Essay on Terrorism's War Against Civilization (by an unknown author), and Rod's Commentary on Basic Christianity

By Rod Hemphill

To get out of a difficulty, one usually must go through it. Our country is now facing the most serious threat to its existence, as we know it, that we have faced in your lifetime and mine (which includes WWII). The deadly seriousness is greatly compounded by the fact that there are very few of us who think we can possibly lose this war and even fewer who realize what losing really means.
First, let's examine a few basics:

1. When did the threat to us start?
Many will say September 11th, 2001. The answer as far as the United States is concerned is 1979, 22 years prior to September 2001, with the following attacks on us:
* Iran Embassy Hostages, 1979;
* Beirut, Lebanon Embassy 1983;
* Beirut, Lebanon Marine Barracks 1983;
* Lockerbie, Scotland Pan-Am flight to New York 1988;
* First New York World Trade Center attack 1993;
* Dhahran, Saudi Arabia Khobar Towers Military complex 1996;
* Nairobi, Kenya US Embassy 1998;
* Dares Salaam, Tanzania US Embassy 1998;
* Aden, Yemen USS Cole 2000;
* New York World Trade Center 2001;
* Pentagon 2001.
(Note that during the period from 1981 to 2001 there were 7,581 terrorist attacks worldwide).

2. Why were we attacked?
Envy of our position, our success, and our freedoms. The attacks happened during the administrations of Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton and Bush 2. We cannot fault either the Republicans or Democrats as there were no provocations by any of the presidents or their immediate predecessors.

3. Who were the attackers?
In each case, the attacks on the US were carried out by Muslims.

4. What is the Muslim population of the World? 25%

5. Isn't the Muslim Religion peaceful?
Hopefully, but that is really not material. There is no doubt that the predominately Christian population of Germany was peaceful, but under the dictatorial leadership of Hitler (who was also Christian) [see Rod's note at end of article], that made no difference. You either went along with the administration or you were eliminated. There were 5 to 6 million Christians killed by the Nazis for political reasons (including 7,000 Polish priests). (see http://www.nazis.testimony.co.uk/7-a.htm).

Thus, almost the same number of Christians were killed by the Nazis as the 6 million holocaust Jews who were killed by them, and we seldom heard of anything other than the Jewish atrocities. Although Hitler kept the world focused on the Jews, he had no hesitancy about killing anyone who got in his way of exterminating the Jews or of taking over the world - German, Christian or any others.

Same with the Muslim terrorists. They focus the world on the US, but kill all in the way -- their own people or the Spanish, French or anyone else. The point here is that just like the peaceful Germans were of no protection to anyone from the Nazis, no matter how many peaceful Muslims there may be, they are no protection for us from the terrorist Muslim leaders and what they are fanatically bent on doing -- by their own pronouncements -- killing all of us "infidels." I don't blame the peaceful Muslims. What would you do if the choice was shut up or die?

6. So who are we at war with?
There is no way we can honestly respond that it is anyone other than the Muslim terrorists. Trying to be politically correct and avoid verbalizing this conclusion can well be fatal. There is no way to win if you don't clearly recognize and articulate who you are fighting.

So with that background, now to the two major questions:
1. Can we lose this war?
2. What does losing really mean?

If we are to win, we must clearly answer these two pivotal questions.
We can definitely lose this war, and as anomalous as it may sound, the major reason we can lose is that so many of us simply do not fathom the answer to the second question - What does losing mean?

It would appear that a great many of us think that losing the war means hanging our heads, bringing the troops home and going on about our business, like post Vietnam. This is as far from the truth as one can get.

What losing really means is:
We would no longer be the premier country in the world. The attacks will not subside, but rather will steadily increase. Remember, they want us dead, not just quiet. If they had just wanted us quiet, they would not have produced an increasing series of attacks against us, over the past 18 years. The plan was clearly, for terrorist to attack us, until we were neutered and submissive to them.

We would of course have no future support from other nations, for fear of reprisals and for the reason that they would see we are impotent and cannot help them. They will pick off the other non-Muslim nations, one at a time. It will be increasingly easier for them. They already hold Spain hostage. It doesn't matter whether it was right or wrong for Spain to withdraw its troops from Iraq. Spain did it because the Muslim terrorists bombed their train and told them to withdraw the troops. Anything else they want Spain to do will be done. Spain is finished.

