|
| |
REYNOLDS |
|
 |
A Christian On The Bin Laden Message Pt. 4
by John Mark Reynolds [author,
academic] 9/15/07
In this part of his speech, Osama destroys any chance peace loving Christians might hope exists for compromise with those who share his views. Osama attacks democracy and free markets as the root of our problems and the conflict.
Want peace with this twisted form of “Islam?”
Here is what Osama and his followers will demand:
Americans will have to give up their republican form of government and free markets.
No chance.
Democracy may be troublesome, but the proposed solutions are always worse. The danger that the rich will exploit the poor is replaced by the certainty that some inner circle of ideologues will exploit everyone.
Capitalism may encourage certain vices, but the alternatives are straight forwardly wicked.
These alternative economic systems replace the potential that you might love money too much with the certainty that the state will encourage you to covet and steal.
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.
[go to Reynolds index] |
Earlier blog posts in this series can be found here, here, and here.
Osama speaks:
It has now become clear to you and the entire world the impotence of the democratic system and how it plays with the interests of the peoples and their blood by sacrificing soldiers and populations to achieve the interests of the major corporations.
If our government is bad, it is at least the government we choose. If Osama is bad, then how shall we remove his self-appointed power?
Osama is vague, always vague, in his economic accusations. What major corporations started the War for their profit? What evidence does he have?
Make no mistake. In this speech we see that Osama cares far more for communist, leftist, and secular academic accusations againt the West than he cares for religion.
He should explain why he hates private property and people being allowed to use that property to do well for their families while doing good. Osama seems petrified that somebody someplace is making money that is not Osama’s.
Perhaps, he thinks free markets produce material goods, but weaken people making them impotent in the face of danger. Is this true?
The democratic system is not impotent which has overthrown the terrorist state which governed Afghanistan and the terrorist state which oppressed Iraq.
Our soldiers fight their terrorists. They blow up women and children by policy.
While the leaders of the terrorists cower in caves, the leaders of the Coalition, including the new democratically elected leaders of Iraq, go about their business.
Osama and his minions have not replicated their deeds of 9/11.
Is the impotent man the one who is hidden in a cave wearing a false beard or the man who can fly into a nation once controlled by his enemies and meet with his new allies?
We are not in Iraq for our profit! While any great deed will attract jackals who hang about grabbing scraps from the work of lions, the central purpose of our battle is to defend our liberties and spread liberty.
How do we know this is true?
The United States has spent billions of treasure and precious lives of her best sons so that we can leave Iraq in the hands of the Iraqi people. Nobody wants us to “bring the boys home” more than the people of America. We just don’t want to leave our allies, many of them Muslim, in the hands of Osama and his idolatrous followers.
Our army is not made up of dupes. Today one of the Honors graduates of my University is back in Iraq having volunteered to return after suffering injury in battle. He knows how to think and he knows why he is there.
Osama should speak about the comparative literacy and education of his followers and the American armed forces.
American armed forces are volunteer. They are some of the best trained and educated soldiers in the history of the planet. They enlist and reenlist because they understand our cause. The volunteer army of Iraq also has waiting lists of men who understand the value of freedom and are eager to protect their families from the nightmare of being forced to share Osama’s twisted dreams.
And with that, it has become clear to all that they are the real tyrannical terrorists. In fact, the life of all of mankind is in danger because of the global warming resulting to a large degree from the emissions of the factories of the major corporations, yet despite that, the representative of these corporations in the White House insists on not observing the Kyoto accord, with the knowledge that the statistic speaks of the death and displacement of the millions of human beings because of that, especially in Africa.
The people of Africa are not dying because of global warming.
They are dying because their governments are anti-democratic and anti-freedom. These governments are run by petty dictators who confuse their will with the Will of God, just like Osama.
Africans are dying in places like the Sudan, because thuggish terrorists have heard the Osama-type message and are killing and enslaving the innocent.
And yes, many of the problems of Africa are due to exploitation in the past by European colonial powers. Some of that exploitation was done in the name of Christianity. That was wrong.
The solution for Africa is not to return to colonialism by importing another foreign ideology that will snuff out all chance for liberty and economic development.
The solution for Africa is not to replace secular socialists with religious ones like Osama. Socialism is secularism in economics and Osama has swallowed it all with mullahs acting as commissars. It is not long (as Iran shows) before the mullahs are simply commissars and true religion is brought low.
