Today's · Holy · Wars

Yesterday evening I finished reading the Qur'an, the holy book of Islam. There is a lot of back and forth in various media about whether the terrorist violence which, in the US, is often associated with Islam is an aberration or if our Muslim brothers and sisters are predisposed toward violent reaction. The anti-Muslim elements in our culture wax and wane with the flow of current events but what is clear to me is that there is a large amount of misinformation and misconception about what the Qur'an says or doesn't say. At the library earlier today I saw a copy of the documentary film "Radical Islam's War on the West" which I have seen mixed reviews about, but which also brings in the question "What does the Qur'an actually say?"

The first and most important thing it does in relation to our misconceptions is define the word Islam. "Now then, for that (reason), call (them to the Faith), and stand steadfast as you are commanded, nor follow you their vain desires; but say: "I believe in the Book which Allah has sent down; and I am commanded to judge justly between you. Allah is our Lord and your Lord, for us (is the responsibility for) our deeds, and for you for your deeds. There is no contention between us and you. Allah will bring us together and to him is (our) final goal." (ash-Shura 42:15) Sadly, much like the Bible, it is difficult to quote the Qur'an out of context, most of the meaning is removed but this lays down the basics. A quick note on the translation I read. The translator, a man named Abdullah Yusuf Ali, spoke in his preface of the hazard he was undertaking trying to find a "best" translation. He stated that his main aims were to preserve meaning and the poetic rhythm of the Qur'an and that he feared that his interpretation may be off. I believe, though he doesn't state this explicitly, that the parenthesis sprinkled throughout are his way of saying "This is what I think worked best out of the choices I had."

The Book of Allah is what we Christians and our Jewish brethren call The Word of God. Muhammed explicitly states in several places that the Qur'an is not to be read instead of the Bible, it is to enlighten the "Law and the Gospel" for non-Greek speakers, specifically Arabic speakers. Many Biblical themes are present in the Qur'an, care for the poor as fellow human beings, our common origin as part of creation and from the the single progenitor Adam. After reading through the Qur'an, I feel that in order to fully practice what Muhammed preached our Muslim brethren should read the Bible as Scripture, which the Qur'an says it is in multiple places. The story of Moses and the giving of the Law is told repeatedly in different Surahs. That law is passed down through the generations as what we Christians call the Pentatuch, the five Books of Moses which begin the Bible.

Tradition says that the Pentatuch was dictated to Moses by God Himself. The scrolls which contained the law were said to be kept in the Ark of the Covenant along with the tablets which bore The Ten Commandments and the Rod of Aaron which miraculously budded when his priesthood was challenged. The Qur'an affirms that God gave Moses the law, making the Pentatuch the literal Word of God. Likewise the Qur'an states that the Gospel was sent by God through Jesus although in His case Gospel accounts were written by the apostles.

Those are the three stated divisions of scripture in the Qur'an, each revealed by God to a separate individual. Now is where we hit the sticky points. The Qur'an is supposed to be a series of revelations made to Muhammed by St. Gabriel. It is apparent in his repeated citation of Biblical stories that Muhammed was familiar with the Jewish and Christian faiths and their teachings but his retellings seem to have missed the mark. Taking the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as an example, the Qur'an says that Lot was a Prophet sent to the people of Sodom and, when they didn't repent, God destroyed the two cities, saving Lot's family, except his wife. "But your wife (will remain behind); to her will happen what happens to the people." (Hud 11:81) The Bible story, which is included in the law given to Moses, says that Lot and Abram lived together until their two households became so large that the two of them could not subsist on the same land. So Abram said to Lot "Is not the whole land before you? Separate yourself from me. If you take the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if you take the right hand, then I will go to the left." (Gen 13:9) So Lot decided to settle in the plain of the Jordan and lived in Sodom and Abram went the other way and settled in modern Israel. Lot was the one righteous man that the angels found in Sodom when they went to see if the citizens would be as sinful with a stranger as they were with their own people. A silly but apt way to put it as I saw recently on cracked.com "The Sodomites were the only people in history who threatened to butt rape an angel." Because Lot was righteous, the angels warned him of the impending destruction and got him out of the city, as the Qur'an affirms. But, Lot's wife left the city with him, she was turned to a pillar of salt when she looked back at the two cities and was smote by the glory of the angels doing the destruction. (Gen 19:26)

Many Bible stories have a Qur'an parallel which is slightly different, up to and including The Virgin Birth. This I have no particular problem with since whenever a story is retold it will come out slightly different but since the Qur'an claims to illuminate earlier scripture I feel that these retellings do more confusing than illuminating.

