God's Temple: Genesis 1

The Bible portrays God as creating the universe as his temple. The temple is perhaps similar to what we would recognize in the Capitol of our domain—the USA. The governing of the universe is God’s function. The material aspects are important but not the focus of Genesis 1. The focus is on the authority of God to preside over the functions of the material world. This is analogous to the way the government of the USA or any of its states functions. The politicians are not focused on industry, supplying utilities such as water and power. They may regulate these material systems but they are not concerned with pipes and wires or concrete and steel as such. The politicians are concerned with getting all this “stuff” of society to function in ways that help human life to flourish. In Genesis God looks over each aspect of the world and says, “It is good.” Good here does not mean morally good, but functionally good. God creates light in terms of the sun, the moon, the galaxies and says, “Yes!!” In other words, it is functioning the way God intended. Sort of like us when we try to make something to function (an article of clothing, a computer program, or an engine, etc.) and light up with joy when we get it right and it does what we intended it to do. “Look at this—it works perfectly—I am so pleased!” When Genesis portrays God as proclaiming, “It is good” it means something like this: “Light—Yes!” “Mountains, oceans, and weather—Yes!” “Animal life—Yes!” “Human life—Yes! Yes! Yes!” God is presiding over the universe. “The Lord is in his holy Temple—let all the earth keep silence before him,” says the Psalmist. Stand in awe. God knows what he is doing. Look around at everything. “The heavens declare the glory of God and the earth shows his skill!” The cosmos is God’s throne and the earth is his footstool. This is like the feeling I have when I stand in the Capitol Building in Washington or visit the White House. These venues are not about the material aspects of our lives but about the ordering and regulating and superintending the purposes for which all the material aspects of life exist. It’s not ultimately about making stuff but about making sure stuff works in a beneficial harmony. The glory of biblical religion in contrast to other religions is this. As John Walton points out in "The Lost World of Genesis One", the religions predominant at the time of the writing of Genesis, portrayed the relationship of the gods and humans differently. In other temple-focused religions, such as in Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, the gods create people to be their slaves. People meet the needs of the gods. In the Bible, God has no needs. The cosmic temple (the universe) is created for the people he wants to be in relationship with him—enjoying fellowship in the royal domain. God takes care of everything needed. As Christians put it, “The chief end (purpose) of mankind is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” As God says to Job and his sophisticated friends, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth—tell me if you know so much!” (Read the Old Testament book of Job, chapters 38-42 to gain a sense of God’s ability to preside over creation in ways that we are incapable of.) Psalm 50 has God saying that he does not want anything from us. God has everything. “If I were hungry, would I tell you, when I already have everything that exists?” God invites us to trust him and to give thanks—to be in fellowship with him. Jesus said we are God’s children, not slaves. That is why God tells us what his plans are and how much he loves us. God also entrusts us to be managers of portions of his domain. This is what is meant by human dominion over other creatures. We are to take care of what belongs to God, not to us. We can use resources to meet our legitimate needs. But we are not to exploit or to damage what is ultimately God’s. On this point, Jesus told a story about a bunch of managers who lived it up while the owner was on a long trip. They trashed everything while satisfying their own desires. They mistreated other servants and made a big mess. Jesus assures us that when the owner comes back he will sort it all out and punish those who deserve it. His point is obvious. God may let us have our way for a while. But there is a day coming when he will hold court and impose justice so that everything in his domain will be fair in the end. If we want to know God person-wise, we should not get hung up on the mechanics of the material world as if this were the purpose of the Bible. The main purpose is to resolve the dysfunction in our relationship with God. As God reigns over all from his seat of authority, so he is to reign in our hearts. His desire is that we return his love. That we find joy in God’s presence, both now and in the life to come.

Real Clear Theology Why should we be in the dark about God and our relationship to him, when it is so plainly laid out for us in the writings of those whom Jesus instructed? Followers of the Way of Jesus should grasp this with clarity. Yet it seems that every generation—perhaps every person—needs to see the light afresh. The key question is this: how can we get in a right position with God? I’ll not go into this question as it relates to eastern religions here, but leave that for another day, since it requires explaining an entire worldview that is based on a fundamentally different way of thinking about the world and our place in it. What I have to say is for those of us who live within the western worldview that stems from Judeo-Christian assumptions and the scientific enterprise that flows from that worldview. Jesus revealed God to us. Christians say Jesus was God—and that he came in human form to rescue us. Do we need to be rescued? Do we want to be rescued? Obviously we need to be rescued. The human race is in a mess—always has been throughout our long history. More pointedly, I as an individual need to be rescued. While I may look good compared to some others, before the all-penetrating eyes of God I am not holy, not righteous, and hence not fit to be in fellowship with God. To use Jesus’ term—I am lost. Lost in my sins. Lost in my delusion that I can make myself acceptable to God by trying harder or being sincere. Sweeping away these fatal misconceptions is the first order of business. As with illness, the diagnosis must be accurate. My diagnosis is this. I have some more or less minor problems that I can fix by proper effort. I will admit I have sinned against God. I will say I am sorry to God. I will do better in the future. I will go to church and learn how I can improve my performance. I will take the sacraments. Why not? I’ll be baptized. I’ll pray. I’ll admit my sins and take Holy Communion. I’ll donate some money to the church and to the poor and be all set. All this will prove that I have done what is required. When my time comes I will present my ticket at the Gate of Heaven, show all the stamps and punched holes of my good deeds, and they will have to let me in. What is the true assessment of the preceding? I am delusional—to think that God will accept that. It’s like training for the Navy Seals thinking your sincere hopes and best efforts will work when you cannot meet the actual requirements. The true diagnosis is much, much worse. I am dead. I am dead in my sins. Some regimen of therapy is out of the question. One does not massage a corpse. Nor inject medicine. It takes a miracle of God to bring the dead to life. The Raising of the Dead—hope for the hopeless. The followers of Jesus insisted that the only way a sinner can be accepted by God is through grace, mercy and faith with no addition of the dead sinner’s religious efforts. God has not asked us to do anything prior to throwing ourselves on the mercy of God. We plead only the merits of Christ and none of our own. None of my own. I come empty-handed. I can present nothing to God to influence him to accept me. Everything I am and have is of no value in the matter of inducing God to accept me. As God looks upon me I must realize that God has every right to reject me. That is what I deserve. In fact, I have condemned myself already. A moment’s reflection is all I need. I have condemned myself already. I have no right to be treated differently than my treatment of others. And just how have I treated others? I have been nasty to others in many subtle ways. Sometimes not so subtle. In short, I have sinned against others. And I have sinned against God. In fact I stand in a posture of rebellion against God. I have not loved the Lord my God with all my heart, with all my soul and with all my strength. I have put myself at the center of my affections for my whole life. It has always been about me. Even my pathetic efforts toward God and for others have been to please myself and make myself feel good. And the truth is, God knows this full well. So what does God require of me before I come to Him? Nothing. As the poet put it, “Nothing in my hands I bring, simply to the Cross I cling.” I come empty of anything that could put a claim on God. I am naked except for the rags I have stitched together to cover my spiritual disgrace. This is what those who knew Jesus insisted on. We are spiritually penniless. Nor is there any basis for me to make a claim that God must help me. God owes me nothing. I know that God has made promises to help the helpless. But can I insist he favor me? No. No more than I can go to a generous friend known for kindness and insist on my request for help being accepted. It is up to the donor alone. I know this by my own attitude when I pass by a row of panhandlers and beggars. No one of them can justly say that because I helped someone else I am obligated to give to him also. God knows this. God has taken it into account. God does not have to accept me. It is up to him only. And God has found a way. Why? Why does God bother with us? Simply because he loves us. It is all due to the kind of person God is. He has no obligation to save us. He does not have to answer our prayers. He is sovereign. He is at liberty, constrained by nothing outside of himself. Whatever he does is fair. We are the ones who are unfair. Want to point fingers? Point at the mirror. Think about it. We have rebelled against God. We have all lived life “doing it my way.” If we get what we deserve, it will be instant damnation—exclusion from the presence of God. That means exclusion from light, love, and joy. For God is light. God is love. In his presence is joy forevermore. That God has not yet sealed our self-imposed fate is due only to his mercy. It is thus foolish for me make an appeal to the justice of God. Justice is exactly what I do not want. I do not want God to administer his justice fairly, for I know that would be my doom. There is but one ray of hope for me. I have been told that God is so merciful that he himself came in the person of his Son to take upon himself my sentence of death. Knowing I deserve to be rejected, knowing my plea has no basis to persuade, I throw myself on the mercy of this God who loves me and who proved it by coming to rescue sinners such as myself. “Encouraged by the goodness of God as shown in the death of his Son, to hope for acceptance and salvation.” This is faith. It is a true faith that transforms one’s whole character by the power of love. I now live for God—not just in religious settings—but 24/7. God is my whole life, not just a portion exercised when I do my religious obligations. Would you love God even if God did nothing for you? Do you love God for who he is—or just for what he does for you? If your whole world fell apart, would you still love and worship him? If God took away your money, your friends, your health—even your life, would you still love him? You and I have taken God’s stuff— resources of nature, money, the gift of life and health. When he came to earth for us we even took his life. But the light of his love for us never flickered. That’s what he is looking for in you and me—our love—a love that turns over everything to him. Nothing less. That’s the deal. Are we there yet? Do we want to be rescued?

