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Subject: The Witches and the infidels
Apologia Report 20:10 (1,239)
March 11, 2015
In this issue:
DIVERSITY - not what you might expect from those who champion it
ISLAM - Egyptian president acknowledges "mainstream Muslim religious doctrine is antagonizing the entire world"
+ why "the restoration of reason is the only antidote to Islam's spiritual pathology"
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DIVERSITY
Where is there greater diversity than in the occult? Yet traditional witch Sable Aradia has hit a snag, and we can learn a lot from it. In her Patheos blog post "Apples and Orangutans: Traditional Witchcraft vs. Wicca" (Jan 16 '15) she writes: "One thing I've been reading an awful lot recently in the blogosphere is how much better traditional witchcraft is than Wicca. ...
"In the spirit of trying not to define a spiritual path by what it is not, and trying instead to find out what it is, I made a great effort to research traditional witchcraft. I have read many of the books that Jason Mankey mentioned in his recent article <www.goo.gl/LwsSSU> (despite his objections to my Wikipedia references <www.goo.gl/6MN7C4> in my recent article). I have been reading website after website in my effort to understand the specifics. What are the spiritual practices of traditional craft? What are its elements of faith? ...
"So why are we comparing the two at all? It seems to me that they are entirely different things, and comparing them isn't even like comparing apples and oranges; it's like comparing apples and - orangutans. ...
"Traditional witchcraft is not a specific religion, and there is no formal code of behaviour. Most traditional witches seem very clear on these two points. Many are clear in their belief that 'fluffy Wiccans' limit themselves with the encumbrance of their ethics and their eclectic mythology. They often see themselves as living on the edge of society, unbound by deities or oaths.
"To this I say: fly; be free! ...
"But please stop trying to define my faith for me in order to differentiate your path! Surely there must be something that defines traditional witchcraft in its own right as a worthy practice, or it would not have such a following.
"I am a traditional witch - and I am a Wiccan. The two are not mutually exclusive because they're not even remotely the same thing." <www.ow.ly/K3wh2>
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ISLAM
In the Land of the Blue Burqas [1] is a wonderful book about Kate McCord (a pseudonym), a courageous American sharing the gospel with everyday people during her five-year stay in Afghanistan. It includes the following dialog (p75) between the author and a friendly local Afghan whose family she was visiting:
"'Is it true that every Friday when you pray, you ask Allah to convert me, and if I will not convert, you ask him for permission to kill me?' ... Finally the man said, 'The mullah prays that. We just say "Amen".' ... I pressed my question. 'You just say "Amen"?' The man was getting more uncomfortable. 'Yes, we have to. The Mullah prays it. It's part of Friday prayers.'
"'Everywhere in the world?'
"'Yes, everywhere in the world. Every Friday.' ...
"I was calm. 'I am not going to become a follower of your prophet Mohammed.' ... 'Do you want Allah to give you permission to kill me?' I was smiling just slightly. ... I still didn't want to believe he really embraced the prayer he agreed to every Friday.
"The man finally took a deep breath and stood by his faith. 'If you do not become a Muslim and God commands, I must kill you.'"
Given the universality of the prayer in question, the above dialog suggests to me [RP] that the man was referring to mainstream Islamic teaching. Consider another example, this time from Mario Loyola, writing for The National Review, explaining that in "a hair-raising op-ed <www.goo.gl/hmLvbS> up at USA Today, Anjem Choudary (a radical Muslim cleric in London) explains:
"Muslims consider the honor of the Prophet Muhammad to be dearer to them than that of their parents or even themselves. To defend it is considered to be an obligation upon them. The strict punishment if found guilty of this crime [of insulting the Messenger Muhammad] under sharia (Islamic law) is capital punishment implementable by an Islamic State. This is because the Messenger Muhammad said, 'Whoever insults a Prophet kill him.'" Yet see this: <www.goo.gl/5YdnCy> And see also ... <www.goo.gl/RVnpAQ>
If Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi says that Muslim doctrine, "the corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the centuries, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world," we can assume that he too is referring to mainstream Islamic teachings.
Loyola concludes: "That's what a lot of Muslims believe, for wholly Islamic reasons, so let's take them at their word." President Sisi "is addressing mainstream Muslim scholars. In other words, he thinks that mainstream Muslim religious doctrine is antagonizing the entire world, above and beyond the terrorist extremists who are doing the actual killing.
"It is increasingly clear that some of those religious doctrines are going to have to change, because the alternative is eternal conflict. One example: the idea that Islamic law applies to non-Muslims, which is precisely as preposterous as if I were to declare that you are all my slaves.
"And by the way, same goes for the elastic hate-speech rules through which American academia is seeking to impose Islamic doctrine on our university students. I have every right to mock whatever prophet I want, and if your religion says otherwise, then you're just wrong, and if you want to fight about it, then let's fight." National Review, Jan 9 '15, <www.goo.gl/UjxF1A>
The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis, by Robert R. Reilly (senior fellow, American Foreign Policy Council) [2] -- writing for the National Catholic Register (Jan 16 '15), C. John McCloskey notes: "In this book, Reilly explains 'why the restoration of reason to Islam is the only antidote to the spiritual pathology driving young men to attempted terrorist acts.' ...
"At the heart of Reilly's book is his argument that the 'denigration of dialogue is due to the demotion of reason...." McCloskey adds that according to Pope Benedict XVI, "not only is violence in the service of evangelization unreasonable and therefore against God, but ... a conception of God without reason or above reason leads to that very violence. ...
"Reilly asks, 'Are [the Islamists of today] something new or a resurgence from the past? How much of this is Islam, and how much is Islamism? Is Islamism a deformation of Islam? If so, in what way and from where has it come? And why is Islam susceptible to this kind of deformation?'"
British author Hilaire Belloc "wrote in his 1938 book The Great Heresies [3], 'Since religion is the root of all political movements and changes, and since we have here a very great religion physically paralyzed but morally intensively alive, we are in the presence of an unstable equilibrium which cannot remain permanently unstable.' Later in the book, Belloc writes, '[Islamic] culture happens to have fallen back in material applications; there is no reason whatever why it should not learn its lesson and become equal in all those temporal things, which now alone give us our superiority over it — whereas, in faith, we have fallen inferior to it.' ...
"Reilly argues that 'the denigration of reason and the primacy of force that developed within Islamic thinking after the suppression of the [8th century] Mu'tazilites are what have produced the dismissal of dialogue.'
"Bin Laden quoted his spiritual godfather, Abdullah Azzam, in a November 2001 video released after 9/11: 'Terrorism is an obligation in Allah's religion.' ...
"Reilly doubts that [the restoration of the status of reason in Islam] is possible, or at least likely. Therefore, those who are considered as enemies by jihadist Muslims must act accordingly, using their God-given gift of reason. Could it be, however, that the question of faith is even more important than that of reason? Unquestionably, there are millions of adherents of worldwide Islam willing to die for their faith. In what is left of the once-Christian West, are there as many Christians willing to be martyred? I have my doubts." <www.goo.gl/GxoWOx>
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SOURCES: Monographs
1 - In the Land of Blue Burqas, by Kate McCord (Moody, 2012, paperback, 320 pages) <www.goo.gl/1fSnl0>
2 - The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis, by Robert R. Reilly (Intercollegiate Studies Inst, 2011, paperback, 244 pages) <www.goo.gl/W3iZCy>
3 - The Great Heresies, by Hilaire Belloc (CreateSpace, 2011, paperback, 122 pages) <www.goo.gl/tyWMo8>
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