So this is what I say to my Muslim brethren. The Qur'an says that the Bible is Scripture. Treat it as such. Read it, study it, understand it. Read about Abram's pleas for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah before their destruction. Read about the Israelite's travels before entering the promised land. Read the Gospel accounts of how Christ not only died on the cross but was raised from the dead. Read St. John's Revelation from Patmos and compare it to Muhammed's preaching about the Day of Judgement. And at the end of that revelation, read the profound "Amen. Come Lord Jesus," written in faith and hope of what God had revealed.

In my odysseys of viral learning I've more and more often been coming up against The New World Order. The theories driving the idea of a global conspiracy are as varied as the sites I've found but most agree that international bankers and the UN have something to do with it.

I was recently reading an article on The New World Order which, per usual, accused international bankers, the Free Masons, and The Illuminati of plotting to enslave the world in some neo-fascist super state. What was unusual about this article was links to two books, one called Pawns in the Game, published in 1954 and probably one of the earliest books to propose the NWO, and another called The New World Order, published 1919.

After clicking on the link for The New World Order, instead of the review page that I expected, I found a PDF copy of the book from The University of California Riverside. The first page of the introduction made it apparent that the person who wrote the article that linked the text hadn't actually read it.

The title, while playing directly into the conspiracist's hands, is intended as a descriptor for the new page in world history opened by World War 1. In the author's view, the Old World Order of European Imperialism had been destroyed once and for all by the massive conflict which had just ended. The New World Order was his term for what could be crafted to fill the vacuum and bring peace and stability to the world as a whole. It is quite obvious to us that his hopes were not fulfilled, but I think the idea of a New World Order of peace and prosperity is one that most people can get behind.

I intend to read the book in the near future and post a more complete review. If anyone is curious in the meantime, the text can be downloaded at http://www.lovethetruth.com/books/nwo_1919.pdf. I look forward to reading the book as both a contemporary view point of the immediate post war period and as a look at a what could have been of the twentieth century.

The September/October issue of Sojourners magazine profiles the attitudes towards Muslims ten years after the 9/11 attacks. I post on this subject a lot but it's one that I think bears regular revisits.

I want to discuss two specific parts of the discussion. The first was an article about the partnership between the Heartsong Church and Memphis Islamic Center which are located right across the street from each other. While the Islamic Center was under construction, Heartsong offered their neighbors use of the church's multipurpose room for prayers during Ramadan. Members of Heartsong's congregation helped set up the space for the Muslim prayers and served as ushers during Ramadan. This was all several years ago now and in the time since the two congregations have begun running several joint ministries throughout the Memphis area.

The second article discusses how a lot of the tensions between Christians and Muslims are self imposed, hearkening back to the partnership in the first article. The article itself is a discussion of how the two theologies can work together and has given me more of an impetus to give The Qu'ran a read, but the aspect that really caught my eye was one of the accompanying photographs. It is a picture of two Muslim women contemplating the Icon of the Madonna and Child at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Islam being traditionally iconoclastic, it is a very startling image showing an appreciation for the Christian veneration of the Saints.

As always, my hope is that all religions working together can help foster world peace. If we can move past our human frailties of distrust and fear of the "other" we can move forward as brothers and sisters and make life better.

I first watched this video about a week ago and was immediately struck by how an obviously highly intelligent man could make such a poor argument to support his rejection of Christianity. Since Mr. Hitchens champions the Socratic method against dogma (which he misrepresents but that is a discussion for a different post) I'll here focus on his claim that the Gospels are so obviously fabricated when one digs into them.