The Shelf Life of Civilizations

The way I look at it, everything has a shelf life. I am aware, for example, that there is an expiration date in my personal DNA—I just haven’t found it—and I am not looking for it, either. But, as the old guys used to say, sooner or later I will “go the way of all flesh.” Philosophers have said this about civilizations, too. Civilizations are born, often through great labor pains; they grow, mature, go senile, and then are buried in the dustbin of history. Forgotten except for people who write doctoral dissertations. Plato, Karl Marx, Oswald Spengler and many others have tried to discern the lifespan of cultures and nations, following Plato’s analogy that the State is the Soul Writ Large—in capital letters, so to speak. As Malcolm Muggeridge colorfully put it a few decades ago, every new social movement ends up like an old brontosaurus that one-day keels over and dies. “The End.” Think of all the once flourishing cultures that are no more, yet intrigue us as we uncover their remains. Incas and Aztecs, Egyptians and Sumerians, Aryans and Easter Islanders. The Mustang Kingdom of Nepal and the Clovis civilization of North America. Some seemed destined for immortality, such as the Roman Empire that persisted for a thousand years. The same for dynasties in China, India, and Egypt. Yet they all collapsed in the end. For me, the dynamics here are a mere matter of input and output. And the pattern is like the progress of a rolling hoop launched with a vigorous spin onto the landscape of history. Think of it this way. A group of people spins their hoop with great energy across the topography of time. Each revolution is a generation that comes and goes but perpetuates the momentum of its civilization. There are ups and downs along its path. There are obstacles that it bumps over or wobbles around—natural disasters, plagues, internal revolts or external wars. But the hoop rolls on—for a time. All the while the system is ageing—to switch to a biology metaphor. Flushed with success in its early years, it begins to soften as it enjoys the fruits of its youthful energy. It begins to get flabby—more appetite than muscle. Outsiders are soon hired to do the hard work. Once gritty fingernails are now polished. Calluses are replaced by a soft elegance on hands at the ends of arms with no biceps. Many are able to outsource military duties and escape a sacrifice that might cost them their life. In the last days money begins to run low, enemies grow bolder. Now in its dotage, the energy ebbs, inviting either an inner decay that proves fatal or a coup de grace by external opportunists eager to bury the remains and start a new civilzation. So the corpse goes back to the dust; the hoop founders and falls to the ground, never to roll again. In philosophic terms, the values that created the society tend over time to be forsaken. Out-take overcomes input. Social discipline weakens. Traditional values no longer drive most people. Social energy flags. The law of social entropy sets in. Marx thought that the hoop of history could roll forever upward and reach the plateau called Utopia where political change with its messy conflicts breeding crime and war would cease and humans would roll their hoops for cultural advances only. (This is a form of utopianism that so far has failed everywhere it has been attempted.) Others thought that the hoops would always roll upward to greater evolutionary heights as humans evolved to nearly divine proportions. “Every day in every way we are getting better and better.” (This theory is labeled meliorism, of which progressivism is a contemporary example.) Still others say that the hoop rolls only downhill, with occasional brief uplifts. (The technical name for this is primitivism: the "good old days" theory.) I go for a combo theory: things get better technologically, medically, and the like, but slowly go downhill morally and spiritually, all the while cycling through the chaos of the ins and outs, the ups and downs of cultural change. Another law of human nature that is constant is that of unforeseen consequences. Sometimes good surprisingly comes from destructive sequences. Sometimes evil arises from seemingly benevolent or at least harmless actions. I say unforeseen. I do not say unforeseeable. Many of the trendy changes we now see in social norms and structures are spinning the hoop downhill not uphill. If we would we could discern this. But we tend to ignore things that we wish were not there—like the people I know that would not go for a medical test that was recommended. Several of them are now dead, I am sad to say. To get to the present state of the world, it seems to me that we are sliding down a slope to a very real precipice that could (not must) bring us to a cataclysmic social event from which humans might never recover. Let me explain. 1. We have seen ever greater catastrophes as the technical power in our hands increases. Example: the next world war would likely make all other wars seem benign by contrast. We are now on the edge of a possible doomsday scenario, when nuclear conflict could, as some put it, bomb us all back into the Stone Age. 2. We are now one global community such that a pandemic that eludes our clever attempts to keep the bacteria and viruses at bay will collapse and decimate the global population in unimaginable ways. Who knows what percent of the world population might succumb? 3. Or there could be a financial crisis in the global network that would collapse the fragile economies of the world like a house of cards. 4. Or, God forbid, it could be a combination of these apocalyptic woes. For me, I expect a combination Tsunami of Troubles. When economies dissolve and disease thereby runs rampant, violence is inevitable. Given the track record of human nature, when push comes to shove, this seems unavoidable. At that point, the horrors hinted at in the Bible's Apocalypse (Book of Revelation) come true as things unravel in, pardon the term, biblical proportions. Our hoop is already lurching down slope with a steep descent ahead. Bill Cosby put it this way in 2011. After summing up his frustration with people who excuse wrong behavior, blame others, and want more from the government, he admits he’s old and he’s tired, and he won’t be around too much longer. “But mostly, I’m not going to have to see the world these people are making. I’m just sorry for my granddaughter and her children. Thank God I’m on the way out and not on the way in.” Is this a great comedian going sour due to age and bitterness? Or is this a man who sees what’s just around the corner? While I am not an end-time guru—I personally hope that normal history goes on a long time so more people have a chance to repent—there are uncanny signs of the fulfillment of biblical prophecies about the end of history as we have known it. Just the sequence predicted there is stunning—from good to bad to worse. First comes a powerful message of peace symbolized by a rider on a white horse—the token of righteousness and justice. Next comes a red horse with war and slaughter in his train. Third is a black horse whose rider symbolizes economic ruin. The last horse is grey in whose track is disease and death. Decent people who have been killed by ruthless criminals in the chaos are crying out for justice. Along with these woes come natural disasters that terrify even the mightiest of the world’s powerful people. Meanwhile, God is protecting those who trust in him even though they suffer horribly for his kingdom’s sake. Next come a series of natural disasters that I associate with a cosmic catastrophe that could possibly come from a magnetic pulse from the sun. Wildfires on land and chaos on the oceans, followed by what could be a meteor that contaminates water supplies. Clouds from volcanoes darken the skies as things turn for the worse. All hell breaks loose. Insects explode bringing disease and pain in their train. Armies go forth to wreak havoc with what might be chemical and biological weapons. Finally God steps in just as all is about to be lost. The cosmic battle of God and good versus Satan and evil comes to a head. People are forced to turn against God or be wiped out. But in the end God’s enemies are brought down once and for all. History as we know it comes to an end and the kingdom of God breaks in and comes to fruition. The Son of God presides over the last judgment. Implacable opponents of God and goodness are forever separated from those who love God and have persevered through all the turmoil and persecution. The conflict is over for good. The great dance of joy, love and peace begins—life forevermore. Civilizations may have a shelf life. God’s kingdom is forever.