The next will probably be France. Our one hope on France is that they might see the light and realize that if we don't win, they are finished too, in that they can't resist the Muslim terrorists without us. However, it may already be too late for France. France is already 20% Muslim and fading fast!

If we lose the war, our production, income, exports and way of life will all vanish as we know it. After losing, who would trade or deal with us, if they were threatened by the Muslims.

If we can't stop the Muslims, how could anyone else?
The Muslims fully know what is riding on this war, and therefore are completely committed to winning, at any cost. We better know it too and be likewise committed to winning at any cost.

Why do I go on at such lengths on the cost of losing?
Simple. Until we recognize the costs of losing, we cannot unite and really put 100% of our thoughts and efforts into winning. And it is going to take that 100% effort to win.

So, how can we lose the war?
Again, the answer is simple. We can lose the war by "imploding." That is, defeating ourselves by refusing to recognize the enemy and their purpose, and really digging in and lending full support to the war effort. If we are united, there is no way that we can lose. If we continue to be divided, there is no way that we can win!

Let me give you a few examples of how we simply don't comprehend the life and death seriousness of this situation. President Bush selects Norman Mineta as Secretary of Transportation.
Although all of the terrorist attacks were committed by Muslim men between 17 and 40 years of age, Secretary Mineta refuses to allow profiling. Does that sound like we are taking this thing seriously? This is war! For the duration, we are going to have to give up some of the civil rights we have become accustomed to. We had better be prepared to lose some of our civil rights temporarily or we will most certainly lose all of them permanently. And don't worry that it is a slippery slope. We gave up plenty of civil rights during WWII, and immediately restored them after the victory and in fact added many more since then.

Do I blame President Bush or President Clinton before him?
No, I blame us for blithely assuming we can maintain all of our Political Correctness, and all of our civil rights during this conflict and have a clean, lawful, honorable war. None of those words apply to war. Get them out of your head.

Some have gone so far in their criticism of the war and/or the Administration that it almost seems they would literally like to see us lose. I hasten to add that this isn't because they are disloyal. It is because they just don't recognize what losing means. Nevertheless, that conduct gives the impression to the enemy that we are divided and weakening. It concerns our friends, and it does great damage to our cause.

Of more recent vintage, the uproar fueled by the politicians and media regarding the treatment of some prisoners of war, perhaps exemplifies best what I am saying. We have recently had an issue, involving the treatment of a few Muslim prisoners of war, by a small group of our military police.

These are the type of prisoners who just a few months ago were throwing their own people off buildings, cutting off their hands, cutting out their tongues and otherwise murdering their own people just for disagreeing with Sadaam Hussein.

And just a few years ago these same type prisoners chemically killed 400,000 of their own people for the same reason. They are also the same type of enemy fighters who recently were burning Americans and dragging their charred corpses through the streets of Iraq.

And still more recently, they are the same type enemy that was and is providing videos to all news sources internationally, of the beheading of American prisoners they held. Compare this with some of our press and politicians, who for several days have thought and talked about nothing else but the "humiliating" of some Muslim prisoners -- not burning them, not dragging their charred corpses through the streets, not beheading them, but "humiliating" them.

Can this be for real?
The politicians and pundits have even talked of impeachment of the Secretary of Defense. If this doesn't show the complete lack of comprehension and understanding of the seriousness of the enemy we are fighting, the life and death struggle we are in and the disastrous results of losing this war, nothing can.

To bring our country to a virtual political standstill over this prisoner issue makes us look like Nero playing his fiddle as Rome burned -- totally oblivious to what is going on in the real world. Neither we, nor any other country, can survive this internal strife.

Again I say, this does not mean that some of our politicians or media people are disloyal. It simply means that they are absolutely oblivious to the magnitude, of the situation we are in and into which the Muslim terrorists have been pushing us for many years.

Remember, the Muslim terrorists stated goal is to kill all infidels! That translates into all non-Muslims -- not just in the United States, but throughout the world. We are the last bastion of defense.

We have been criticized for many years as being 'arrogant.' That charge is valid in at least one respect. We are arrogant in that we believe that we are so good, powerful and smart, that we can win the hearts and minds of all those who attack us and that, with both hands tied behind our back, we can defeat anything bad in the world!

We can't! If we don't recognize this, our nation as we know it will not survive, and no other free country in the world will survive if we are defeated.