He acknowledges the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, but states that in order for him to be the Messiah he has to be of the line of King David. This statement is true. At this point he says "There was never a census, they didn't have to travel to their home towns and Quirinius was not governor of Syria, this is all made up." He makes a point of the need for Christ to be born in Bethlehem to fulfil the prophecies of the Old Testament and that this is a poorly disguised way to fake it so that it seems like the charismatic Jesus of Nazareth met the requirements.

His first mistake with this argument is stating that the Gospels don't even agree on Christ's birth. Of the four Gospel accounts only two actually talk about Christ's childhood and they about different episodes in that childhood. The account of Jesus' birth is taken from The Gospel of St. Luke, the only one of the four evangelists, as they're called, who didn't know Jesus of Nazareth during his ministry. Because of this, St. Luke says at the beginning of his account of the life of Christ "Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed."

This is just what it reads like, St. Luke's mission statement which is repeated at the start of St. Luke's other book, The Acts of the Apostles. So, as stated, St. Luke's Gospel is based on what he was told both before and after his own conversion and was written down to further educate a man named Theophilus. When St. Luke wrote this account the life of Christ was still relatively recent history, the resurrection having taken place probably 30 to 40 years previously. The obvious first question is "when was this person born?" so St. Luke answers it. "This was the first registration, and was taken while Quirinius was Governor of Syria." Why does St. Luke mention the governor of Syria? Perhaps Theophilus was Syrian and thus would have a time frame to ask older friends and relatives about with an identification of who was governor during the census. Not to mention that Theophilus being obviously educated could go and look up the census with this information.

Clearly, Theophilus distributed St. Luke's account because it made its way into the early cannons before codification at the Council of Nicea almost 300 years later. If, as Mr. Hitchens claims, this account is so full of holes, then why would well educated Roman citizens keep it around instead of kicking it to the curb as was done with dozens, if not hundreds, of early Gospel accounts.

This brings me to the second account of Jesus' early childhood which is found in the Gospel of St. Matthew. His account is only a few sentences and describes the journey of the Three Wise Men or Magi as we call the in English. In Greek, the word Magoi means astrologer or magician. Traditionally, the coming of the Magi from the east is celebrated 12 days after Christmas, the reasoning being that that was how long it took the Magi to make the journey. Modern Biblical scholarship tells us that it could have been as much as two years later that the Magi showed up, during the next census in which the same travel to the home town would be repeated.

This is not without modern parallel. In China people are recorded in their home town each census, not where they actually live at the time of the census. It is quite possible that the Romans did something similar.

I speak from personal experience that it is very difficult to argue against something one knows little about. It is clear to me that Mr. Hitchens did not use the volumes of Biblical scholarship at his disposal nor does he have real familiarity with the Gospel accounts he is attempting to disprove. People often want to write of religion as mere superstition but it is very rarely that simple.

Tuesday night POV aired a documentary called Enemies of the People which was about the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge. In some ways this was a documentary about making a documentary. The film followed a Cambodian journalist named Thet Sambath as he interviewed and video taped former Khmer Rouge soldiers, zone leaders and even Pol Pot's deputy, a man named Nuon Chea.

Mr. Thet was himself a victim of the Khmer Rouge. His father, brother and mother all died during their regime in the late 1970's. During a post film interview, Mr. Thet's co-producer commented how most journalists approach former Khmer Rouge with an attitude of hostility and accusation where as Mr. Thet simply wanted to talk to them and learn about what went on for the sake of history.

It was the fact that during the interviews Mr. Thet would simply listen and throw out the occasional question which really moved me. When I went to Paris there was a painting in the Centre Pompidou called "Ode to Pol Pot" which was a horrifying and striking depiction of genocide. The painting used an almost factory setting to show how the Khmer Rouge treated people, something like the ultra mechanized world of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. This is a stark contrast to where the Killing Fields actually were. Cambodia is a beautiful country. The film showed the fields and jungles and cities, far from the steel and glass reality many of us in the west see on a daily basis. Two of the soldiers interviewed during the film were in front of the rice paddies where they did the killing. They even pointed out where the mass graves were. "There was a ditch over by that tree." What is now simple farmland was once a scene of horror and has Lord knows how many bodies buried beneath it.