Worldview Lite: Making Robust Thinking Thinner

In our time people seem to prefer philosophy lite. Rather than think systematically, ranging over the landscape of ideas to be sure everything relevant is accounted for in a worldview, we often tend to take a few thoughts that we think are enough to dismiss alternative worldviews—just enough to think we have proved our point. Religion lite is what it comes down to for most people. Lets take a look at four influential worldviews—Christianity lite, Hinduism lite, Islam lite and secularism lite. In Christianity lite people pick a few ideas in the Christian worldview that they like and stop there—sort of like a buffet line. Such people often have no idea what a full-orbed Christian worldview looks like. Their view pretty much comes down to this. “Be good and go to church. Give some money and say prayers when you need something.” They have no clue that Jesus Christ speaks harshly against this attitude. He says that no one can follow him unless they radically deny themselves, make God their top priority, confess sin constantly, and sacrifice everything to God 24/7—yes, everything. Hinduism does much the same. The demonic horrors of the caste system that glosses over crimes and abuses now brutalizing millions of people are dismissed as aspects of a salvation credo that explains this away. There are exceptions. Many Hindus would not commit such injustices. They hold to Hinduism lite. But the caste system demands inequality—a level of inequality that results in the oppression of millions of low caste people who supposedly deserve their lot as the result of karma. They made their bed, now they must lie in it. Islam lite glosses over the dark side of the faith Muhammad brought to the world. Think of the crass cruelty of Allah against those who deserve hell, where flames burn off one’s skin only to have it grow back to be burned away again and again forever. Or ponder the injustice of Islamic theocracy that necessitates peace by force, not persuasion. Muslims have full rights—Christians and other unbelievers do not. Many Muslims gloss over such things in Islam because Islam does not encourage the faithful to be critical of the Qur’an and Hadith. “Believe, obey, and fight” seems to be a motto that puts Muslim basics into a slogan. For this reason Islam could not long sustain its golden age of philosophy that peaked nearly a thousand years ago. Islam as an intellectual force has been in decline ever since. Secularism lite is also prevalent in our time. “Take the best of non-religious thought and compare it to the worst of religion—this seems to be the modus operandi. Dismiss powerful arguments for creation with a wave of the hand, so to speak, rather than grappling with the weaknesses of humanism and the strengths of Christian philosophy. Marxism lite is a version of secularism that similarly rails against the shortcomings of capitalism and bad religion while blind to the assumptions of its own worldview and to the death and destruction coming from its own dark side. Integrity demands that we take an open-minded look at the strengths and weaknesses of every worldview, including our own. Anything less would be logic lite that cuts corners to achieve a comforting closure. The light of knowledge will never come through lite thinking. We must do an analysis of all worldviews that honestly appraises the strengths and the weaknesses of all belief systems, including our own.

