot back or, in at least one known case, ran over an insistent officer with a tank. Not to mention troops sometimes shooting undesirable officers first.

Ukrainian forces have provided additional confirmation of this violence and collapsing morale within Russian units. Many Russian troops will surrender to the Ukrainians at the first opportunity and admit it to Ukrainian, Russian, and foreign journalists. This prompted Ukraine to equip some of its quadcopters to notify and lead surrendering Russian troops safely to Ukrainian front-line forces.

One wishes our administration would stop dithering on the matter of the kind and quantity of assistance we provide to Ukraine and enable them to drive the Russians back across their borders into Russia.

A Great Book

What makes a great book great? At Biola College they offer an honors program in which students read, by the time they graduate, about one hundred of the books considered to be among the very best ever written, but how do they determine which works should be included?

Fred Sanders, at The Scriptorium, lists and discusses eight characteristics or criteria of a great book. I've listed the eight, but to read his discussion of them you'll have to visit his article: He writes that a great book...

1. speaks from an important original setting.
2. is written in a way that is relevant for readers today.
3. is well-crafted.
4. is one that provokes excellent discussion.
5. is inexhaustible, so no reading of it is the final reading, and no discussion ever runs it dry.
6. is time-tested. People from multiple generations have had their hands on it, and have judged it to be worth passing along.
7. is weird. It’s got angles, edges, textures, and stuff sticking out that you wouldn’t have predicted.
8. is smarter than the best teacher, but within reach of the average student.

How many books have you read that meet the criteria of a great book?

Strange How Things Sometimes Work Out

Sometimes things in life work out in ways completely unforeseen and unforeseeable. Just when it seems nothing good can come of one's life, when we've all but given up hope that anything we do will amount to anything worthwhile, sometimes something wonderful happens.

The following is taken from a book by Robert Petterson titled The Book of Amazing Stories. The excerpt is titled The Chambermaid’s Choice and it truly is an amazing story:

Maria had hoped that her second marriage would make for a better future. Though born the daughter of a cook, she had dreams of being in high society. But at sixteen, she fell madly in love with a nobleman’s valet. When they married, she consigned herself to be dismissed as one of the serving class. After Maria gave birth to a son, her valet husband died. At age eighteen she was a grieving widow and a single mother. Not long after, her little boy died too.

Then she got a second chance at love [with a musician]. But when her young musician took her home to meet his prominent family, they looked down their haughty noses at this girl from the serving class. His father would ever after refer to her as “the chambermaid.” Her husband’s family would always view her as an inferior interloper. It was no wonder that Maria’s second marriage soon soured.

She later referred to her life as “a chain of sorrows.” The couple’s first child died six days after he was born. The “chambermaid” would bury five of her eight children. But her worst heartache was watching the decline of a husband who enjoyed the tavern more than practicing his music. If he wasn’t in a drunken stupor, he was with other women.

Then the beatings began. After he took advantage of her in one of his brutal rages, Maria discovered she was pregnant.

She determined that she wasn’t about to bring a child conceived by rape into her miserable world. She found her way to a woman who traded in concoctions that induced miscarriage.

Three drops of that deadly liquid would kill her baby. Any more might end her life too. She dumped it all into a cup of tea. But before she was able to drink it, the cup was accidentally knocked off the table. At first she was hysterical. Then she resigned herself to the fact that God must have a purpose for her unwanted child.

He turned out to be a strange little boy, often reclusive and unresponsive. But he did have his family’s love for music. When a local teacher took him on as a piano student, no one imagined that she was gaining a prodigy.

Maria was forty years old when Wolfgang Mozart allegedly declared that her son was destined for greatness. Two months later, the teenage prodigy rushed home to be at her deathbed. She told her son that giving birth to him was the best thing she ever did in her unhappy life.

We should all be grateful that Maria van Beethoven did not abort little Ludwig, a child of rape who would grow up to write the world’s greatest symphonies.

Maria's life, like that of so many others in her day and in ours, was tragic, yet out of her tragedy she gave the world a wonderful gift. Her son's symphonies, especially the fifth and the ninth, as well as many of his concertos, are marvelous, but his life, too, was tragic. He went deaf while he was still at the height of his powers, allegedly from beatings he received from his father as a child. Yet out of his sufferings he produced works of astonishing beauty.

Reading this I was reminded of a few lines from the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard who asked, "What is a poet?" "A poet," he replied to his question, "is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and cries escape them they sound like beautiful music."

Kurt Gödel's Belief in an Afterlife

Kurt Gödel is one of the most prominent logicians and mathematicians of the last few centuries. His achievements in mathematics, logic, and computer science are momentous.