The soldiers who were interviewed are old men and simple farmers. Nuon Chea, who is now on trial at the Cambodia Tribunal for war crimes, is also an old man. Before his arrest he lived in a simple hut in the jungle with his family. Although they didn't go into it in the film, I would guess that, when he was younger, he too farmed his land and made a living. When Mr. Thet opened up to Nuon Chea about his family there were tears in the former leader's eyes. It is an incredibly touching scene that a man who was so high up in a genocidal regime still feels remorse for those who were murdered on his watch.

The simple farmers who did the actual killing also have their remorse. They were tearful in many scenes and one Buddhist man commented "I don't know what I'll come back as in my next life or how long I'll spend in Hell for what I did, I just know it will be a long time before I'm a human again." There are many things that
our history would be much better without and the Khmer Rouge is one of them but the opportunity to see masterminds and soldiers as actual human beings instead of demons should probably be given more often. I highly recommend that everyone see this film and go into it willing to learn.

Several years ago I found a Nova episode on You Tube which discussed the mysterious mummies of western China. The basic conclusions of the investigation were that the individuals had immigrated from Europe and that they may have brought the wheel with them and introduced it to the local population.

About halfway through the episode I finally got curious enough about who had posted it to glance at the author name. What greeted me was a picture of an eye, black and white with a blue iris, and the user name AryanCrusaderIX. When that segment of video ended I scrolled to the comments and found a white supremacist soap box spawned by the revelation that maybe Europeans introduced the wheel to China.

Today I finished reading a book called 1421: The Year China Discovered America by Gavin Menzies. The purpose of the book is to attempt to plot the course of the Chinese Treasure Fleets sent out by the third Ming Emperor, a man named Zhu Di. Menzies makes a well supported argument that, not only did the Chinese chart the entire world, but that copies of their charts were in the hands of the great European explorers, Magellen, Columbus, Da Gama, etc.

As I read, I kept thinking of AryanCrusaderIX and his channel which, the last time I looked at it, had been purged but used to hold vast quantities of White Supremacist propaganda. The Chinese Empire abandoned its overseas ambitions with the death of Emperor Zhu Di but I began to wonder what might have happened if it hadn't. My thought is that during the European Age of Exploration the Spanish, Portugese, and English, later British, would probably have founded colonies and outposts alongside and in alliance with existing Chinese settlements.

If the European Kingdoms and Chinese Empire had established an alliance in the 16th century who can tell what the face of the world would look like today. What I think I can say for sure is that in working in close concert with such an advanced civilization the Europeans would have viewed their expansion not as conquest but as a step out of the backwater which they had been living in for the past thousand years and into the economic and cultural glory that had made the Roman Empire an example to the known world at its hight, a reawakening of what Europe had been and a step towards a greater understanding of the diversity of humanity.

News of the death of Osama Bin Laden has set the nation into a mass of excitement. The capture of Bin Laden was the initial objective of the US Military's invasion of Afghanistan almost 10 years ago now and in some ways his death closes the book on 9/11.

That the man was an international criminal and needed to be dealt with is not what I want to talk about. Rather it is the fact that despite all his crimes he was still a human being and thus our brother. While I share the relief of everyone that a dangerous fugitive is no longer out there to organize attacks against innocent people I am saddened that, to the best of our knowledge, he never got the chance to repent his wrong doing. We all are children of God and this is the root of the concept of Christian Justice, that we are all sinful and deserve the chance to atone for our sins. Bin Laden was the enemy of my country but he was my fellow human. As long as he was alive there was hope that he may have been captured and brought to realize the harm he'd caused not just in the US but in the Muslim world as well. Now that he is dead, I mourn his feeling that violence was the answer and I say May God have mercy on his soul.

After church yesterday I spoke briefly to my pastor about the fundamentalist site www.jesus-is-savior.com. To our surprise we had both visited the website in the last week although we had gotten there in two completely different ways. Apparently my pastor received a phone call from asking if there was something wrong with the New International Version of the scriptures. The website rails against just about every modern English translation of the scriptures but it pays particular attention to the NIV. The person asking the question directed my pastor to the site, she looked it over and said "If it sounds like a stretch, it probably is."