Why Christianity Bugs People

Why Christianity Bugs People—Especially Christians. As a professor of World Religions I field many discussion posts about religion. I know that fewer and fewer people in our society understand the basics of the Christian religion. That doesn’t bother me. It is my job to help them gain understanding through the textbook (Huston Smith’s classic: The World’s Religions) and my lectures. What tempts me to withdraw from society and become a desert monk is this: most who claim to be Christians do not know their own faith, the faith that Jesus and the apostles promoted at the cost of their lives. In my courses I try to distinguish between Christianity as a popular religion and the Good News as Jesus presented it. I refer to this original Christianity as the Way of Jesus just to make my point. Christianity is what Jesus said and what those who knew him heard from his own lips. Over the centuries his ideas have been “improved upon” by well-meaning followers so that one now needs to peel back layers of interpretation designed to deepen our understanding. That is a legitimate enterprise. But in my view the average person in our culture, even among church attenders, has a distorted view of what Jesus actually taught. What follows may be simplified but it is not simplistic. I want to get to the heart of the matter. In one sentence I assert this: Christianity has become a religion rather than a unique way of life. It may well be the most misunderstood movement on earth. Christianity the religion is fairly easy to live with. The Way of Jesus is not. It upsets every life it touches. As a popular religion Christianity is just another path to God. You believe in God as creator. You try to live by his instructions—mainly the Ten Commandments. If you are nice and polite God will answer your prayers and then you will have a nice life. No need to go overboard here. Nothing embarrassing. Or threatening to your plan for your life. You want God on your side. Maybe you read the Bible, maybe not much. Maybe you go to worship with others (church), maybe not or not much. As long as you are a mostly decent person and agree that God exists and that Jesus taught the truth and made a way to heaven, you are good-to-go. Not so fast. This is more like Islam than Christianity. But it is what most people, Christians and non-Christians, believe. Contrast this with what the message of the Way of Jesus truly is. 1. You are not good in God’s holy eyes and you have no chance of making it to heaven by being a good person. None. All people keep on sinning in the sense of falling short of God’s standards. That shows we are sinful to the core, not just weak people who commit a sin here and there now and again. 2. There is no way you can balance the scales and thus make the grade. The standard is sinless perfection, not trying your best. Illustration: some rock climbers climb cliffs (like Half Dome in Yosemite National Park) without ropes. Such freestyle climbing requires zero mistakes. You cannot do it if you are missing an arm or leg. Humans climbing the cliff to heaven can never reach that destination on their own because we start off as cripples to begin with. 3. The whole Gospel message tells of how God reaches down to save us from inevitable destruction. We must trust him and him alone to carry us. We are as helpless as a paraplegic is in a Triathlon. Some severely handicapped people have completed a triathlon. But someone else did all the work for them. That’s what Jesus, the Son of God, does for anyone who will yield to him. Check out Dick and Rick Hoyt (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH943Az_lPQ) for an example that illustrates what I am saying. 4. When you embrace this it is like being born all over again into a new life. God gives himself completely to you—every breath you take, every neuron that fires in your brain is a gift God gives you just because he cares. On this basis God requires that you live for him every moment of every day 100%. You cannot wait to find out everything God wants you to become and everything God wants you to do. You are united with him. God’s goals are your goals. God’s desires are your desires. God’s plans are your plans. It is to be 100% God and zero percent anything else. You are going to stumble on this track; you are going to want to quit. You are going to suffer hardship just like a marathon runner does, but you are not going to give up or take an easier route. You may even get killed, just like a solider serving his country. But that does not matter. God promises he will get you to the goal no matter what—and the finish line, the goalpost, is in heaven. 5. To stay fit and on course you are going to think of Jesus every day. You are going to love reading his words and those of his first followers of the Way in the book called the New Testament. You are going to find yourself thinking of him many, many times each day and you are going to listen to him and speak to him in prayer—in fact your attitude will be like that of mother with a newborn—you will always be alert for his voice. You will fail in this process many times, but God is for you. 6. You are going to carry out his mission. He will use you, usually in partnership with others who are sold out to him. You will agree that all your time is his, that all your energy is his, that all your money is his. So you are going to give 10% of your money at the start and a lot more as you advance, as a general rule. You are going to join with others to pray, to grow in understanding, and to serve on the Lord’s Day and at many other times. You are always on duty—just as you would be if you were a parent or a spouse. You are in battle 24/7 while you live on earth. Jesus will give you time to rest and be refreshed. But your life, your time, your treasure are all provided by him and for his cause.It takes time to grow to this level. But that is your goal. 7. This life will produce a sense of joy you won’t believe. You will know this is what you were created for. To love, to serve, to enjoy God’s presence is your highest fulfillment. God created you for this. You will know that your reason for existence is to glorify God and to enjoy God forever. And you will gladly pour out your life into other people. Of course people who have not been transformed by this grace and power of God will not understand. To them you are now a fanatic. They think you are now too religious, when in truth you are not religious at all. It is not about religion. It is not about trying to do enough or be good enough to get goodies from God, the Great Vending Machine in the Sky. If you follow the Way of Jesus this world is no longer your home. You are not there yet. But God is transforming you little by little. You enjoy what God gives you and you struggle with the mess and heartaches. You enter the sufferings of Jesus. But you are looking for a kingdom whose builder and maker is God—a home eternal in the heavens. He’s leaving the light on for you. That is enough.

Review of Goldman "How Civilizations Die"

The Sky Is Falling! The Sky Is Falling!

Is David Goldman hatched from Chicken Little?

His book: How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying Too) Regnery 2011

What a shock! I recall teaching a course at the college about the future (pretty dumb, I know) some years ago when everyone thought the threat to humanity was over-population. Then Paul Erlich’s best-selling doomsday book predicted the collapse of everything under the weight of too many human beings on Planet Earth. Not even Mother Nature could save her chicks. So I guess Chicken Little is right—the sky is falling!

Goldman predicts just the opposite—population collapse. He presents several “Universal Laws” along the way. (I have included some of these “laws,” but not all.)

How can that be?

Preface

In the developed world the birth rate is below replacement level. In some places it is unlikely to recover from a point of no return. This is true, surprisingly, for Islamic countries. Before taking comfort in this, think. Desperation can lead to irrational belligerence. Radical Muslims, unable to reverse the trend away from their archaic aspirations can already sense that they have nothing to lose. Law #1 A man or a nation on the brink of death does not have a rational self-interest. (x)

Many examples can be noted of nations going on when all hope of winning is gone. Examples: the Guarani of Brazil have a huge suicide rate, as do Canadian Indians. (xii) The Arab suicide bomber also suffers from a loss of faith in the future. Islamists see their culture trickling into the sands of the modern world and often would rather die fighting. Law #2 When nations see their demise as a near-term outcome, they perish of despair. (xiii)

Female literacy also plays into this outcome. Women bear children mostly when they see them as assets for old age or when they have a hopeful religion. As women in general and Muslim women in particular gain education and find their religion repressing them, they are disinclined to have children. The global crisis, un-recognized by most academics, is at root spiritual. It's the theopolitics of Augustine versus the nihilism of Hobbes. Ecopolitics views atomized man motivated only by the pursuit of material advantage. (xvi) “When faith goes, fertility vanishes, too.” (xv) Yet why does “one religion (Christianity) seem to inoculate people against demographic decline in one place (America) but not in another (Europe)?” (xv) Apparently some kinds of faith will survive in modernity and others will not.