In a rather lengthy article at Aeon Alexander Englert discusses the argument Gödel makes for his belief in an afterlife. His reasons are found in a series of several letters he wrote to his mother Marianne in 1961.

The crux of his argument is contained in these words to his mother:

If the world is rationally organised and has meaning, then it must be the case [that there's an existence beyond this one]. For what sort of a meaning would it have to bring about a being (the human being) with such a wide field of possibilities for personal development and relationships to others, only then to let him achieve not even 1/1,000th of it?

His argument has Kantian resonances, and his basic reasoning makes sense. If the universe is rational then human life is rational. But human life cannot be rational if physical death ends it before it achieves anything meaningful. Thus, if the universe is rational, which he believed it certainly was, then physical death must not be the end of our existence.

Gödel writes this:

What I name a theological Weltanschauung [Worldview] is the view that the world and everything in it has meaning and reason, and indeed a good and indubitable meaning. From this it follows immediately that our earthly existence – since it as such has at most a very doubtful meaning – can be a means to an end for another existence.

Englert offers the reader much more insight into Gödel's reasoning, which the great logician elaborates over the course of several letters to Marianne, and there's a lot more analysis by Englert of the argument as well.

It's a fine essay written about one of the towering intellectual figures of the 20th century.

Who Are the Houthis?

Powerline blog recently ran a column by Washington Times columnist and defense expert Cliff May in which May explains who the Houthis are and why they've been attacking shipping in the Red Sea. Given that the actions of these terrorists have the potential to drag us into a war in the Middle East I thought important that we know what's going on there and so have lifted a few excerpts from May's column.

May writes that the Houthis call themselves Ansar Allah, meaning "Supporters of God." They are a Shia military and political organization whose theology is consistent with Iran’s and is succinctly expressed in their slogan: “Death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory to Islam.”

He goes on to explain that,

For a decade, they have been waging a civil war against the government of Sunni-majority Yemen, a conflict in which more than 150,000 people have been killed. A ceasefire between the rebels and the government has been in effect since 2022.

Just before leaving office, President Trump designated the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization.

Just after taking office, President Biden removed the Houthis from that blacklist. He also froze weapons sales to Saudi Arabia which had been leading an Arab coalition supporting the Yemeni government.

If [allied naval forces fail] to silence Houthi guns, President Biden will face a choice: Capitulate or escalate.

The latter would mean at least directing the Pentagon to eliminate Houthi weapons warehouses, the vessels and helicopters used for hijackings, and perhaps command-and-control centers.

But such a response would be only tactical. A strategic approach would focus less on the puppets and more on those pulling the strings of the Houthis – along with the strings of Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Shia militias.

That would mean directly punishing Iran which is the enabler of all these subordinate terror organizations. Such a measure carries the potential for a much wider conflict.

In recent days, Iran’s rulers have increased their production of enriched uranium. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, they may now have enough to produce three nuclear bombs.

A nuclear-armed regime in Tehran would be more difficult to contain and deter – and a more valuable partner for Beijing and Moscow.

President Biden, like his predecessors in the White House, has said that for Tehran’s jihadis to possess nukes would be “unacceptable.”

The problem for Mr. Biden is that the longer he waits the more nukes Iran develops and the more cataclysmic war with Iran becomes. It seems that if we do nothing war with Iran becomes inevitable since they've promised that they'll use their nuclear weapons to destroy Israel.

If we can find a way to punish them now, and simultaneously destroy their nuclear weapons capability without triggering a wider conflagration, that would be the more desirable alternative. Parenthetically, it's ironic that sanctions imposed by President Trump had severely crippled Iran, but President Biden removed the sanctions and Iran is now flexing its muscle.

In any case, acting now certainly entails grave risks, but not acting entails even graver, much more horrific, certainties. This may well turn out to be the biggest test of Mr. Biden's presidency.

Ms. Gay's Resignation

Claudine Gay has resigned as president of Harvard. She has, she implies, succumbed to racist animus which has put unsustainable pressure on her and the Board of Directors.

Here's an excerpt from her resignation letter:

Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.

Racism is, of course, the left's go-to response whenever a progressive black person is held to the same standard of conduct as everyone else, and although she may have received despicable emails or phone calls, it's absurd to think that that's what brought about her downfall.

Ms. Gay has been determined to have committed almost fifty acts of plagiarism in her scholarly publications, an offense for which lowly undergraduates are routinely suspended.

She also demonstrated an alarming degree of moral maladroitness when she was unable to condemn calls for genocide of Jews on her campus when asked to do so by a House committee.

The Fellows of Harvard College claimed to have accepted her resignation "with sorrow":

While President Gay has acknowledged missteps and has taken responsibility for them, it is also true that she has shown remarkable resilience in the face of deeply personal and sustained attacks.