There is no single “Africa.”
The many peoples of this vast continent must each solve their own problems. The hundreds of millions of Christians on the content must not be doomed to second class status or genocide (as in the Sudan) by Osama and this thugs.
Meanwhile, Western nations are pouring billions in humanitarian aid into Africa through government and non-government means. This is proper both on purely charitable grounds, but also as a partial repayment for the exploitation of colonialism.
At the same time, Osama and his criminals are killing and causing mayhem. Christian charities are feeding Muslims all over Africa. Any “charity” Osama gives comes covering his desire for idolatrous worship of Osama.
Osama hates democracy, because it would allow people to remove him from power if his mad predictions fail. He wants no one to be able to hear the Voice of God, but Osama.
Global warming exists. It may be caused in part by human activity. Something must be done about it, but the best solution will not be to return our standards of living to the fifteenth century.
This much we know:
Global warming may kill humans in the future, but terrorists are killing them today.
This greatest of plagues and most dangerous of threats to the lives of humans is taking place in an accelerating fashion as the world is being dominated by the democratic system, which confirms its massive failure to protect humans and their interests from the greed and avarice of the major corporations and their representatives.
Compare the standard of living in South Korea to North Korea.
Which is better?
The democratic system will produce problems since rising prosperity produces problems. A man with no food need not worry about growing fat, but starvation is a more immediate problem than obesity.
Democracy and free markets have bettered the lives of billions, but Osama can only see the problems.
The serfs of the Middle Ages did not contribute to global warming, but most of us would rather see the temperature rise a few degrees than live like they did. The better answer is to harness the power of free men and women and a free market to solve the problem.
And despite this brazen attack on the people, the leaders of the West - especially Bush, Blair, Sarkozy and Brown- still talk about freedom and human rights with a flagrant disregard for the intellects of human beings. So is there a form of terrorism stronger, clearer and more dangerous than this? This is why I tell you: as you liberated yourselves before from the slavery of monks, kings, and feudalism, you should liberate yourselves from the deception, shackles and attrition of the capitalist system.
To what end?
So that we can turn to slavey to mullahs, caliphs, and socialism?
If you were to ponder it well, you would find that in the end, it is a system harsher and fiercer than your systems in the Middle Ages. The capitalist system seeks to turn the entire world into a fiefdom of the major corporations under the label of “globalization” in order to protect democracy.
This is absurd.
Through hard intellectual and material labor the Middle Ages produced the freedoms we have today. I am thankful for those spiritual ancestors. Of course, all advances come with a cost. Our problems, since they are our problems, look worse to us than the problems of the past.
It is easy to envy the virtues of the Middle Ages. It is good to use them to check our own blind spots and pride, but the men of the Middle Ages would be horrified to think we should wish to return to their time.
They lived as they lived so we would not have to do so. Osama would dishonor the sacrifice of our fathers by refusing the gifts they suffered to give us.
I would rather be a free man in my free nation living as a I do, than an emperor one thousand years ago.
We are better off by every material standard and most of us can be (if we choose) better off spiritually.
And Iraq and Afghanistan and their tragedies; and the reeling of many of you under the burden of interest-related debts, insane taxes and real estate mortgages; global warming and its woes; and the abject poverty and tragic hunger in Africa: all of this is but one side of the grim face of this global system.
I own my own home so I can suffer from debt. Osama would make us serfs and so deliver us from debt. I prefer the debt.
Taxes are insane, but my duly elected representatives passed them. I would rather be taxed by my own Congress, than have low taxes because there is nothing left to me to tax.
The global system of freedom is growing, but sadly many African nations are not part of it. No African will grow richer by impoverishing France. That is the hard lesson we learned in the battle with communism in the last century.
Osama’s world would be more equal, because he would destroy almost everyone’s liberty and wealth. The king of the Middle Ages lived much more like the serf than the billionaire lives like the American poor, but both the king and the serf ate less well than many American poor!
The equality of poverty and tyranny is not preferable to the inequalities that will exist in a free society.
Osama plays on the sin of coveting and promises to steal my neighbor’s wealth to give it to me. He defies the law of God in the name of God.