And finally, name any Muslim countries throughout the world that allow freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, equal rights for anyone -- let alone everyone, equal status or any status for women, or that have been productive in one single way that contributes to the good of the world.

This has been a long way of saying that we must be united on this war or we will be equated in the history books to the self-inflicted fall of the Roman Empire. If, that is, the Muslim leaders will allow history books to be written or read.

If we don't win this war right now, keep a close eye on how the Muslims take over France in the next 5 years or less. They will continue to increase the Muslim population of France and continue to encroach little by little, on the established French traditions. The French will be fighting among themselves, over what should or should not be done, which will continue to weaken them and keep them from any united resolve. Doesn't that sound eerily familiar?

Democracies don't have their freedoms taken away from them by some external military force. Instead, they give their freedoms away, politically correct piece by politically correct piece. And they are giving those freedoms away to those who have shown, worldwide, that they abhor freedom and will not apply it to you or even to themselves, once they are in power. They have universally shown that when they have taken over, they then start brutally killing each other over who will be the few who control the masses. Will we ever stop hearing from the politically correct, about the "peaceful Muslims"?

I close on a hopeful note, by repeating what I said above. If we are united, there is no way that we can lose. I hope now, a year after the election, the factions in our country will begin to focus on the critical situation we are in and will unite to save our country. It is your future we are talking about! Do whatever you can to preserve it.

We all must do this not only for ourselves, but our children, our grandchildren, our country and the world whether Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal, and that includes the politicians and media of our country and the free world!

There are those that find fault with our country, but it is obvious to anyone who truly thinks through this, that we must UNITE!
______________________________________________________

Rod's Commentary:

In item #5 above, the writer says that Hitler was a Christian. I beg to differ, although I acknowledge that there are people who believe that he was. Those who believe this way seem to either be antagonists of the Christian religion, or they have a misinformed and naive view of Christianity.

According to one source, Hitler was baptized into the Catholic Church and was confirmed at age 15, and never renounced it. But he despised the Church and its teachings. His life demonstrated nothing that would suggest he could have been a Christian, and was characterized by much that is totally incompatible, irreconcilable, and contradictory of any legitimate Christian faith.

So if you define Christianity as including anything or any person who calls himself a Christian, then I guess under that definition, Hitler might be regarded as a Christian. But be aware that such a loose way of defining something, or of arbitrarily creating a new definition to suit one's own agenda, serves only one's own purposes, and nearly always both distorts and misrepresents the actual entity being defined or described.

A true definition of Christianity must reflect the actual core values of the Faith, and these values must be gleaned from an unbiased reading of Christianity's source book, the Bible. Any entity or definition that deviates from how this basic Christianity views itself is itself deviant and outside the pale of legitimate Christianity. The only connection to authentic Christianity that it might claim would be that of being a heresy of Christianity.

Measured against such a true definition of Christianity, Hitler was a pagan, a perverted contradiction of what a Christian is. Whether or not he called himself a Christian, thought of himself as a Christian, or is regarded by a few others as a Christian, is irrelevant.

By the Bible's insistence, one is not a Christian just because he belongs to a Christian church, or was raised in a Christian family, or identifies with Christianity more than with Buddhism, Islam, or any other religion, or has his own privately concocted version of a few Christian ideas mixed with New Age, Naturalism or other philosophical notions. Neither is one a Christian because he thinks of himself as a basically good person.

Moreover, basic Christianity is much more than any of its churches. In fact, although Christianity is a religion, if you think of Christianity primarily as a religion, you are missing the point!

The point of Christianity is the experience of allowing God to save us from what all we are without Him. In contrast to mankind's inclination to sacrificing our humanity on the altar of self-serving determination at the cost of lives that merely exist somewhere between ho-hum and devastation, fractured relationships, social abuses and the atrocities of war, Christianity is the experience of allowing God to conform us to the very image of Jesus Christ Himself --a process that will be complete only when we meet Him after death, but which should have some immediate and growing evidences upon our giving our lives over to His control and purposes (Lordship)-- and depending on Him to save us from all that we are that is dis-similar to Him, and to enable us to more fully live the kind of righteousness that characterizes Him.

This basic Christianity gives us a world-view which is centered in God and His purposes for this world, in contrast to all those failed secular and other religious world-views which seek to force themselves upon the world, world-views which insist on making people swim against the current of reality in this world, world-views and philosophies which in seeking to create a reality of their own design, deny the realities in which God has created this world and human interpersonal and societal relationships in general, and our individual lives in particular.