While some of this has played out in the public domain, much of it has taken the form of repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol directed at her through disgraceful emails and phone calls. We condemn such attacks in the strongest possible terms.

That first line above presumably refers to her failure, when given the opportunity before a Congressional panel, to condemn antisemitic demonstrations among her student population during which some demonstrators called for the genocide of Jews.

Gay stated that she was caught up in a combative exchange with Congressional interrogators and "failed to convey what is my truth.”

That it's wrong to threaten students with violence is somehow her truth, as if someone else might legitimately have a different "truth," is a notion which should alone be enough to disqualify her from being the president of a college, but set that aside. Jim Geraghty at National Review asks,

Hey, who among us hasn’t gotten caught up in the moment and argued that calling for the genocide of Jews might be okay in certain contexts? Some of us might say that if you can stumble into telling Congress that, in certain circumstances, calling for genocide is acceptable, you really shouldn’t be running anything, much less the most prestigious university in the country.

“Is calling for genocide a form of harassment?” should be the sort of question they ask when they are trying to assess if you’ve had a concussion.

Geraghty goes on to write:

Here’s the thing: If you’ve done nothing wrong, are being falsely accused of rampant plagiarism, and all of your critics are racists or are gushing “racist vitriol” . . . why are you resigning? Why are the Harvard Fellows accepting your resignation?

The contention of Gay and the Harvard Fellows is that Gay did nothing seriously wrong, certainly nothing that warrants her resignation, but she’s resigning anyway, because a bunch of racists are demanding it.

Good point. Ms. Gay's massive breach of professional ethics and her moral and epistemic squishiness, not her race or gender, disqualify her from holding the position she did.

Taught to Hate Jews

It's difficult, perhaps, for many Westerners to grasp the hysterical hatred that many Muslims have for Jews. It's a hatred that seems to consume a significant majority of them and which boiled over in the horrific atrocities of October 7th.

This article gives some insight into how Jew-hatred is instilled in Muslim children almost from their infancy and how some Muslims have rejected it and the religion that fosters it.

Here's the lede:

The following five ex-Muslims grew up in Canada, Europe, and the Middle East, but they were all indoctrinated, they say, with the same views on Jews and Israel.

They remember a childhood shot through with antisemitic moments ranging from the mundane (one woman recalls her aunt claiming Jews put cancer in her vegetables at the market) to the deadly (a former extremist went as far as to pick a location in London for a terrorist attack he planned to carry out at 17).

These hateful ideas, repeated by their family members, religious leaders, and teachers, are part and parcel of the same animus, they say, that fueled Hamas’s attacks on October 7.

Some of the people you will hear from below have received death threats for speaking out on issues like antisemitism and sexism in the Muslim world. One uses a pen name to protect herself and her daughter from her terrorist ex-husband, who is currently jailed in Egypt.

All of them came to reject their loathing for Jewish people and the West, and have rebuilt their lives in the wake of their realizations. Here are their stories, which you can read or click to listen to each author recite in the audio recordings below.

One wishes that virtues like grace, tolerance, and love were more in evidence in a religion adhered to by 20% of the world's people. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case.

Perhaps more Muslims will eventually realize that hatred and violence are spiritual dead ends and follow the example of the five whose testimonies were featured in this article.

The Elephant's Trunk

One of the animal kingdom's most amazing features is the elephant's trunk. It's an amazing piece of engineering and another example of how the Darwinian explanation for it requires an enormous amount of faith, blind faith, in undirected chance.

The following video gives some insight into the capabilities of this fascinating structure:

C.S.Lewis and Systemic Racism

People are often heard reciting some variation of, "Of course, there's still racism in America," but when asked to give an example of a racist occurrence, the individual is often at a loss to come up with one. Undeterred, they'll sometimes insist that the difficulty in citing examples just shows how insidious racism is. Though individuals may not show their racism outwardly, we're told, they're still guilty of it inwardly. Or, it's claimed that the racism is "systemic" - embedded so deeply in our institutions that it's not easily visible.

People hearing these allegations too often nod in agreement. They acquiesce to what's proffered as common knowledge whether or not they're given any evidence in support of it. It seems impolite or unnecessarily provocative or confrontational to demand that the person present some empirical evidence before they can expect their claims to be credible.

Yet why should anyone acquiesce? Why should people go along with the assertion that "Of course there's still racism in America" if they've never seen it or been shown specific, unequivocal examples of it? Are people just supposed to accept the existence of virulent racism on faith or on the supposed authority of their interlocutor?

It all reminds me of a passage from C.S. Lewis in his book The Four Loves. Lewis is writing about the claim made by some that deep friendships between men are really evidence of homosexual attraction.

