Christian Carnival LXXX

This week's Christian Carnival is up at Daddypundit. Haven't had time to peruse it yet in detail, but I do note a certain amount of anti-war prattling in certain Christian circles, as evidenced in posts like this one:

We’re being treated, yet again, to the Press conflating two issues that have little to do with one another but that sell newspapers – terrorism and asylum. At least two of the tabloids today have front-page headlines about one of the London bombers apparently having arrived in Britain as a boy, as part of a family that was granted asylum. How, the papers ask, could he have done this to us?

A better question, though, is how did we fail this family to such an extent that their son did this to himself, to them and to the country that was supposed to protect them all?

An even better question is, what about the rest of the bombers? Most of the London bombers were born and brought up in Britain. They were British. How has this country so failed to include its own people that they feel as these young men did – closer to their fellow-religionists in the Middle East than to their neighbours in Leeds and London? The current media trends, of demonising muslims and the now-traditional targets of immigrants and asylum seekers, will only make this worse. They will only further divide our people when what we need is to draw closer together, to break down the walls of ignorance and prejudice (on all sides) and to learn more about one another.

If we can learn the truth about one another, it might be difficult, it might even be ugly, but at least it will be the truth.

Being in the profession of arms, I find it hard to be patient with this attitude. We did not fail that family. Even the parents did not fail their son. He was given every advantage of a Western middle-class upbringing. Most of the West's homocide bombers are well-to-do and well educated. The young man chose to follow an evil path that led to his own death and the deliberate killing of innocent bystanders. And if he'd been shot dead before detonating the bomb, the shooter would be a hero.

Nolan Dynamite enjoins us here to remember that Christ says to love one's enemies--and his point is well taken. I often let my enthusiasm, shall we say, for the task set before those in my profession get the better of my judgment, especially when spouting off into the blogosphere. But I do not hate muslims or islam. If I did, I would find a way to make myself stop, because such hatred, quite aside from being un-Christian, would inhibit my ability to defeat them , which is an aim that every member of the profession of arms within the Anglosphere shares. Actually, I admire much of islam's history and culture. And I think Arabic is a beautiful language.

But understand this: we are at war with a brand of extremist, fundamentalist islam that is a natural product of that religion, just as monastic asceticism and certain types of socialist liberalism are inevitable products of the Catholic understanding of Christian doctrine, and just as a degree of narrow-minded, intolerant emphasis on outward display of faith is an inevitable product of certain types of fundamentalist Christian practice. These aberrations don't condemn those brands of faith; they are just errors that their structures naturally incline them toward. Unfortunately, jihad, as interpreted today by Wahabbi Sunni and fundamentalist Shia alike, is a similarly inevitable outgrowth of islam's encounter with secular modernism. Equally unfortunate is the fact that islam will eventually have to grow past this phase or face much worse consequences in its relations with the rest of human civilization.

When I am not bloviating in my blog I can still tell a hawk from a handsaw, and I know that the only really humane outcome is complete victory for our cause, on our terms--and that means the effective eradication of militant islam as viable ideology (a la communism and fascism); or, at worst, permanent and total separation, backed by tremendous force a la the Cold War. Our system and thiers cannot coexist peacefully.

I do not have to hate my enemy to plot ways to bend his will to mine, or, failing that, to rid him of his means of resisting me, or, failing that, to kill him and destroy what he values outright. In fact, hating him gets in the way of doing this most effectively and efficiently.

I owe Nolan a longer response specifically dealing with his points, but it will suffice for now to remind all of C.S. Lewis' statement in Why I Am Not A Pacifist:

Pacifism practiced would be the straight road to a world in which there will be no pacifists.

Monk