So it is imperative that you free yourselves from all of that and search for an alternative, upright methodology in which it is not the business of any class of humanity to lay down its own laws to its own advantage at the expense of the other classes as is the case with you, since the essence of man-made positive laws is that they serve the interests of those with the capital and thus make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
The problem is that any law this side of Paradise must be implemented by fallible men. Even a divine law will be perverted by those men.
The solution is to leave the implementation of as much of the law (divine or otherwise) as possible to individuals, families, and society. Each person’s virtues will tend to balance out the vices of his neighbor as each individual has different temptations.
This need not be harmfully individualistic as people will join groups (such as religious groups, clubs, or civic organizations) that will exercise corrective power.
Millions of these groups will tend to check the vices of each other. A free society is dazzlingly complex, but Osama (like all would be tyrants) prefers his simplicity to the complexity of the world God created.
Osama thinks himself more just than God. He would not have allowed mankind the freedom to sin in the Garden. Thank God he is not God.
Central government must be given the power to “punish wickedness and vice,” but this power must be made as weak as possible. It should also be diffused amongst as many “levels” of government as possible to avoid one man’s vice becoming (by force) the problem of us all. Federalism is not perfect, and tyranny of the majority or of the rich is always possible, but it is the best imperfect system yet devised.
The infallible methodology is the methodology of Allah, the Most High, who created the heavens and earth and created the Creation and is the Most Kind and All-Informed and the Knower of the souls of His slaves and the methodology that best suits them.
You believe with absolute certainty that you believe in Allah, and you are full of conviction of this belief, so much so that you have written this belief of yours on your dollar.
But the truth is that you are mistake in this belief of yours. The impartial judge knows that belief in Allah requires straightness in the following of His methodology, and accordingly, total obedience must be to the orders and prohibitions of Allah Alone in all aspects of life.
So how about you when you associate others with Him in your beliefs and separate state from religion, then claim that you are believers?!
It is one of our highest beliefs that trust in God is essential to national happiness.
Do we live up to our ideals?
No, but they remain to call us to a better way. We do not need Osama to tell us our failures. We do this so well our ourselves that Osama has gleaned much of his diatribe from our free media.
However, the best cure for our folly is not to abandon our ideals and adopt Osama’s.
Osama would simplify the complex world God made in the name of that God. He cannot see any power but state power and so he must give all power to the state.
But Christian Americans (and most Americans are Christian) believe God created families, churches, and society giving each power. One part of the social order is the state. We do not reduce the means God has given to implement His revealed Will to one. We would not deny the creative power of the Almighty by making the cosmos more simple than it is.
This is a good discovery for non-Christians in America, because Christians have been able to extend full citizenship to all Americans who will play by very basic rules. Because citizenship is not “everything” . . . it is not necessary for a man to be a Christian to be a full citizen even in this overwhelmingly Christian land.
Because Osama (and others like him) have only one means to use power (the church-state), non-Muslims must always be second class.
It is hard to give advice to people of another faith, but let me make a suggestion that has worked for Muslims in the West.
These faithful are able to pursue their faith and live by it making their neighbors second-class citizens. They are first-class Americans in a country where eighty percent of the people are Christians!
There is no bar to Muslims holding the highest office in our land. Surely, the Christians need not be better neighbors than the Muslims in their own lands?
Place less power in the state and you will be able to have less worries about being responsible for the errors of your non-Muslim neighbor.
Follow God’s law as you see it, but do not make your non-Christian neighbor do so. There is some precedent for this policy in the governance of the Ottoman Empire. There non-Muslims were not required to obey Islamic law. However, the weakness of the system was that the state would not allow full citizenship or all offices to the non-Muslim. There is evidence that as the state began to limit its scope that this could have changed, but the First World War (as it did in many places) ended any hope for this experimentation.
Of course, this seed idea must be grow to fit modern times, but it is possible!
You will be able to argue, persuade, and convince without harming your neighbor. Nobody wants you to secularize, just put faith in God that He is big enough to defend Himself. If you are correct, then you can submit to God and He will vindicate you.
But let us be truthful as is fitting amongst equals and free men:
I believe in a free society that you will discover that Christianity is true and that Jesus Christ is God. God is One in essence, but three blessed Persons.
Any non-Christian reader does not agree.
Well and good.
Let us build an open market place of ideas and see. ExileStreet
copyright
2007 John Mark Reynolds
§
|
q