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US evangelical
movement, Ummah and SYs seek same refuge against the septic
tide of popular culture
From:
jagbir singh <www.adishakti.org@gmail.com>
Date: Thu Nov 4, 2004 10:16 am
Subject: US evangelical movement, Ummah and SYs seek
same refuge against the septic tide of popular culture
—- In
shriadishakti@yahoogroups.com, Catalin Ioan <kata_lin@y...>
wrote:
>
> Only a guy who want the America wake up would speak like
that.
> So no way it was Osama who did, if any one ever did it,
and is not
> just the product of somebody immagination. It would be too
great
> risk to take for the representative of the devil, that the
> americans will wake up listening to such words.
> Regards
> Cata
>
> Jay Shri Mataji.
>
i seriously doubt the Americans will wake up to anything
anyone can
tell them. Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" did little to
turn the
tide against George Bush during the present elections.
President
George W Bush has convincingly won the US election, the
White House
has said. Chief of staff Andy Card said he was convinced Mr
Bush "received more votes than any presidential candidate in
our
nation's history."
Mr. Moore's latest award-winning "Bowling for Columbine"
will also
hardly matter, despite all his efforts to educate them on
pervasive
gun violence peculiar only to America.
After seeing both films i have understood why it is so
difficult to
wake up Americans. Osama would have failed even if he did
make that
speech, which he did not.
jagbir
Note: In "It's the culture, stupid" Spengler clarifies
his recent lampoon "What Osama might have
told America".
'It's the culture, stupid'
By Spengler
James Carville, Bill Clinton's consigliere of 1992,
kept the words "It's the economy, stupid!" pinned to his
office wall. Substitute "culture" for "economy", and the
basis of US President George W Bush's re-election victory
becomes obvious. Evangelical Christians compose 40% of the
American population, and three-quarters of them probably
voted for the incumbent. Voter participation for
traditional Democratic constituencies changed little, but
the number of evangelical voters surged, just as Bush
political adviser Karl Rove predicted. From available data
it appears plausible that the increase in evangelical voter
participation accounted for all of the president's
3.5-million-vote victory margin.
What brought 4 million more evangelical voters to the
polling stations than in the previous presidential election?
The US evangelical movement is not by nature political.
Families join evangelical churches as a refuge against the
septic tide of popular culture that threatens to carry away
their children. Evangelical concerns center on family
issues, child-rearing and personal values rather than
national or global politics.
Liberal commentators blame the evangelical turnout on
bigotry, noting that 11 states carried ballot referenda
against same-sex marriage. The truth in that observation is
misleading.
It is true that the Republicans have made evangelical issues
into politics, but it is just as true, and far more
important, that the evangelicals have made political issues
into religious issues. That is especially true of the Bush
administration's response to terrorism. It was the feminists
of the 1960s who first stated that the personal was
political, although they could not have imagined how this
idea would evolve.
The world mis-estimated how Americans would respond to
September 11, 2001. In the past, the United States came
under attack for what it did; Japan's Pearl Harbor raid
responded to a US trade boycott that cut off access to
energy and raw materials. On September 11, the US came under
attack for what it was. Osama bin Laden's dispute with the
US was cultural rather than material. In last week's
videotape he cast the airplane attacks as a retaliation for
America's support of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon 20
years ago. In a lampoon published on November 2 (What
Osama might have told America), I
attempted to portray his underlying motives. The US barely
can live with the freedom of the modern world without
destroying itself; the same forces would utterly devastate
the Arab world, which lacks the resistance the US has
developed over the centuries.
Although Americans have difficulty articulating their
response, few are so dim as to misunderstand the message.
America's culture is in the judgment seat. Do they deserve
the contempt, and even the violence, that the Islamists
inflict on them? As they seethe with self-righteous anger
against their attackers, do Americans take stock of
themselves? The answer evident on November 2 is that many of
them did. After September 11, a number of evangelical
leaders, including the Reverend Jerry Falwell, claimed that
the attacks constituted a divine punishment for America's
sins. Silly as it sounded, Falwell's statement concealed an
underlying truth. The US provokes the hatred of the Islamic
world because the "freedoms" associated with the nether
reaches of its entertainment industry are its most visible
face to the rest of the world. The US, to most of the world,
represents global mobility, but also the breakdown of the
family, the collapse of hoary conventions of respect, the
trampling of tradition.