Sociologist Eric Kaufmann says “The weakest link in the secular account of human nature is that it fails to account for people’s powerful desire to seek immortality for themselves and their loved ones.” (xviii) Unlike the past when people regularly held funerals even for infants, we think that we can duck death completely. Law #3 Contrary to what you may have heard from sociologists, the human mortality rate is still 100 percent.

Religions attempt to overcome mortality albeit in different ways. Political science often ignores religion as secondary to a more rational “survival instinct.” But what humankind seeks is meaning that transcends death. “Secular rationalists have difficulty identifying with the motives of existentially challenged people—not so much because they lack faith, but because they entertain faith in rationality itself and believe with the enthusiasm of the convert in the ability of reason to explain all of human experience.” (xx) But many nations are now acting in an irrational manner that puzzles secularists who need to heed Law #4 The history of the world is the history of man’s search for immortality.

“Culture is the stuff out of which we weave the hope of immortality—not merely through genetic transmission but through inter-generational communication.” (xxi)

“In the absence of religious faith, if our culture dies, our hope of transcending mere physical existence dies with it.” People then live in a twilight world and embrace death through infertility.

Law #5 Mankind cannot bear mortality without the hope of immortality.

“America is the great exception to the demographic collapse of modern times since we are an immigrant nation—a propositional nation—founded on a philosophy, rather than an ethnic or geographical nation.” xxii

Part I: The Decline of the East

Chapter 1. The Closing of the Muslim Womb

“If demographic winter is encroaching slowly on the West, a snap frost has overtaken the Muslim world.” [1]

In Europe rural life, with its high fertility, it took 200 years to decline to a negative population rate. Iran, Turkey, Tunisia, and Algeria have taken a mere 20 years—the fastest in human history. It is already too late to reverse this, and the results will be catastrophic, since the per capita income of these nations is half or less that of Europe. No cushion is in place to soften the fall. The working population of America will likely increase over this century while that of Western Europe will decline by 40% and Eastern Europe and Asia will fall by 65%. “This is the great underreported story of our time. Population collapse…is threatening to disrupt the world’s economy and…political stability.” (3)

Former Soviet economies are in a death spiral. Pension costs will explode while revenues implode in many nations. Those who preach the USA’s inevitable decline “should be sentenced to a year’s hard labor at the United Nations data base.” (3) The USA alone has the workers needed to shoulder the burden; the rest of the world does not.

In the Muslim world things are grim. Their population decline is several times sharper than the world’s average. This is pernicious since such nations have no public pension systems. The average age in Muslim nations is now around 20; by 2050 it will be over 40, resulting in a graying population worse than that of Europe. The key factor driving this is literacy. University educated Muslim women, who grew up with four or five siblings, now have one or two children. Only in the poorest of Muslim nations is fertility higher—Mali, Niger, Somalia, and Afghanistan.

Those Muslim countries that have high birth rates are usually too poor to care for their people and those having low birth rates are unlikely to be able to provide for the elderly. This is perhaps similar to Europe. But “Europe tends toward pacifism because it knows it has nothing to gain from aggression, Iran tends toward belligerence because it knows it has nothing to lose…. Modernity has attacked Muslim society in its most vulnerable organ…, the womb.” (7)

The presidents of Iran and Turkey are apoplectic about a population dearth destroying their countries as indicated by Persian and Turkish press and blogs. “The real risk to world security is not the gradual triumph of Islam by demographic accretion, but an era of instability…and aggression impelled by despair.” (8) Women want to destroy our nation, says Turkey’s President Erdogan. This worries him because the most fecund ethnic group in Turkey is the breakaway and hopeful Kurdish people.

Iran worries about a tidal wave of the elderly. The steepest fertility decline on record is in Iran in the last two decades. (10) The deposed Shah had boosted education of women by allowing teachers an exemption from military service; hence the decline in fertility rates among educated Iranian women. “The vast majority of educated young Muslims are alienated from the traditional Islamic culture…. They have voted with their wombs.” (14) The flip side of this demographic suicide may result in a jihad against the West.


Chapter 2 Faith, Fertility, and the World’s Future

Phillip Longman (The Empty Cradle) notes “people of faith have children while secular liberals do not.” (15) This was hinted at long ago when Christians catapulted from a tiny minority in the Roman world to a position of dominance in merely a few centuries. And today, behind a façade of religious control, lies a death spiral in Muslim nations. Yet secularized faiths in Christian Europe are also dwindling. (17) How can we explain this?
Another anomaly also surfaces. The over-population scare of some decades ago was an aberration because the death rates plunged almost immediately due to modern medicine, while birth rates fell more slowly. Scientists from 58 nations in 1994 published a declaration of impending population-driven doom (predicting nearly 8 billion humans by 2050). That “may have been the dumbest idea that ever occurred to a group of smart people.” (18) Why? Because population is likely to start falling in the second half of this century. The United Nations “low variant” model (the more likely model) predicts a sharp decline in world population from 2050 to 2100. The problem will then be insufficient population.
In the past infant mortality and the rigors of rural life induced women to bear children through most of their reproductive lives as required for survival. That motive is now gone. The only remnant of this mentality is found among highly religious groups such as the Amish and Orthodox Jews. (21) Today a child is seen not as an asset but as a cost—averaging nearly a quarter of a million dollars, not including college education. That means there is no economic reason to have more than one or two children—or any children for that matter. The U.N. forecasts a world fertility rate of “just above two children per woman” by 2050. That is below replacement level. The difference may seem small but it is “the difference between having your nose half an inch above the waterline and half an inch below.” (26)

Chapter 3 What the Arab Revolutions Mean
Will Europe become Eurabia? If so it will not be from immigration but by inundation—Muslims fleeing chaos in Arab North Africa. [28] As Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt slide into chaos many will flee. Egypt is running out of food and the money to sustain its massive imports of wheat. [29] Its imports in 2011 were $55 billion while its exports were merely $29 billion. [30] Meanwhile tourism is dropping at the same time that money sent from its diaspora falls as surrounding countries fail. Tunisia seemed to be doing well. But its statistics are misleading—most of its college degrees are worthless, for example, and the work prospect of its graduates is bleak. Ageing dependent classes explode while the number of workers to support them shrinks. [33] Mohamed ElBaradei, himself Egyptian, says the Arab world is “a collection failed states who add nothing to humanity or science.” [35]
Things are equally bad in Syria. “Arab dictatorships kept a large proportion of their people in rural backwardness as a matter of social control, a failed policy that set in motion the present crisis.” [39] The rise of China exacerbates the problem because prices do not fall in bad times since China is wealthy enough to keep buying grain at a higher price than mid-East nations can afford.
One may be tempted to seek comfort in the uprising of Egyptian youth. However the students are not very numerous and their degrees do not impress multinational companies. Most of those who get a job are stamping papers in some government office. [41]
Muslims in Europe soon adapt to its lower birth rate. While still higher than the birth rate of natives, the birth rate among European Muslims has already declined by about one child per household and is expected to fall below replacement rate soon. [43] The exception is Great Britain—slated to become the most populous European country by 2050. [44]
Conclusion—Europe is not likely to become Muslim dominated through population expansion.