Lewis debunks the claim in the following excerpt in which he presents argument that applies as much to "racism" as to "homosexuality." He writes that the assertion that friendship evinces homosexual love...

...though it cannot be proved, can never of course be refuted....The fact that no positive evidence of homosexuality can be discovered in the behavior of two Friends does not disconcert the wiseacres at all: "That," they say gravely, "is just what we should expect."

The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence; the absence of smoke just proves that the fire is very carefully hidden.

He then adds this,

[This is like] arguing like a man who should say "If there were an invisible cat in that chair, the chair would look empty; but the chair does look empty; therefore there's an invisible cat in it."

A belief in invisible cats cannot perhaps be logically disproved, but it tells us a good deal about those who hold it.

Indeed, those who claim to see the invisible cat of racism in every chair are often people who are desperate to blame the invisible cat for the failures of those whom they insist are the victims of this nebulous, and perhaps imaginary, form of oppression.

If those who claim that racism is alive and well in contemporary America can adduce evidence of this assertion then, fine, we should heed them. If they can't adduce evidence they should be ignored.

What They Did to the Women

The New York Times recently ran a story on what the Palestinians did to the Israeli women on October 7th. John Hinderacker at Powerline excerpts from the Times' story some of the eyewitnesses' descriptions of the atrocities committed by these adherents of the "religion of peace."

Hinderacker opens with this:

I am generally contemptuous of the New York Times, but it deserves credit for this article on the violence against Israeli women and girls that was perpetrated by Gaza on October 7. The article is long and chilling. Organized gang rape, mutilation and murder were obviously features of the Gazans’ strategy. The evidence described by the Times is sickening; I credit a left-wing outlet for being willing to describe unflinchingly what Hamas’s supporters did.

He goes on to quote from the Times' article:

The Times viewed photographs of one woman’s corpse that emergency responders discovered in the rubble of a besieged kibbutz with dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin.

An eyewitness describes what she saw:

The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.

She said she then watched another woman “shredded into pieces.” While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast.

“One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road,” Sapir said.

She said the men sliced her face and then the woman fell out of view. Around the same time, she said, she saw three other women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more women.

Another eyewitness offered this:

Maybe 40 yards in front of him, he recalled, a white van pulled up and its doors flew open.

He said he then saw five men, wearing civilian clothes, all carrying knives and one carrying a hammer, dragging a woman across the ground. She was young, naked and screaming.

“They all gather around her,” Mr. Cohen said. “She’s standing up. They start raping her. I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words.”

“Then one of them raises a knife,” he said, “and they just slaughtered her.”

Near the highway, he said, he found the body of a young woman, on her stomach, no pants or underwear, legs spread apart. He said her vagina area appeared to have been sliced open, “as if someone tore her apart.”

A dentist who worked with some of the bodies gave this testimony:

Captain Maayan asked to be identified only by her rank and surname because of the sensitivity of the subject. She said she had seen several bodies with cuts in their vaginas and underwear soaked in blood and one whose fingernails had been pulled out.

Hinderacker adds one more excerpt:

There are at least three women and one man who were sexually assaulted and survived, according to Gil Horev, a spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs. “None of them has been willing to come physically for treatment,” he said. Two therapists said they were working with a woman who was gang raped at the rave and was in no condition to talk to investigators or reporters.

Whenever we see students demonstrating against Israel and on behalf of the Palestinians, the above is what they're endorsing, either implicitly or explicitly. They may deny it but they're tacitly approving of such heinous crimes.

Here's Hinderacker's conclusion:

What accounts for this savagery? The sick culture that prevails among the so-called Palestinians, and that especially dominates Gaza. The Gazans are lost in hate and have been trained to do evil from childhood. It is that culture that must be destroyed, not [just] the political organization of Hamas, which is a symptom not a cause.

A number of commentators have written that the Israelis must not seek revenge for the atrocities of October 7. I don’t understand that. They absolutely should wreak vengeance on the Gazans. (“Everyone over there is a terrorist,” as one retrieved hostage says.)

In my opinion, Israelis have a moral duty to avenge the Gazans’ atrocities. Happily, they seem to be well on their way to doing so.

How can they not?

Kwanzaa

President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden recently wished everyone a Happy Kwanzaa. You might wonder how Kwanzaa ever came about and why the President observes the day, so Lloyd Billingsley at Powerline blog tells us about the man who got it all started. His name is Ron Karenga, although he was born Ronald McKinley Everett in 1941.

Here's Billingsley:

Karenga was a political activist in the late 1960s and came to prominence as a theoretician of the black nationalist movement.

