Ohmyrus sums up his argument by saying that “in the current war against terrorism, secularism is a hindrance. It encourages political correctness, low birth rates, self-doubts and apathy. The West, especially Europe, is in a deep spiritual crisis. Secularism could be a fatal weakness in its body politic against a resurgent Islam as polytheism probably was in 7th century Mecca. Modern Europeans are the lucky heirs of Christian civilization which has contributed so much to human progress. It has brought on the scientific revolution, abolition of slavery and human rights. The separation of Church and State also created the space for democracy to take root. (...) But for it to be useful, Christianity needs to be revived, particularly in very secular Europe which was once part of Christendom. Bring back that Old Time Religion.”

Now, I don’t disagree with the fact that Christianity does have its flaws. Monotheism’s inherent potential for intolerance is one of them. But so is the opposite, the potential for naïve pacifism and turn-the-other-cheek mentality when confronted with Islamic aggression, a flaw which is too frequently displayed by many Christian leaders. As Bat Ye’or has pointed out in “Islam and Dhimmitude,” Christian leader have frequently participated in selling out their own in Muslim majority countries. The church needs to understand that Islam is an enemy and can never be an ally, otherwise the church may die and will deserve to die. Both these potential flaws in Christianity have been balanced out in the modern West by the worldly institution of the nation state, made possible precisely because of the separation between the spiritual and the temporal inherent in Christian teachings. This is what has made individual choice and modern democracy possible. Contrast this with Islam, where the individual hardly exists except as a cell of a larger organism, the Ummah.

For example, in Islam, if a man and a woman are left alone with each other in a room, it is normal for many Muslims to assume that they have had sexual relations. The rational behind Islamic thinking is that it is the responsibility of society to remove the possibilities for temptations. The logic behind the modern, Judeo-Christian West is that society does bear some responsibility, but that ultimately, individuals need to take responsibility for their own actions. This is why democracy, in which the whole point is the possibility of individual choice, is so difficult to establish in Islamic countries, in which the thinking is to remove any possibilities of making a “wrong” choice. Muslims thus hate our freedom because it permits people to think and decide for themselves. The Muhammad cartoons affair is a good example of this. The protesting Muslims see countries as collective entities in which governments are to be held responsible for the acts of individual citizens. The concept that what matters in Western nations are individuals is alien to them.

What made Europe strong and dynamic earlier was the power of the individual, but still an individual that felt part of something larger than himself, his nation and his religion. At the beginning of the 21st century, Europe is weak. We are weak both because we have lost our religion and subdued our nation states, as embodied in the Eurabian Union, and because we have been weakened by collectivist ideologies. The USA, the most individualistic of the Western nations, but also the most religious and the most patriotic, has retained some of this Western dynamism, even though the same weaknesses are very much present there, too. At the same time as Islam is advancing in Europe, individualism is spreading in other parts of the world. Unless Europe returns to her roots, we could get a situation where notions of the individual, which have been previously championed by Europe, will slowly die in Europe while they are advancing in parts of Asia.

The traditional, Western idea is that not everything we consider to be immoral can be punished, at least not in this life. What we have done wrong now is Egalitarianism, the concept that all choices and viewpoints are equally valid and equally worthy of respect. Islam creates an extremely inflexible society where the autonomous individual hardly exists. On the other hand, we have Western Multiculturalism and nihilism, where there is no right or wrong and where the individual is so autonomous that the country and the civilization largely is left defenseless, because nobody any longer identifies with it any longer, and because short term gratification of individual desires is the only thing left. We need a balance between the two. For Europe, that means ditching the European Union, or the Evil Empire as some of us call it, and a return to our traditional, Judeo-Christian religion. Since religious people have more children than non-religious people, Europe in a couple of generations from now will be much more religious than now. The only question is what religion this will be. If the current Islamic advances continue, anything that can be remotely described as European culture will die. The alternative is a revival of our own religious heritage. I agree with Ohmyrus: Bring back that old time religion.

<  bcak