First of all, America's tragic encounter with Islam is a
confrontation between a modern and a traditional society, in
which the traditional society only can lose. That it also is
a confrontation between Christianity and Islam, two
religions that respond in radically different ways to the
fragility of traditional society, makes the confrontation
all the more ferocious. Islam looks outward to defend the
community, the ummah, against its enemies by
conquering and transforming them in its own image. By its
nature it is militant rather than self-critical.
Christianity demands that the believer look inward to his
own sin. Soul-searching after September 11 is what made the
personal so political in the US.
The US is in danger of social decay - not as much danger as
my Halloween apparition of bin Laden portrayed, but in
danger nonetheless. When two-fifths of female university
students suffer from anorexia or bulimia, and one-sixth
suffer from depression, it is clear that the Witches'
Sabbath of sexual experimentation that began during the
1960s has led to widespread misery. Parents cannot raise
their children in isolation from violent pornography; young
people cannot build their lives in a fraternity party.
It is the hard, grinding reality of American life in the
liberal dystopia that makes the "moral issues" so important
to voters. Partial-birth abortion and same-sex marriage
became critical issues not because evangelical voters are
bigots. On the contrary, parents become evangelicals
precisely in order to draw a line between their families and
the adversary culture. This far, and no more, a majority of
Americans said on November 2 on the subject of social
experimentation.
Unlike the Europeans, whose demoralization has led to
depopulation, Americans still are fighting against the
forces of decay that threaten - but do not yet ensure - the
ultimate fall of American power. That is the message of
November 2.
'It's the culture, stupid' - By Spengler
https://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FK05Aa02.html
Today the US evangelical movement, Muslims, Jews, Hindus,
Buddhists, Sikhs and SYs are all seeking the same refuge
against the rise of popular culture that threatens to
destroy universal human values. We are all
fighting against the same forces of
decay that threaten soceity.
The sad part is that Christianity's (and Judaism's) "tragic
encounter with Islam is a confrontation between a modern and
a traditional society", and their radically different
response and mutual antagonism for each makes the
confrontation all the more ferocious.
Malachi Martin in his book, The Encounter, makes a
scathingly accurate analysis of Judaism, Christianity and
Islam locked in mortal combat for more than a millennia,
hopelessly without any possibility of conciliation or
solution to deep-rooted divisions:
"Christianity within its own borders has specialized in
self-crucifixion, at first to quite a minor degree during
the first 1500 years of its life, when heretics and
dissidents and accused witches and sorcerers were put to
death, as Jesus was. Then, with the breakup of its unity in
the 16th century, Christians devised for each other one Hell
more horrendous and tortuous than another, indulging in a
300-year round of mutual recrimination, accusation,
denigration, and relegation by bell, book, and candle, to
the filthiest categories of human life. No branch of
Christianity can be excused from this, because all
Christians have indulged in it. No body of Christians ever
answered the insults of other Christians with Christ's
answer: "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they
do?" They all developed special vocabularies replete with
violent words such as "heresy," "heretic," "extirpation,"
"condemnation", "excommunication," "outcasts," "unclean
believers." "vice-mongers." Each one devised its special
defenses against the other: social ostracism, civil war,
discrimination, calumny, legal non-existence. Rome was the
Red Lady of the South. Luther was the Pig of Germany.
Protestants were the sons of vipers. Jews were the "race of
the devil." Muslims were "benighted and error-ridden
barbarians." No body of Christians ever tried to conquer the
world with humility and patience and love, and no body of
believers ever tried to fan the flames of faith, in the
heart of man by being authentically believers.