In “The Quotable Karenga” handbook, the Kwanzaa inventor told followers: “When it’s burn, let’s see how much you burn. When it’s kill, let’s see how much you kill. When it’s blow up, let’s see how much you blow up.”

Karenga also established Kuzaliwa, a tribute honoring Malcolm X’s birthday on May 19, and Uhuru Day on August 11, to commemorate the 1965 “civil disturbance” in Watts. Between 1971 and 1975, Karenga “dropped out of sight while serving a prison term for ordering the beating of a woman.”

In 1971, a court convicted Karenga of kidnapping and torturing two women in his organization. According to “Karenga Tortured Women Followers, Wife Tells Court,” from the May 3, 1971 Los Angeles Times, Karenga stripped naked Deborah Jones and Gail Davis, whipped them with an electrical cord, and beat the women with a karate baton.

The Kwanzaa founder also stuck a hot soldering iron into Davis’ mouth, and used a vise to clamp down on one of her toes.

Before that torture session, Karenga created a black nationalist organization known as “US.” The rival Black Panthers, who made common cause with white radicals, mocked Karenga’s group as “United Slaves.”

On January 17, 1969, the Black Panthers and United Slaves shot it out at UCLA over control of the black studies program. Panthers John Huggins and Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter perished in the gun battle.

Billingsley has more on Karenga, but the preceding should suffice to give the reader a sense of the sort of gentleman the originator of Kwanzaa is. Given the character of the man, one might be tempted to think the holiday he invented is a giant con.

In any case, I think I'll stick with Christmas, a day associated with a God of love, rather than with a criminal with a record of hate and violence.

Booty for Allah

One difference between Christianity and Islam is that if a Christian preacher gave a sermon like the one excerpted below he'd rightly be subjected to popular opprobrium and media outrage. He'd probably also be cashiered from his church, at least he should be, but in American mosques it's evidently acceptable to sound like a medieval barbarian.

Robert Spencer at PJ Media explains:

Since the Oct. 7 Hamas jihad massacres in Israel, Muslim clerics in mosques all over the United States have prayed for the victory of the Muslims and the destruction of Israel. But in one mosque in Bayonne, New Jersey, a cleric went even farther than that.

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reported that during a recent Friday sermon that was streamed on YouTube from the Bayonne Mosque and Community Center, an unnamed Muslim preacher emphasized the importance of Hamas’ jihad against Israel for the entire “Muslim nation,” and prayed an incendiary prayer that included the request that Allah would give the wealth, possessions and even the children of non-Muslims to the Muslims as booty, that is, the spoils of war.

The cleric preached: "Today, we are making the same supplication [as the Prophet did] for the group of people remaining in Gaza today, who are protecting and guarding the remaining dignity of the Muslim nation, and Allah be praised, before what happened on October 7, I met a brother from Gaza, and I said that to him.”

This is puzzling language for anyone who believes the standard narrative that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is over land, and can be solved by Israel ending its “occupation” and dismantling its settlements. If that were the case, what would it have to do with the “dignity” of Muslims around the world.

Evidently, the indignity that the Muslim world has suffered is that land which at one time was under Muslim hegemony is now inhabited by infidels and must be retaken, since it violates the Quran to allow non-Muslims to govern what once belonged to Muslims. Never mind that the Muslims took every inch of land in the Middle East and North Africa from people who were not Muslims, and did it through bloody, violent conquest.

Spencer continues:

The New Jersey cleric is assuming what analysts of the conflict in the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and the capitals of Europe steadfastly ignore: that as "The Palestinian Delusion" explains, the real cause of the conflict is the Islamic idea that any land that was governed by Islamic law at any point belongs by right to the Muslims forever. This idea is based on a Qur’anic command, “Drive them out from where they drove you out” (2:191).

The claim that the Israelis drove the Muslim Arabs out of what is today the modern state of Israel is a historical myth: they were told to leave by the Arab League in 1948 when Israel declared its independence. The Arab League was promising to destroy Israel in a matter of weeks, after which they could return. Nevertheless, they now claim to have been driven out, making the destruction of Israel a matter of fulfilling the immutable will of Allah.

Spencer has more about this preacher's sermon at the link. He concludes with this:

And so in the waning days of 2023, we have the spectacle of a religious leader in New Jersey praying that the wealth and even the children of non-Muslims become the property of the Muslims as “booty.” The name of the eighth chapter of the Qur’an in Arabic is al-Anfal, which is variously translated as “booty” and the “spoils of war.”

The Qur’an envisions the Muslims waging war on non-Muslims and capturing their belongings and even their women, and using them for their own purposes. Several passages of the Qur’an (4:3, 4:24, 23:1-6, 33:50, and 70:30) make it clear that Muslim warriors are permitted to seize infidel women and use them sexually.

