Orson Scott Card:

Here is one simple truth, borne out by statistics over many decades and generations: The religions that demand of their members some real and rational degree of sacrifice, obedience, and adherence to faith are growing stronger and stronger; while the ones that say, in effect, that you can do what you want and God doesn’t expect much of us anymore, except to be vaguely nice - they are losing members rapidly.

Because if it doesn’t matter what you do, then why would you bother to belong?

Reinhold Niebuhr put it this way in The Kingdom of God in America: “We want a God without wrath who took man without sin into a kingdom without justice through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

The activist group, “Free Muslims Against Terrorism,” is sponsoring a March Against Terror on April 30. The news release reads:

The Free Muslims Against Terrorism are proud to announce that on May 14th 2005, Muslims and Middle Easterners of all backgrounds will converge on our nation’s Capital for a rally against terrorism and to support freedom and democracy in the Middle East and the Muslim world. This will be the first rally of its kind in Washington DC that is led by Muslims and Middle Easterners.

Join us in sending a message to radical Muslims and supporters of terrorism that we reject them and that we will do all we can to defeat them.

We also want to send a message of hope to the people of the Muslim world and the Middle East who seek freedom, democracy and who reject radical Islam that we are with them and that we will do all we can to support them.

This rally is NOT limited to Muslims and Middle Easterners. We request anyone and everyone who supports our message to join us at the rally. We want to send a message to the extremists and terrorists that American Muslims, Christians, Jews and people of all faiths are united against terrorism and extremism.

We welcome all endorsers and we ask that you circulate and publish this message to as many groups and people as possible. Help us make history.

To sponsor this rally, please send the name of your group to the Free Muslims Against Terrorism. [email protected]

Location of the rally:

Freedom Plaza
Neighborhood: Downtown
Address: Pennsylvania Ave. between 13th & 14th Street, NW
Metro: Federal Triangle
Date & Time: Saturday, May 14th 2005 1-5 pm

If you’re in the area, go join in; we’ve been saying for about three and one-half years now, where are the Muslims who will denounce terror? Well, they’ll be marching in Washington, DC, on April 30. Hat tip: Dean Esmay.

Tom Donelson has some reflections on the pope’s passing.

What do you do when you decide your daughter should marry a certain man, introduce him to your daughter and your wife as your future son-in-law, but have him checked out - a little late - after that? TJ, serving in Iraq, starts this tale of woeful humor this way:

I had lunch today with an Iraqi intelligence officer whose daughter just broke off her engagement.

Well, I say broke off, but he did have a lot to do with it.

He came home one day and his wife introduced him to a young man. “This man would make a great husband for our daughter.”

So they sat down and spoke, but during the course of the conversation Alaa, the father, became skeptical about some details of the story. So, being an intel officer, he had the man shadowed.

Nope, not here. You’ll have to click on over to read the rest!

Blogger Someguy at Mystery Achievement responds to my post, “Pope John Paul II and resisting terrorism” with a compliment on one hand (“more than worth your time to read”) and a criticism on the other - “it has one glaring weakness.” My first thought is that if he can find only one glaring weakness then that is a compliment in itself!

Without repeating the text concerned here, suffice it to say that one criticism I made of Pope John Paul II’s statements about fighting terrorism was that it had no way to resonate within the theology and world view of Islamist terrorists: JPII “He consistently made the error of assuming that everyone - even Islamist terrorists - could find a common ground for peace and justice defined in specifically Christian terms.”

Someguy says that claim is the glaring error:

While Christian in the sense that it was fully developed and articulated in the Catholic Church, John Paul II’s “rhetoric” is actually pre-Christian in an ontological and anthropological sense. That is because it is rooted in the image of God found in all men, Christian or not.

This is, of course, the centuries-old Catholic concept of natural law, and Someguy explains it a little more, citing George Weigel’s comparison of “elements of George W. Bush’s second inaugural address with some of the Pope’s teaching on freedom.”

Someguy states that

the reaction of the majority of the Iraqi people to the opportunity to build a free society—in spite of the overwhelming dominance of Islam and Muslim culture—bears out what Weigel has said here. And it matters very much that we believe this is true. That belief is why we are attacking our enemies in the GWoT with both arms and diplomacy—rather than just the former.

Even so, Someguy admits that it often seemed that the pope and the Vatican often seemed to be “laboring under the illusion that Islamic terrorists are some breed of anonymous Christian.” Even so, Someguy says that the elections in Iraq and Afghanstan are “most encouraging,” although the Muslim world itself has “some way to go in the conscience-development part of the program.”

While defending John Paul’s theological rhetoric he concludes

Nevertheless, it is precisely that conscience that must be present to some degree for negotiations and compromise absent the threat of violence to succeed. Whether Islam (and I deliberately avoid the weasel word “Islamism” and its cognates) is capable of developing such a conscience remains to be seen. But until the fruits of such a conscience become evident, the assumption that a civilization that attacked and destroyed Christianity in North Africa and the Middle East (and continues to persecute its Christian and Jewish populations) can be dealt with on the basis of diplomacy that forswears any recourse to violence whatsoever, is imprudent and possibly suicidal.

I agree with the conclusion except his rejection of the term, “Islamism.” It is not a “weasel word” but in fact is an academically-sourced word of some precision, used to distinguish a politically and religiously absolutist, expansive form of Islam from other “denominations” found in the Muslim world. Islamism absolutely, violently rejects the entire concept of democracy that Someguy rightfully finds so encouraging in Iraq and Afghanistan. I explained Islamism’s source in the second chapter of my (hopefully) forthcoming book, The War Between Ways of Knowing:

Modern Arab terrorism has gone through three stages. The first was a revival of strict Islamic devotion. Islamism, as the movement came to be called, was originally a reform movement calling secularized Arab governments and societies to return to the basics of pure Islam as the reformers defined it. Islamism began in Egypt in the early 1920s. It was and still is fundamentally religious in nature. It was not originally violent but became violent fairly soon; Islamists believed that they were obligated to strike those who defied Islam as Islamists perceived it. For many decades afterward, and still significantly today, the targets of Islamist terrorists were Arab governments. Islamism’s goal was the institution of strict Islamic law, sharia, in Muslim countries and the rooting out of all non-Muslim influences in the ordering of societies.

My criticism of John Paul was not that he tried to reach out to the Islamic world using specifically Christian language, but that he seemed to fail to distinguish between Islam and Islamism, a distinction that Muslims themselves are recognizing with increasing understanding. There may indeed yet be found some religiously formed language that can abut a bridge between Christianity and Islam, but I still maintain that the abutment cannot be made when the other side of the chasm is controlled by Islamists rather than Islamics, and the distinction is not imaginary.