My personal bible is NRSV so when I first stumbled upon this site I looked at his RSV section. The article he uses to "debunk" the RSV is based on taking a particular verse and simply comparing it word for word. I did not read the entire article because it literally would have taken me hours to cross reference the arguments he was making with my bible and the Vulgate, which he maintains is corrupt, but what I found was that often when placed back in context the differences in verses come down to a change in phrasing. Other times the dropping of a word, such as "firstborn" in Matthew 1:25, appears in the footnotes. Also the "corrupt" Vulgate of St. Jerome contains the word "firstborn."

This gentleman asserts that the original King James Version cannot be a "wrong" translation because "God's word exists perfectly in heaven." (I apologize for lack of citation but I cannot find the article in which he quotes this psalm.) In the 4th century there was a brand new translation available to believers, it was St. Jerome's Vulgate. The Vulgate replaced the standard Greek version of the Old Testament for the Latin speaking west and St. Augustine pointed out in City of God that "The Jews prefer this version as being more accurate to the Hebrew. Nevertheless, the errors in the Greek version still have something to teach us because the translation was produced under divine guidance."

Almost the same argument, polar opposite conclusions. St. Augustine understood that over time new and more accurate translations are going to be produced but the older versions are still valid. The gentleman who runs Jesus is Savior rejects on principle the idea that a new translation can be better. I have studied 7 different languages to various extents and if all of that has taught me anything it's that translation is not an exact science. There are certain nuances to words and phrases that are not carried over in translation, sarcasm is a good example. The most a new translation can hope to do is come closer to those nuances through changes in word choice and phrasing and this is where Biblical scholarship comes in, as we learn more about linguistic use when the books were written down we can try to capture those nuances more acurately while not changing the wording very much. Translation is difficult but as we learn more about language and how it operates we can do more to say the same things thousands of years removed from the living speakers who wrote down the originals.

The company I work for has a policy where we ask customers to leave backpacks and other shopping bags at the front of the store while they shop. A couple of weeks ago I was working on Sunday morning and a gentleman came in and I asked him to leave his bag up front. His response was "It's just my Bible, you can look if you want. You should think about reading it." To which I said "I read mine every night but it's company policy."

The gentleman went off to shop and the cashier who was on that morning turned to me and said "You read it every night? Do you believe all the stuff that's in there is going to happen soon?"

I wish that I'd had time to answer that question better but since I've just finished reading The Revelation I figured it was a good time to reflect back on that question.

Many Televangelists and fundamentalist preachers like to go on fire and brimstone tirades using the prophesies of Revelation to frighten people into redemption. That's really not what the book is for. The Revelation was revealed to St. John as a guidepost so that those awaiting Christ's return know what we have to go through before that happens.

There is no way to know for sure when all the stuff laid out in Revelation will happen, prophesy is notoriously hard to figure out ahead of time. Not to mention Christ's own words "The son of man will come like a thief in the night."

There is something downright fascinating about the Revelation. It could be because the book sheds some light on the future, however dim. I have seen no less than 3 different History Channel things about The Revelation to St. John. Watching all the experts try to decode what is not supposed to be understood clearly is always kind of fun to see what sort of things they come up with. I saw one where they were attempting to figure out the Anti Christ and this expert was positive that the man would rise to power through the European Union. While this is possible, given the EU's extremely limited power a lot would have to change for that to really be feasible.

I guess my whole point in this is that there really is no way to know for sure when Christ is returning. All we know is that He is and that it really could be at any time, 5 minutes from now or in another 5000 years. We can try to figure out each of the signs all we want and probably everyone who studies the Revelation in detail will come up with a different set of indicators. We shouldn't be sitting back on our heals waiting for the Second Coming, we should be living the Gospel as though we knew for certain the Kingdom would come tomorrow. It is by our love that we are judged and that's where we should be investing our energy.

As I was searching for images to use in my last post I stumbled across a fundamentalist website courtesy of this image.


In light of my early argument in these reflections for Christian Unity I thought it might be interesting to go through a little bit and address some of this man's talking points surrounding is condemnation of orthodox Christianity. Note that I use a lower case o in orthodox because I am referring to the collective church represented by Roman Catholicism, the Eastern Rite, commonly called the Orthodox Church, and Mainline Protestantism.

http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/False%20Religions/Russian_Orthodox/ro-idolatry.htm

The above is the url for the first page that I came to. This site is vast and if you feel like exploring it there is a link to his homepage at the very bottom. What I will do for this post is go through some of his more interesting pictures and captions and examine them from both a Catholic and Protestant viewpoint, I am sadly ignorant of the details of the Orthodoxy which the images represent so I call on someone more informed than myself to please enlighten me.