Chapter 4 Sex, Drugs, and Islam
Traditional Muslim mores are breaking down. Iran suffers rampant drug addiction and prostitution “on a scale much worse than anything in the West.” [45]
University educated women turn to prostitution, according to a repressed Tehran report in 2009, as a temporary method of getting their education. [46] This does not include women pressed into “temporary” marriages. Law #9 A country isn’t beaten until it sells its women, but it’s damned when its women sell themselves.
More generally, less than a third of the 15-19 year-olds say they are satisfied with their situation.
Islam may forbid alcohol consumption, but people break out the booze when flying beyond Muslim air space. [Reviewer’s observation here.]

Chapter 5 “They Want to Destroy the Turkish Nation!”
2038—one generation hence. That is when Turkey goes bankrupt and Kurds become dominant. [53] As Turkey races to keep up, its women become more educated. But this leads to fewer children and to population decline. Meanwhile the Kurds keep producing children. Ambivalent as to whether the country is European or Asian, secular or Islamic, Turkey suffers from a malaise. Fethullah Gulen, in exile in the USA, controls billions of dollars with which to push Turkey toward a fundamentalist Islamic state. By western standards, “he is utterly mad,” as his “science” consists of “a magical world of jinns and sorcery,” whose power enables tiny roots of plants to split rocks. [63] It is a sort of alchemy applied to the political realm.
Reports in the western press optimistically heralding a modernization of Islam in Turkey are unfounded. Even many Turks “are convinced that Erdogan is biding his time…waiting for the right moment to launch an Iranian-style revolution.” [65]
Others think this unlikely since Turkey is resource poor. Unlike Iran it has no oil. Even if Erdogan is a bit flakey, he is no fool. Law #10. There’s a world of difference between a lunatic and a lunatic who has won the lottery.
Many Turks have a solid western education and threaten to leave Turkey if Islamic law is imposed. Indeed, many have already fled. [68] Many women, despite more education than their counterparts in Egypt, are unemployed. [69] All of this adds up to a looming disaster as fertility declines, population ages, and the economy sputters. [70]

Chapter 6 The End of Traditional Muslim Society
The Muslim world is going directly from adolescence to senility, bypassing maturity. [73] This from Ali A. Allawi, former Iraqi Minister of Finance, Defense, and Trade and a former Oxford professor now at Princeton. Islam, he says does not change with modernity but is retreating into a private sphere. Muslim women have no place to go between subservient traditional roles and a clean break for modernity. [75] Turning away from traditional family life, their fertility “crashes to the ground.” [75]
The traditional Catholic communities in Ireland and Quebec lost out to modernity and their birth rates collapsed, while other Christian communities made the transition. By contrast, Islam elevates tribalism to a universal level despite its claims to be universal, and thus it “sanctifies the petty tyranny of tribal society.” [75]
Wife beating can be used as an example. In the Judeo-Christian West the individual enters a covenant with God that elevates the rights of individuals over any king, local official, or family member. [76] Islam is more like the paterfamilias arrangement in ancient Rome, with the male head of the unit functioning as a sovereign in his household. No Muslim authority has repudiated Sura 4:34 in the sacred Koran, which allows a husband to admonish his wife, to refuse to sleep with her, and finally to beat her. This allowance sometimes escalates to justify honor killings, arranged consanguineous marriage, and female genital mutilation. [76]
Some argue that the passage implies the goal of reconciliation, first by speaking and last by spanking, not so as to cause fear or humiliation or to compel. Nevrtheless the father/husband is the “lord of his castle” just as the civil leader is lord of the clan or tribe or state. [78] Abstract concepts such as individual rights have no purchase. “Sharia in principle cannot be adapted to the laws of modern democratic states, for it is founded on the pre-modern notion that the family is the state in miniature and that the head of a family may employ violent compulsion just as the state does.” [78]
In the West wife beating is a crime, even if some women tolerate it. The archbishop of Canterbury tried to soften the British court’s response to Sharia on this point by pointing to the Jewish Halakah. But as far back as the ancient Babylonian Talmud Jewish husbands are forbidden even to humiliate a wife, “for any blessing found in his home is only on account of her.” [80] In Judaism and Christianity the norm for marriage and family is based in a covenant that God himself makes with each person. Omnipotent Allah does not stoop to such a level.
The pernicious result is that as many as 5000 women and girls are murdered annually in Muslim nations, according to the United Nations Population Fund. Killing or wounding a wife or female relative guilty of adultery is not prosecuted in Jordan and gets light sentences in Pakistan, Syria, and Turkey. This number dwarfs honor killings among Hindus. Statistics on female genital mutilation are astounding in African Muslim nations—as high as 90% in Somalia, Sudan, and Egypt. [82]
And even though Islam teaches a single worldwide Ummah of sisters and brothers, marriage of cousins is very common, showing loyalty more to family and tribal blood relationships than to foreign Muslims. [85]
Finally, Islam has never achieved self-criticism. The Koran functions in Islam not so much like the Bible does in Christianity but as Christ—it is divine and hence the ultimate and unquestionable authority. Hence scholars cannot give critical interpretations of texts. The result is that Islam intimidates scholars who want to test various theories about the origin and meaning of the Koran. It is unable to accept anything but an absolutist interpretation, much to the dismay of western scholars who would like to engage Islamic scholars. [88]

The Islamist Response Chapter 7
Islamic jihad is the response to the tension between modernity and Muslim dogma.
With millions of Muslims now moved from rural settings to huge cities it is hard to keep modernity at bay. In 1900 Cairo’s population was 600,000. A century later it was 8 millions. [89] Some Muslims have taken advanced degrees in the West yet have often continued to promote, covertly if not openly, jihadist causes. [90]
Islam has little to lose in challenging the West. Can it take the West down with it? In the near term of 40 years Muslim nations may be more dangerous as they perceive less hope for their future. Loss of faith can result in passivity (Iran’s high rate of opium addiction and its upwardly mobile women funding their goals by prostitution) or in aggression as in the suppression of dissidents in the summer of 2009 (and in Syria in 2011).
Iran seems to be desperate to achieve a glorious future while that is possible. It needs nuclear weapons to secure that ambition. Meanwhile its youth are aping Western ways and creating a birth dearth. Turkey is also becoming more belligerent. Are these signs of desperation?
The United States may be the last standing industrial democracy of any significance at a time when Muslim nations are risking a last-ditch effort to recapture their perceived former glory. Could the Islamists take America down with them?

