Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Belloc, the Prophet. This Ain't Pretty

If you think that what's happened in Paris and Brussels is a shock, you haven't read Belloc.

...During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Mahommedan world fell under a kind of palsy. It could not catch up with our rapidly advancing physical science. Its shipping and armament and all means of communication and administration went backwards while ours advanced. At last, by the end of the nineteenth century, more than nine-tenths of the Mahommedan population of the world, from India and the Pacific to the Atlantic, had fallen under the Government of nominally Christian nations, especially of England and France. 

On this account our generation came to think of Islam as something naturally subject to ourselves. We no longer regarded it as a rival to our own culture, we thought of its religion as a sort of fossilized thing about which we need not trouble. 

That was almost certainly a mistake. We shall almost certainly have to reckon with Islam in the near future. Perhaps if we lose our Faith it will rise....H. Belloc, 1938 quoted at 1 Peter 5

Well, pace my Lut'ran pals, Europe began losing its faith when Luther (et.al., Zwingli, Henry VIII, Calvin) rose in rebellion against the Church.  If you disagree--and I expect you will--then PJBuchanan has a few words for you:

...Consider the idols to which European Man has burnt incense since losing his faith: Darwinism, Marxism, Bolshevism, fascism, Nazism, now globalism — the idea of a secular paradise where mankind’s needs are met by the state and people spend their lives consuming cultural and material goods until the time comes for the painless exit....

You Prot friends need not remind me that Catholics, too, have fallen for this hogswallop; all it proves is that Catholics can lose their faith without (formally) leaving the Church.

Meantime, Paris, Brussels, and coming to a theater near you.

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