The contrast with Christian teaching based on the words of Jesus couldn't be more stark.

Sex

One of the many questions naturalism finds difficult to answer given a Darwinian paradigm is why sexual reproduction would have ever evolved when asexual reproduction works perfectly well for so many organisms. Sexual reproduction is incredibly complex, so much complicated chemistry has to occur at just the right time, and so many contingencies have to be perfectly synchronized that it's simply extraordinary that both plants and animals would've evolved such an improbable means of perpetuating themselves.

One explanation for this phenomenon that's sometimes heard is that the genetic mixing that results from sex promotes diversity which in turn promotes adaptation which advances the evolutionary process.

Perhaps so, but one problem with this explanation is that, though it might explain why sex is evolutionarily advantageous, it doesn't explain how it could've arisen in the first place.

The excellent video that follows gives an idea of the complexity of the process, but even this elides the incredible challenge of evolving meiosis, sex organs, the complicated chemical reactions that occur throughout the process, and much, much more.

Complicated systems with which we're familiar are always the product of intelligent engineering and design, but naturalists insist that blind processes like genetic mutation and sheer chance could've done the job of producing sex. I suppose they could've but to believe that they actually did requires an enormous investment of blind faith in serendipity.

Watch:

I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day

Our world is filled with violence and war - in Ukraine, in Israel, in Africa and dozens of other less well-known places around the globe. The incessant brutal conflict makes it hard to believe that there could ever be "peace on earth, goodwill to men."

In 1863, in the midst of the American Civil War, the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was wracked by similar thoughts. Grieving the loss of his wife in a fire two years before and the more recent wounding of his son in battle, he was bitterly contemplating what that phrase could possibly mean, what hope it could possibly offer.

As he sat at his desk on Christmas morning, despairing, he heard the village church bells ringing. Their sound suddenly filled him with assurance that evil would not ultimately prevail. He took up his pen to compose a poem of optimism and hope. The poem was titled I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day, and has since been set to music in several different arrangements. Here's one I especially like.

I wish all my readers an especially meaningful Christmas today:

Two Noels

I thought it fitting as we approach Christmas eve to post what is perhaps my favorite Christmas hymn. Christmas hymns, or carols, came to be called "noels" by the French based on the Latin word natalis, which can mean "birthday" or "of or relating to birth."

Eventually the word found its way into English in the 1800s and is frequently used today either as a synonym for Christmas carols or for Christmas itself.

As sung by Dave Phelps this noel captures some of the magic, mystery and power of Christmas. I hope you enjoy it and hope, too, that each of you has a wonderful, meaningful, magical Christmas filled with the love, peace and blessings of God:

After you watch, I highly recommend listening to the Bonner family sing O Holy Night. It's spectacular:

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Three Christmas Symbols

Some people get a little miffed during the Christmas season over the use of Xmas rather than Christmas, because it seems like an attempt by non-Christians to have the celebration without having to acknowledge the historical reason for it.

Every year there are signs and bumper stickers saying, “Put Christ back into Christmas” as a response to the substitution of the letter X for the name of Christ, but historically it's not the letter X that's being substituted for Christ. Actually, the X is a shorthand for the Greek name for Christ (Christos).

The first letter of the Greek word Christos is Chi which looks like our letter X. There’s a long history in the church of the use of X to symbolize the name of Christ, and from the time of its origin, it has signified the opposite of any attempt to avoid naming Christ.

Gr: Christos

The irony is that probably a lot of people do use Xmas to exclude Christ from Christmas and have no idea what the origin of the word is.

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A popular Christmas tradition is to decorate one's home with a "Christmas" tree.

Painting by Marcel Reider (1898)

Modern Christmas trees originated during the Renaissance of early modern Germany. Its 16th-century origins are sometimes associated with protestant reformer Martin Luther, who is said to have first added lighted candles to an evergreen tree. The practice is believed to have spread among Luther's followers in Germany and eventually throughout Europe.

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No doubt the most popular Christmas myth is that of Santa Claus. There's a rich ancient heritage behind the Santa Claus story. The secularized, sanitized, contemporary version has its origin in Christian history, and specifically in a man named Nicholas.

Much exaggerated legendary material is connected with his life and ministry, but if nothing else, the legends tell us what values and beliefs the church held as important as they were projected onto Nicholas. To the bare minimum of facts, legend has supplied intriguing details through such writers as St. Methodius (patriarch of Constantinople in the 850s) and the Greek writer Metaphrastes in the 10th century.

The story goes that Nicholas was born in Lycia in southern Turkey in A.D. 280 to pious and wealthy parents who raised him to love God and taught him the Christian faith from the age of five.

However, his parents died suddenly when he was still young, and Nicholas was forced to grow up quickly.