In this, God's commandments are not given to make us do what God arbitrarily decided we should (or should not) do. His commandments are given to inform us of what works in this world and in our lives, and what doesn't --what brings results and what brings consequences as a matter of course. It's no accident that two of the words translated as "sin" in our Bibles actually mean "to miss the mark" (as in shooting at the wrong target, or being unable to hit the right one), and "to go beyond the boundary" (as in violating the No Trespassing sign, and sooner or later discovering that you are in the middle of a mine-field).

This all means that to be a Christian is to live a life that is given to God, is being shaped by God, is being enabled by God, is being used by God, is being fulfilled by God, has it's hope and purpose in God --the Christian life is a life that experiences God!

In contrast to all the negative controls imposed on people's lives by religions and secular philosophies, the Christian (as just described) experiences the freedom to be what God created him to be, because he is in tune with reality as it actually is, and with the God who created it.

Now, either you are a Christian or you're not.
• If you are, but you can't really put your finger on much in your life that you know is God's doing --take heart! For you, life's greatest adventure (should you accept it) is about to begin! If you wish, I'll help you get started (you may email me). After that, there's no telling where the Lord will take you. But I'll tell you this: If you start relating to God as I've described in the paragraphs above, no tomorrow will ever be a repeat of yesterday. Ever again! Every today will be a day buoyed up on hope and excited by anticipation.

You can start by understanding that the awesome Creator of all that there is, whom we cannot comprehend, has shown himself to us in a form that we can comprehend, one with whom we can identify, the Lord Jesus Christ. Since we finite beings could not comprehend Him who inhabits a dimension beyond the time and space of our earthly existence, He came to us, this "God-come-in-the flesh," on a mission to save us from our estrangement from Him. As we see the face of God in Jesus Christ, we find that our humanity does not separate us from God. Rather, we derive our humanity from God, and as we accept Him as Lord of our lives and depend upon Him to save us from living meaningless and sometimes perhaps destructive lives estranged from Him, we experience the reality of God.

• Or maybe you're not a Christian at all. Maybe you're a skeptic. Excellent! --as long as you're an honest skeptic. If you are, you're an exceptional person --a skeptic who's willing to consider and follow the evidence wherever it leads! Most skeptics offer all kinds of excuses to avoid doing this. Frankly, (to paraphrase the title of a book you may wish to get) “I don't have enough faith to be an atheist.” Ah, yes --you can't be an atheist without having faith in this non-god (idea) in whom you don't believe. And yes, Christianity is founded upon a sufficiency of evidence to warrant faith in God, and in Christ in particular. If you're still interested, it's time to put all your presuppositions on the shelf and start an examination of the real factual evidence. It's time to debunk the Christian “mythology,” or to follow the evidence to its logical and most reasonable conclusion, and perhaps (gasp!) even reach the point where you can no longer deny Him.

It now appears to me that the evidence for God --yes, scientific evidence apart from any religious consideration, as well as historical-- is so specific, so overwhelming with no alternative theories of any real merit (by the admission of top-ranked secular scientists who are still hopeful that maybe something will still be discovered to rescue their apparently doomed secularist theories)--

--yes, it would now appear that the only reason a person can reject Intelligent Design in favor of Naturalism is that of being ignorant of the facts of science, or an unwillingness to believe in Intelligent Design regardless of the facts, for whatever reason, and this is neither scientific nor intelligent.

If your thinking is rooted in the ideas of 19th century criticism, or even those of the first half of the 20th century, please be aware that while many scientists still believe in Naturalism and its theories, few scientists today believe in much of its supposed "evidence," although it's still being taught in science textbooks. The evidence these scientists are producing today is mind-boggling, and it points convincingly to Intelligent Design with no significant opposing secularist theories.

If you wish, email me and I'll get you started on what you'll discover to be a journey out of Naturalism's Land of Oz and a return to the real world. Do you think you're up to this? Or do you have excuses to avoid an honest, objective look at the evidence? Your choice! May God give you wisdom in place of a secularist agenda.

Rod

Other articles by Rod:
The Tomb of Jesus... And Mary, and Son Joseph?
How to Take Over a Country without Firing a Shot
The Danger of Christianity to Secularism