To start with, the image that I posted at the start is captioned "People are worshipping Satan and don't even realize it." This is an inflammatory statement to say the least but one that is pretty common among Protestant denominations unfamiliar with icons.

Icons have a well established place in church history and symbolism. Probably the most famous icon in the world is of the crucified Christ which is what the woman in the image is kissing. Now there is no way from the picture to tell for certain what time of year it was taken or what exact event is going on but in the Catholic tradition the crucifix is venerated in this manner on Good Friday, the yearly commemoration of Christ's crucifixion. Protestants often see the promulgation of icons in Catholic churches as idolatrous, the placement of an image before God. Icons are not worshipped instead of God, as this gentleman argues, but they are venerated as a representation of divine grace and favor. It was upon the cross that Christ redeemed all human kind and so we honor the image of our Lord crucified not because it has any power in and of itself but because it is a visual demonstration of God's love for creation that he would suffer in our place for our sins. This is why on Good Friday we commonly kiss the crucifix, as a symbol of our gratitude to our Heavenly Father.




This image bears the caption "The icons are worshipped more than Jesus. Some of those icons are of mystics (meaning Satan possessed) like Sergei Radonevzhski." This is followed up with the last sentence of the First Letter of St. John "Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen." The irony here is that St. John's Gospel is a mystic one. Instead of an action by action account of Christ's deeds during His time among His people, St. John begins with creation. "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God." It is St. John's Gospel which states plainly the doctrine that Christ is both fully human and fully divine. Mysticism consists of focusing on the spiritual connection with God and mystics have played an important role in both Christian and Jewish thought. Mystics often compose hymns and poems to the Glory of God, some of which we still sing in church services all over the planet. In the last year a couple of films have been made about Hildigard von Bingen who was a Benedictine Nun, composer, and mystic. According to Russiapedia, Sergei was an ascetic monk who lived the humblest of lives and founded a monestary. There is now a cathedral on the site where he built his first shrine to the Holy Trinity.

Icons are made of Saints to give a visual cue for the faithful to look to. Icons are venerated not for any inherent power they possess but because those they represent received the divine blessing.



The caption here is "The crazy 'Patriarch' and his two dragons!" (punctuation from the site). There is a secondary caption which reads "Also, notice the phoenix birdies on his hat." Now because I do not know enough about Russian Orthodoxy I am not sure what the dragons represent but the "phoenix birdies" are a symbol of temporal Russia. After the fall of Constantinople in AD 1453 the King of Moscow, who I believe was Ivan the Terrible but don't quote me on that, made the Roman Eagle flag the symbol of his empire and took the title Czar which is a Russian translation of the word Caesar. The Russian Empire was often called the Third Rome because of the use of this symbol. It represents the empire ruling over two continents, both east and west and where the Empire reached the Church was able to operate freely which is why the Patriarch wears the symbol.




Last, but not least, is the veneration of Relics. Probably the most famous Relic in the Western world is the Shroud of Turin which is taken by the church to be Christ's burial cloth. There are many Relics venerated throughout the Catholic and Orthodox worlds and this one is the Skull of St. Vaclav. This is a Saint I know nothing about but the caption once again uses the word "worship." Same point, Relics are not worshipped, they are venerated because they bear the blessings of God. Because we believe in the resurrection of the dead, St. Vaclav's skull is not merely a piece of bone, it is part of his once and future body, part of the Body of Christ, the Church, and the remains of our brother in Christ. Because he is a saint, it is taken as a matter of faith that his soul is in Heaven waiting to reclaim his earthly body. Presumably, the soul knows the state of the body after their separation and venerating his skull in death is the same as honoring the living man Vaclav who was an exemplar of the faith.

I could go on but I hope this does address some Protestant confusion about icons and relics and maybe reiterates that we're not as far away on some things as it can appear on the surface.

God bless.