The Left has a lot in common with Islam. Progressives and Muslims have different traditions and a different vision of their desired future. The point of the comparison is not to prove they are the same. It is simply to explain by comparison. Multiculturalism has made comparison a taboo, but it is a useful way to understand things. It used to be the main way we studied cultures, but that was a long time ago in another country.
Anyway, consider this story the other day from the heart of Islam:
ISIS fighters have destroyed two ancient Muslim shrines in the oasis city of Palmyra, the Syrian government confirmed Wednesday, the latest act of cultural vandalism by the Sunni extremists.
ISIS seized control of Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage Site dating back 2,000 years, last month, prompting fears for the site’s survival.
An email sent on behalf of Syria’s antiquities chief, Maamoun Abdulkarim, head of the Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums, said the body had heard four days ago from people in Palmyra of the shrines’ destruction.
“ISIS has blown up two ancient Muslim shrines in Palmyra, and has published photos of this awful crime against the Syrian cultural heritage on Facebook,” the statement said.
One of the tombs destroyed is that of Mohammed bin Ali, a descendent of Ali bin Abi Taleb, the Prophet Mohammed’s cousin, the website DGAM said. It’s in a hilly area 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) north of Palmyra.
Now, consider this story from the heart of Liberalism:
The Thomas Jefferson Memorial, which has stood near the banks of the Potomac River in Washington for more than 70 years, is a classical tribute to the author of the Declaration of Independence and the third U.S. president.
This week, the Jefferson Memorial was drawn into the national debate about race following the shooting deaths of nine people in a predominantly black church in South Carolina last week. It joins other public statues depicting Southern or Confederate figures, including Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, that some are arguing represent the country’s racist past and should be removed.
CNN anchor Ashleigh Banfield this week questioned whether the Jefferson Memorial should be taken down because Jefferson owned slaves. “There is a monument to him in the capital city of the United States. No one ever asks for that to come down,” Banfield said.
Fellow anchor Don Lemon responded by saying Jefferson represented “the entire United States, not just the South.” But he added: “There may come a day when we want to rethink Jefferson. I don’t know if we should do that.”
Now, it is easy to dismiss the chattering skulls on CNN because no one watches CNN and these are two idiots with the IQ of goldfish. They are not demanding we blow up the Jefferson Memorial because it is blasphemy.
I’ll just point out that twenty years ago fringe idiots on TV were talking about men marrying men. It sounded absurd then, but now you can have your property taken if you laugh at gay marriage. Twenty years from ululating liberals could very well be blowing up the Jefferson Memorial because it offends the one true faith.
I don’t think that this thing that the West is undergoing is the birth of a new civilization. It’s like saying the cancer growing in your lung is transforming you into a new organism. In a sense it is, but we all know that the cancer is a parasitic growth, and won’t survive its “victory” over the host. These are death throes, not birth pangs. Multicultural, perversion-obsessed modernism is staging a loud, histrionic death scene. If a tougher culture doesn’t finish it off first, it will starve to death on its own.
Islam and the Cult will together ultimately destroy Christianity. At that point Islam and the Cult will go to war, a war that Islam will win because they are are not afraid to kill, while the Cult is allergic to violence.
The Cult is by no means adverse to violence. They are merely adverse to participating, not directing. Drones are best, but humans will do.
You might bright, but I can’t see the Cult winning at anything that takes actual courage, moral or physical.
Yes. The West is transforming into a new civilization. The old believers, old ways, old symbols will be abolished, annihilated, or redefined. Much already has been.
They always go after the symbols. The destroyers of civilisation and progress have to dismantle the visible because while they can’t really take apart what people feel in themselves, they can remove that which is obvious.
Statues, shrines, flags, even here in the UK shrieking about a nurse wearing a small crucifix to work (though cheerfully employing women who must wear a large piece of cloth over their hair because their violent god tells them to, apparently)… they are all good targets for the hatred of the left and their imagined friends, the muslims.
I’m of a mind to say that Islam and the New Religion are both reactions to Christianity. And by that I mean the much larger sense of Christianity as encompassing Western Civilization. The Near and Middle east have always viewed the people north and west as their natural enemy. Once Christianity conquered Europe and came back south as a European religion, Islam was born and flourished as a reaction and an alternative.
The Progressive faith has always been at ear with Christianity, but it was also always at odds with technological and material progress. The defining characteristic of the West is science, from which springs material and technological progress. You cannot have science without the Christian concept of a rational, orderly universe.
I’m still noodling through it.
Are they the new gnostics? Maybe you’ve drawn this connection in the past, but I missed it. Everybody seems to think there are only two sides–secularism versus Christianity–but traditionally there is a third. Here’s a good quote from John C. Wright, currently one of my favorite fiction authors, on this topic:
“Clarke could not help but give a Gnostic answer to the Christian challenge because, within the framework of Western assumptions about man and life and afterlife, there is no other answer. There is nothing new under the sun (so says Solomon in Ecclesiastes). Logic allows only for minor variations on certain themes and ideas in human thinking. So if you ask a question about man’s relation with God and the ultimate destiny of the race, there are really only three answers Western philosophy will give: (1) There is no God, and the ultimate destiny of the race is extinction (the answer of H.G. Wells—and of every pessimist who ever trod the planet); (2) There is a God, and the ultimate destiny of the race is salvation or damnation as the grace of God shall provide (the answer of C.S. Lewis—and of every Christian who ever ate bread); (3) Man shall be God, and the ultimate destiny of the race is transcendence or extinction, salvation or damnation, as the power of Man shall provide (the answer of Arthur C. Clarke—and of every Gnostic since the Second Century).
By sticking with the Christian assumptions about ultimate destiny, but rejecting the Christian answer, Arthur C. Clarke has no choice but to pen a naturalistic and science-fictional version of an old Gnostic myth. In the Western mind, if heaven is not in heaven, then heaven is on Earth. In the Western mind, if you cannot find the long lost Golden Age of Eden by crossing the Jordan of baptism, then you must find it by building the Tower of Babel. The Assumption of the Slans at the finale of CHILDHOOD’S END would not make the reader’s breath catch with wonder if Communion with the Overmind were not an image of Eden, a cure for the pain of the world as promised by the Holy Grail.
[…]
Western humanist transcendentalism always reflects a Gnostic theme, because there is no other rebuttal to Christian thought available to any man who accepts non-Oriental and non-pagan assumptions about destiny, eschatology and transcendence; there is no other, aside from Gnosticism. Either you glorify Man with the Gnostic and call God a liar, or you glorify God with the Christian and call Man to repent.”
http://www.scifiwright.com/xabout/transhuman-and-subhuman/#_Toc384557551
There aren’t that many people who can live life and accept that nothing matters at the end of the day–that some spree shooter is morally on level with the people he killed. Eventually they slip up, and start describing themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” and throw their lives into flesh-hating social causes like transgenderism. They might go full on Ted Talk occultist, and start looking forward to the technological singularity, cryogenics, transhumanism, and other faiths, but most aren’t there yet. None of these progressives are going to crack open a gnostic gospel any time soon, and if asked about religion they’ll sneer “I’m a rational atheist, religion is for idiots, science rules!” but it looks like that’s where they’re headed.
Whatever the case, it’s funny–billionaires, politicians, the mainstream media, and academia are all running away from Christianity. The most powerful people on earth, putting their faith in man’s mightiest tool–empiricism, the scientific method–think they can put God away for good. All they’ve managed to do is retrace the footsteps of a two-thousand year old Christian heresy.
Good comparison: The Left and Islam, both culture annihilators.