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REYNOLDS |
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A Christian On The Bin Laden Message Pt. 2
by John Mark Reynolds [author,
academic] 9/12/07
Six years ago a terrible thing was done to America. This event was not an accident, but part of the plan of a group of men inspired by a dangerous ideology.
It is important to remember the evil done on 9/11, but it is more important to understand why it was done and defeat it. This defeat cannot take place only on the battlefield, but must also take place in the minds of millions around the world tempted by Osama’s lies.
One great impediment to victory is the misconception by many secularists that Osama is a deep religious thinker. He shrouds his language in religion and his religious language reveals his intention, but his deepest motivations are fear of secularism which itself is a deeply hidden worship of the secular.
Osama lacks the confidence that God can defend Himself without resorting to evil actions on the part of Osama. His “god” is so weak that He cannot speak to men in history unless Osama does violence, burning the innocent, in His name.
Osama’s deepest belief is the “secularization thesis” which argues that the world will soon remove all traces of religion from public life.
Contributor
John Mark Reynolds
John
Mark Reynolds is the founder and director of
the Torrey Honors Institute and Associate Professor
of Philosophy at Biola University.His
personal website can be found at www.johnmarkreynolds.com and
his blog can be found at http://scriptoriumdaily.com.
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He believes that this could happen, forgetting God’s power. Instead of seeing God’s patience, mercy, and love in His tolerance of mankind, Osama believes that he (Osama) must force God’s hand to prevent God from losing history to secularism.
Osama is afraid, but perfect love of God would cast out all this kind of fear. He lacks the courage of true religious conviction to be patient with just means to just ends.
Both Western secularists and Osama agree that the future, if left as it is, belongs to secularism. Traditional religious people understand that the truth is more powerful than lies and that left to itself secularism will decline into infertile dotage while God startles the cosmos again with His glorious fecundity.
Truth does not need murder to stand.
God might call us to witness to His truth, but He does not need individuals killing in His name.
Osama has forgotten the might of God who does not need evil done in order to vindicate His goodness.
Secularism has made man a god and idols cannot stand against God.
Osama grants this idol the worship of a fearful man and so destroys what he would save by using evil means to save it.
Against the evils of our time the true believer labors by godly means while secure in the knowledge that the cosmos is in His hands. We cannot make even of our labor an idol that can demand wicked means to our good ends. We leave the sword to the legitimate powers of the state and rely personally on argument and love.
Part I of this series is here.
Osama is in block quotes with my response following.
Osama says:
So these are some of the results of the freedom about whose spreading he is talking to you. And then the backtracking of Bush on his insistence on not giving the United Nations expanded jurisdiction in Iraq is an implicit admission of his loss and defeat there.
The best sign of the cult of Osama’s personality, where he must act for God or God cannot be saved, is in his personalizing the War. The War is between Osama and Bush. Like all tyrants he exalts his own importance beyond that of his followers and makes any attack on his ideology personal.
And among the most important items contained in Bush’s speeches since the events of the 11th is that the Americans have no option but to continue the war. This tone is in fact an echoing of the words of neoconservatives like Cheney, Rumsfeld and Richard Pearle, the latter having said previously that the Americans have no choice in front of them other than to continue the war or face a holocaust.
If we fear a holocaust, it is because Osama breaks all bounds of religion in his idolatrous desire to protect God from history. Who can trust such a man?
If we fear a holocaust, it is because of the words and actions of Osama’s ally in Iran. Both hate each other but are united in their greater hatred of Israel and the United Sates.
I say, refuting this unjust statement, that the morality and culture of the holocaust is your culture, not our culture. In fact, burning living beings is forbidden in our religion, even if they be small like the ant, so what of man?! The holocaust of the Jews was carried out by your brethren in the middle of Europe, but had it been closer to our countries, most of the Jews would have been saved by taking refuge with us.
It is true that the sin of the Holocaust lies on the conscience of the West.
Fearful men in one Western nation looked at a rising secular power, the Bolshevik horror, and decided that any alternative was better. Religious people compromised their deepest convictions hoping that Hitler would not be as bad as his words. Western men made an idol of the state and gave it great power. Secular philosophers in the West also compromised with it through the lure of power.
Millions died because Western people lacked the courage of their convictions and married a false pagan religion to unchecked state power. That it sometimes did so in the name of God was the greatest blasphemy.
Yet it was also Western power that ended that horror. Western powers that were not in the grip of evil fought mightily to end the Nazi holocaust.
When the godless powers of the Nazi’s and the Bolsheviks began to consume each other (as such former allies of expedience eventually do), we helped the Russian people to stop the more virulent threat of the Nazi regime and then waged a long and costly Cold War to overthrow the evil Russian regime.
America and Britain paid with their best lives in these two great Wars of liberty and it was a horrible price, but from it both learned a terrible and valuable lesson:
We cannot ignore those who would unite great state power too closely with any ideology.
Fallen man is not fit to weld the power of the head and the heart together inseparably. Religion or ideology and massive state power cannot be made one. Most Americans do not trust the state with great power, because we do not trust human beings to use it justly. The risk is just too great.
We have learned this lesson from the mistakes of our past. Osama has not learned this lesson at all, but repeats the error.
Osama is right that one Western nation spawned the evil of the Holocaust. The United States knows this, because it helped defeat that nation, but Osama does not realize that as a result Americans recognize such evil very well when they see it.
Osama is not fighting the Germans of 1941, he has become as the Germans of 1941 were.
Like them he and his terrorists are fighting the United States and her allies, including brave Islamic persons, who recognize this ancient evil reborn with new clothes.
Osama and his cult have allowed the idolatry of fear, hatred, and the lust to use unholy power for a supposed good to infect man’s devotion to God.
Americans know how to treat this disease, because Americans have cured it before now.
Osama is really a Western man, a man who worships fallen Western idols of unchecked state power wedded to ideology. That he does this is in the name of submission to the Will of God is the ultimate irony. ExileStreet
copyright
2007 John Mark Reynolds
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