The Jews, in retaliation for their pain and their sustained
exile, contributed to the sea of hate, distrust and, in some
cases, deformation of truth. They invented multiform
expressions of contempt, condemnation, loathing, and utter
rejection of Christians. They even modified some of their
traditional beliefs because the Christians had borrowed them
in their original form and, in their repugnance from all
things Christian, they wanted no resemblance to subsist
between their faith and that of the Christians. They
returned hate with hate. They, also, cannot be excused and
considered totally guiltless. They preached truth and
justice, yet they violated both in order to maintain their
religion and their Jewishness. Christians preached love but
practised officially sanctioned hate, intermingling their
loveliest psalms of compassion for their dying Savior with
the expressions of extreme disgust for the Jews....
Muslims preached mercy and compassion, but they practised
none or very little, assigning both Christians and Jews to
the lowest rung in Allah's consideration, and historically
meting out to both a treatment which rivals any cruelties of
man in known history. Down through the ages, this procession
of the crucified one has come: formed, maintained, and
augmented by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Each one has
prayed with its armies to its god that the armies of the
opponents be destroyed. There is no palliating or explaining
away the sin of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
The three religions failed in another significant way. None
of them attacked slavery or race prejudice or other flagrant
inhumanities of man to man from the very beginning of their
existence. The Arabs of today sanction slavery as
spontaneously as the Popes of the 19th century sanctioned
the creation of castrati choirs for Papal masses, as readily
and blindly as the Protestant ethic of the white American
sanctioned the serfdom and degradation of the Negro race
until the second half of the 20th century. Each religion has
practiced the art of climbing on the bandwagon: only when
lay and secular reformers, sometimes lacking any formal
religion whatever, raised such a hue and cry that men's
consciences were stirred, did the religions begin to turn
their huge resources toward reform. The Catholic Church in
Germany and Italy acquiesced in Nazism and Fascism at least
in the earlier stages of the ideologies. Russian Orthodoxy
acquiesced in the despotism and sadism of Czarist times.
Greek Orthodoxy sanctioned the corruption of the Byzantine
court and is today bitterly nationalist in Greece's disputes
with Turkey. No Protestant Church and no Jewish Synagogue
ever officially condemned and attacked the Ku Klux Klan
before 1945 in America, though individuals did. Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam have practiced the double standard
in this matter ...
Thus the three religions have not been witnesses to the
truth. All, it is true, have developed an exalted
vocabulary, and a very impressive manner of announcing their
own grandiose claims. All three have excelled and excel in
words, as distinct from actions. All three have an
impressive ritual and have refined psychological approaches
to man. Yet the witness of words, mere words, has never
changed men's minds, nor has mere theological subtlety
helped men to be better men. The witness of the three
religions have been faulty, at times perniciously false and
erroneous. The three of them have witnessed to the uses of
hate for the love of a god. And all three have disposed of
the lives and happiness of millions of human beings without
any real feeling for human suffering or any genuine concern
for the concrete realities of life.
It is clear, first of all, that today all three religions
lack any authoritative note for man. They have, as yet, each
one of them, sufficient number of adherents to give the
impression of continuing strength, and this glosses over for
them and for the outside world at times their terrible
weakness. For each of them, when scrutinized closely, is
blackened with sufficient failures to prevent any thinking
man from believing in them. And, above all, all three
persevere in making a claim which cannot possibly be valid
and true: that they are, each single one, the true religion.
Each one of them, however, hides from the ultimate test of
its validity and truth behind a wall of unknowing and
expectation. All three chorus that only the "Last Day," when
the "End" comes, when "God" decides, will it be clear that
the "other two" and all others besides were false, and it
(the claimant) was all along the true community of the one
"God." "
Now the
Adi Shakti Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, the Messiah sent
to declare the Great Event ordained for humanity, confirms
that the Last Judgment and Resurrection validates
the ultimate test of their claims (and that of Hinduism,
Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism and Sikhism as well). Those
who have surrendered to this Great News are indeed the true
community of the one God Almighty.
Jai Shri Mataji,
jagbir
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