Part II: Theopolitics
Chapter 8: Civilizational Failure and Suicide.
Law # 12: Nothing is more dangerous than a civilization that has just discovered it is dying. [99]
People hold their lives cheap when they no longer believe their culture will endure. Generally life sustains hope when people believe their lives have meaning beyond their own brief life span. [99]
One notable example from the past: in one area terrorist assassinations became so common over time that newspapers quit mentioning them. Nearly 17 thousand killed in five years. Where was this “jihad”? In the Russian Empire in the early 20th Century, according to Anna Geifman in Death Orders, published in 2010. “There is no such thing as rational self-interest for people who believe they have nothing to lose.” [100] Communism is similar to the religious fanaticism of Europe during the Thirty Years’ War—it is messianic. The economic determinism in the materialism of Marx is as dangerous as religious messianism.
Law #13 Across epochs and cultures, blood has flown in inverse proportion to the hope of victory.
Cases in point. The American Civil War continued for 18 months after the decisive battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg. During World War I and World War II (both Europe and the Pacific) combatants suffered immense casualties after all hope was lost. The atomic bomb saved the Japanese from fighting to the last man in its effort to defend the faith of the emperor cult. The same might have occurred in Europe in the last decades of the 20th Century had not Reagan called the bluff on the Soviets by ordering Pershing Missiles to Poland and building the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars.
While many historians knew that the USSR could not sustain competition with the West, what they failed “to grasp is that Russia’s weakness made it aggressive.” [107] But SDI provided “the bullet between the eyes.” [108] No Soviet leader would risk annihilation of the homeland in a gamble to annex the productivity and resources of Poland and Germany. Once Pershing missiles “were installed in 1983, and once the U.S. was embarked on the Strategic Defense Initiative, Russia had lost the Cold War.” [109] Andropov over-ruled the hawks among the Russian leadership. “The Politburo of 1983 was not composed of revolutionary fanatics but of bureaucratic survivors of the Stalinist terror….” CIA Director Bill Casey quipped at the time, ‘These guys must be exhausted over there. These damn Politburo meetings go on for hours—by the time the guy gets back to his dacha he just wants a drink. All they want to do is enjoy being at the top, and we’re not letting them do it.’ ” [111]
Now it is Iran’s turn. The U.S. could crush Iran’s military capacity in days from carriers sent to the Persian Gulf. Yet Iran, as it faces running out of oil, continues on its quest for nukes and plans a nuclear base in Venezuela. Why? Because its “decline is irreversible” unless it can annex oil in neighboring countries. This posture is more dangerous than that of France in 1914, the South in 1861, and the Soviet Union of 1981. The Ayatollah Khomeini adds the irrationality of his apocalyptic mind by proclaiming that Islam either will result in the victory of Islam over the whole earth or its martyrs will gain eternal life—a win-win proposition. Appeasment in this case will be futile. As we see from the World Wars, the Civil War and the Cold War, “the strategy most likely to avoid war in the Middle East is not to reach out to Iran but to humiliate it.” [113]

Chapter 9 Four Great Extinctions
Three Great extinctions are behind us. Islam is now caught in the fourth.
The first Great Extinction saw the demise of Mycenaean, Hittite and Egyptian civilizations a thousand years before Christ. Lesser cultures have vanished also. “Linguist David Crystal estimates that somewhere between 64,000 and 140,000 languages have been spoken over the course of human history.” [116] All these once living languages in which mothers sang lullabies and warriors shouted their chants are stilled forever. The known great civilization of the Eastern Mediterranean region vanished forever in the course of a couple of hundred years, never to rise again.
The Second Great Extinction destroyed Hellenistic civilization two centuries before Christ. The third was the fall of Rome. What were the causes?
Usually historians point to economic or technological causes—famine, disease or superior weaponry. But ancient writers “offer a different explanation: these ancient civilizations destroyed themselves from within before the conquerors came.” [118]
Aristotle attributes the fall of mighty Sparta to depopulation. [120] Its oligarchs concentrated wealth into a few families that failed to keep up its population and fell into debauchery. Sparta eventually became a destination attraction for the Roman Empire and its tourists. Law #14: Stick around long enough and you turn into a theme park.
In the ancient world the quest for eternal life was the quest for eternal youth. Hence the prevalence of pederasty bolstering the hope of eternal youth, since going down to the realm of the shades was to be avoided at all costs. The search was more for perpetual youth than eternal life. Yet Hades would swallow even the gods eventually. The pagans made their gods in their own image only larger than life, hoping for help in achieving success. Absent that, as Sophocles said, “it is better to die, and better yet never to have been born.” [122] “The richest culture of the ancient world would reach its apogee with its epitaph.” [122] Law #16: Small civilizations perish for any number of reasons, but great civilizations die only when they no longer want to live. Greek religion seeks to flee death for a time, not to overcome it. Sexuality drifted away from procreation. Population declined. [123]
As Athens followed on the path to oblivion, its philosophers and playwrights pointed out the irony of its swirling currents. But there was no prophetic voice to signal a way out of its demise. As Kierkegaard said, Socrates was an ironist not a prophet. [128] Aristotle had insight but no remedy for the endless swings between democracy and oligarchy. And his defense of abortion and the exposure of children unwittingly contributed to Athens’ demise. [129]
Polybius (220-146 BC) comments on the causes of Greece’s fall to Rome. “In our time all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and…decay of population…though there were no [long] wars or serious pestilences….” [129] The cure was within our own hands as men became “perverted to a passion for show and money and the pleasures of an idle life, and accordingly either not marrying at all…or refusing to rear the children that were born, or at most one or two out of a great number, for the sake of…bringing them up in extravagant luxury.” [130] The remedy, he says, is in our own hands—change our values and pass laws for the preservation of infants. Like China today, the 200 BC census in Miletus showed 188 sons and only 28 daughters. Strabo noted that Greece is a land deserted. “Roman soldiers camp in abandoned houses; Athens is populated by its statues.” [130] The same pattern would be repeated by Rome itself, as Theodore Mommsen showed in his History of Rome, a work that got him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1902.
Between 1800 and 1900 another demographic winter was coming to Europe. Once the largest European country, “the population of France simply ceased to grow.” [134] Both Shaw and Spengler saw this coming. Spengler wrote “It is all the same whether the case against children is the American lady who would not miss a season for anything, or the Parisienne who fears that her lover would leave her; or an Ibsen heroine who belongs to herself—they all belong to themselves and they are all unfruitful.” [136] America may prove the exception due partly to its religious history and culture, while Islam, on the other hand, seems to be vulnerable.