Inheriting his family's wealth, he was left rich and lonely, but he desired to use his wealth for good. The first opportunity to do this happened when he heard about a father of three daughters who, through an unfortunate turn of events, was left destitute.

Without marriage dowry money, the daughters could be quite likely condemned to a life of singleness and prostitution, so Nicholas threw some small bags of gold coins into the window of the home (some traditions say down the chimney), thereby saving the children from a life of misery.

Later, Nicholas made a pilgrimage to Egypt and the Holy Land and upon returning home felt called to ministry. He was subsequently ordained and spent time at the Monastery of Holy Zion near Myra in Turkey until an old priest had a vision that he was to be the new bishop.

The congregation overwhelmingly approved him, and he became known for his holiness and passion for the Gospel, becoming a staunch defender of Christian monotheism against the paganism that prevailed at the temple to the goddess Artemis in his district.

Nicholas was imprisoned during the persecution of Christians under the Roman emperor Diocletian, savagely beaten, and later released under Constantine's Edict of Milan (313 A.D.). Those who survived Diocletian's purges were called "confessors" because they wouldn't renege on their confession of Jesus as Lord.

When Bishop Nicholas walked out of the prison, the crowds called to him: "Nicholas! Confessor!" He had been repeatedly beaten until he was raw, and his body was covered with deep bruises.

Bishop Nicholas was said to have intervened on behalf of unjustly charged prisoners and actively sought to help his people survive when they had experienced two successive bad harvests.

There was a widespread belief in those days, promoted by a theologian named Arias, that Jesus was actually a created being, like angels, and not divine. The Council of Nicea was convened by Constantine in 325 A.D to settle this dispute, and the Nicene creed, recited today in many Christian worship services, was formulated to affirm the traditional teaching about Jesus' deity and preexistence.

Nicholas and Arias both attended the council and the story goes that the two got into such a heated dispute over the true nature of Christ that punches were actually thrown. This may be a legendary embellishment, but whether it is or not, it certainly seems inconsistent with our normal image of jolly old St. Nick.

In any case, the actual story of St. Nicholas (Say the words "Saint Nicholas" quickly with a European accent and you'll understand how we got the name Santa Claus) is a lot different, and much more interesting, than the popular modern "fairy tales" surrounding him.

The Amazing Eye

One of the points of conflict between naturalists and theists is the origin of the human eye. Naturalists insist that natural, random evolutionary processes have designed the eye whereas most theists believe that the eye has been designed by an intelligent agent.

There are a couple of arguments naturalists have employed to buttress their case, but the most well-known has for most of the twentieth century been the assertion that the eye is in fact poorly designed. If an intelligent agent designed it, the argument goes, he did a lousy job of it.

On the other hand, if blind evolutionary processes were the "agent" at work then we would expect sub-optimal designs to occur in living things, and this is what we find in the structure of the eye.

This nine-minute video explains in very clear terms why the argument based on the alleged poor design of the eye has fallen into disfavor among biologists and why discoveries in the twenty-first century have shown the eye to be even more marvelously designed than was previously thought.

The video is quite well done and very informative:

An Incomprehensible Story

If Christians are correct about what happened on that first Christmas day it's an event of such magnitude as to be incomprehensible. If what the Gospel writers tell us is true then the child who was born in a stable that day was not just a special baby, it was the incarnation, the incorporation, of the very creator of the universe!

This is such a breathtaking thought that it's humanly impossible to get one's mind around it. The God who created us and all the galaxies in the cosmos deigned to make Himself like one of us in order to share in the pains and sorrows of being human, being willing ultimately to suffer an excruciating death, all so that our death need not be the end of our existence.

This is what the Gospel narratives insist actually, literally happened, and if they're correct, if they're only approximately true, they surely recount the greatest, most astonishing, story ever told.

This three minute video beautifully illustrates the point:

As we go about making our Christmas preparations this year, it'd be good to keep in our minds the literal wonder of what it is we're preparing to celebrate.

Why Christians Celebrate Christmas

In this season of shopping and feasting it's easy to lose sight of why Christmas is a special day. The following allegory, which we've posted on Viewpoint several times in the past, is a modest attempt to put the season into perspective [Some readers have noted the similarity between this story and the movie Taken, however, the story of Michael first appeared on Viewpoint over a year before Taken was released so the similarities with the movie are purely coincidental, although the similarities with my novel Bridging the Abyss, are not.]:

Michael, a member of a top-secret anti-terrorism task force, was the father of a teenage daughter named Jennifer, and his duties had caused him to be away from home much of the time Jen was growing up. He was serving his country in a very important, very dangerous capacity that required his absence and a great deal of personal sacrifice. As a result, his daughter grew into her late teens pretty much without him. Indeed, his wife Judith had decided to leave him a couple of years previous and took the girl with her.

Finally, after several years abroad, Mike was able to return home. He longed to hold his princess in his arms and to spend every possible moment with her to try to make up for lost time, but when he knocked on the door of his ex-wife's house the girl who greeted him was almost unrecognizable. Jen had grown up physically and along the way she had rejected everything Michael valued. Her appearance shocked him and her words cut him like a razor. She told him coldly and bluntly that she really didn't want to see him, that he wasn't a father as far as she was concerned, that he hadn't been a part of her life before and wouldn't be in the future.

Michael, a man who had faced numerous hazards and threats in the course of his work and had been secretly cited for great heroism by the government, was staggered by her words. The loathing in her voice and in her eyes crushed his heart. He started to speak, but the door was slammed in his face. Heartbroken and devastated he wandered the streets of the city wondering how, or if, he could ever regain the love his little girl once had for him.

Weeks went by during which he tried to contact both his ex-wife and his daughter, but they refused to return his calls. Then one night his cell phone rang. It was Judith, and from her voice Mike could tell something was very wrong. Jennifer had apparently run off with some unsavory characters several days before and hadn't been heard from since. His ex-wife had called the police, but she felt Mike should know, too. She told him that she thought the guys Jen had gone out with that night were heavily into drugs and she was worried sick about her.

She had good reason to be. Jen thought when she left the house that she was just going for a joy ride, but that's not what her "friends" had in mind. Once they had Jen back at their apartment they tied her to a bed, abused her, filmed the whole thing, and when she resisted they beat her until she submitted. She overheard them debating whether they should sell her to a man whom they knew sold girls into sex-slavery in South America or whether they should just kill her and dump her body in the bay. For three days her life was an unimaginable hell. She cried herself to sleep late every night after being forced into the most degrading conduct imaginable.

Finally her abductors sold her to a street gang in exchange for drugs. Bound and gagged, she was raped repeatedly and beaten savagely. For the first time in her life she prayed that God would help her, and for the first time in many years she missed her father. But as the days wore on she began to think she'd rather be dead than be forced to endure what she was being put through.

Mike knew some of the officers in the police force and was able to get a couple of leads from them as to who the guys she originally left with might be. He set out, not knowing Jennifer's peril, but determined to find her no matter what the cost. His search led him to another city and took days - days in which he scarcely ate or slept. Each hour that passed Jennifer's condition grew worse and her danger more severe. She was by now in a cocaine-induced haze in which she almost didn't know or care what was happening to her.

Somehow, Michael, weary and weak from his lack of sleep and food, managed to find the seedy, run down tenement building where Jennifer was imprisoned. Breaking through a flimsy door he saw his daughter laying on a filthy bed surrounded by three startled kidnappers. Enraged by the scene before his eyes he launched himself at them with a terrible, vengeful fury. Two of the thugs went down quickly, but the third escaped. With tears flowing down his cheeks, Mike unfastened the bonds that held Jen's wrists to the bed posts. She was weak but alert enough to cooperate as Michael helped her to her feet and led her to the doorway.

As she passed into the hall with Michael behind her the third abductor appeared with a gun. Michael quickly stepped in front of Jennifer and yelled to her to run back into the apartment and out the fire escape. The assailant tried to shoot her as she stumbled toward the escape, but Michael shielded her from the bullet, taking the round in his side. The thug fired twice more into Michael's body, but Mike was able to seize the gun and turn it on the shooter.

Finally, it was all over, finished.

Slumped against the wall, Mike lay bleeding from his wounds, the life draining out of him. Jennifer saw from the fire escape landing what had happened and ran back to her father. Cradling him in her arms she wept bitterly and told him over and over that she loved him and that she was so sorry for what she had said to him and for what she had done.

With the last bit of life left in him he gazed up at her, pursed his lips in a kiss, smiled and died. Jennifer wept hysterically. How could she ever forgive herself for how she had treated him? How could she ever overcome the guilt and the loss she felt? How could she ever repay the tremendous love and sacrifice her father had showered upon her?

Years passed. Jennifer eventually had a family of her own. She raised her children to revere the memory of her father even though they had never known him. She resolved to live her own life in such a way that Michael, if he knew, would be enormously proud of her. Everything she did, she did out of gratitude to him for what he had done for her, and every year on the day of his birth she went to the cemetery alone and sat for a couple of hours at his graveside, talking to him and sharing her love and her life with him.

Her father had given everything for her despite the cruel way she had treated him. He had given his life to save hers, and his love for her, his sacrifice, had changed her life forever. That's why she celebrated his birthday every year.

And that's why Christians celebrate Christmas.