Chapter 10 Islam: the Arabs as Chosen People
The Koran casts Mohammed “as an Arab prophet who embodies the characteristics of Moses as well as Jesus. [138] Recently Sven Muhammed Kalisch, a Muslim theologian at the University of Munster, claimed that Mohammed is a mythical figure, not a historic person. [137] Conflating Moses and Jesus, the emerging Arab empire sought to establish itself as “the Chosen People under Islam,’ [139] Like Moses and Jesus, Muhammad also returns to his point of origin as he flees to Medina and returns in triumph to Mecca, his birthplace, mimicking Moses migrations and the flight of the child Jesus to Egypt. The religion of the Jews and Christians is thus transformed into the religion of the Arabs. [140]
Whether this thesis is cogent or not, it shows that religion is never merely theological. It is existential in that it connects to the context of a given time and place. Hence it produces those who will accept martyrdom rather than apostasy. And when collectivism of family, tribe, and sect persist, individualism is unthinkable. “For this reason every institution of pagan society, emphatically including family and clan, must collapse into the totality.” [141]
Ancient Israel and later Christianity provided an alternative to pagan social order. [142] Its covenants are not merely applicable to the group as a whole but provide the individual with rights that supersede the claims of the group. No longer can the paterfamilias expose his children, nor a husband beat his wife. “The defining experience of Judaism and Christianity is alien to Islam. That is the love of a personal God.” [142] Allah can never bind himself to a covenant of love to mere mortals or incarnate Himself as a human being, since that would compromise his ability to change his plans as a sovereign ruler. For Christians and Jews God is good, not evil, even though his ways may be inscrutable as he ties himself to active participation in our history.
“Allah, by contrast, is beyond good and evil. His cosmic caprice determines everything ” [143] Allah could make us do evil, even commit shirk, for Allah is beyond covenants. While he “is described as absolutely transcendent,” actually Allah is a lot like us. This is what Franz Rosenzweig means when he terms Islam “a monistic paganism.” [143] There is a pagan purpose in Islam’s replacing the Jews with the Arabs.
Some insightful contrasts follow.
The Bible presents God as lovingly ordering a world that will fulfill our needs. The laws of nature are dependable. For Islam Allah can make any kind of world he wants and even change it precipitously at any time. In the Bible God “limits his own powers by granting to man what politicians later called inalienable rights.” Hence kings and cops cannot act arbitrarily because every individual is “protected by laws that no earthly authority can disregard. Allah is not a God of laws because he is not a God of love.” [144] Al-Ghazali (1058-1111) says that one can imagine that Muslims may “love Allah, but [it is] nonsensical to imagine that God loves Muslims.” Love implies a sense of incompleteness that Allah cannot logically exhibit. There is no law of cause and effect, whether of eating and satiety, fire and burning, medicine and healing, decapitation and death. God is the direct cause of every event. [145] There are no laws of nature.
The idea of a covenant-keeping God stems from the love of God who creates an environment that enables us to use reason to cope with the created environment and to be stewards of the productivity and beauty of the world. “Islam eschews reason.” [145] And the concept of Allah’s’ love (found in the Koran 16 times) shows that Allah ‘loves those who do him service.” The Bible says God loved us while we were yet sinners and gave himself as a propitiation for our sins. For Islam this is unthinkable. Jesus says we become beloved children of God, who is Abba—Daddy. By contrast the Koran says “Allah loves those who fight” in his cause. [146]
Christians and Jews pray to a personal God who loves them and even speaks to them through prayer and meditation. The devout sustain fervent trust in God even when adversity comes. Christians follow Jesus—and Jesus suffered hardship on this earth. They are to consider even devastating difficulties as but “slight momentary afflictions” compared to the glory that is to be revealed in them. (Romans 8:18ff.) Muslims come to prayer not to gain strength for trials but as a way to attain success. Allah rewards the faithful with success. [147]
“Islamic culture, though, has been singularly unsuccessful during the past seven centuries.” [147] While Islamic culture flourished for a century after al-Ghazali’s occasionalist view of creation was advanced it soon slipped toward the jinn-haunted worldview of Gulen. How can Allah grant success in the science-dominated modern world? In the last century why is it that Jews received 169 Nobel prizes (not counting the Peace Prize) and Muslims only three?
The Syrian poet Adonis (a pen-name) is a likely future Nobel laureate, who calls his work an “obituary’ for the Arabs, whom he says are extinct as a culture capable of impacting the modern world. Since the Koran is the final word, no further words can amount to much. [148] “If we want to be democratic, we must be so by ourselves. But the pre-conditions for democracy do not exist in Arab society…and cannot exist unless…religion becomes a personal and spiritual experience…” [148] Being free, he says, is a great burden. “You have to face reality.” In hierarchical Islam it is easier to glorify dictatorships.
Since Allah is One (tahwid) everything else is excluded; hence no doubts, no questions. Islam dictates the totality of life and thought. Allah speaks through the Prophet, regulating the details of life. Wives placate husbands, who are stronger by the will of Allah. Children follow the track laid out for them—often consanguineous marriage. Times of prayer are uniform in word and gesture. Prayer is “inherently collective.” [150] Jewish and Christian prayer, by contrast, is highly individualistic except for some ritual prayers in worship services. Among Protestant evangelicals, prayer is most often extemporaneous.
Ideas about sacrifice show the greatest difference between Islam and the Biblical religions. “At the heart of religion is the encounter with mortality,” rather than the secular view of religion as a belief-structure. [151] One stakes one’s life on the hope of conquering death. “Religious communities that forget this—mainline Protestants, Reform Jews, and liberal Catholics—fade away in a generation or two.” [151] “Despite the political scientists…communities and nations continue to define themselves by what they hold sacred, and when nothing more is sacred, they lose their reason for being.” [151]
How is eternal life attained? For Christians and Jews it by the gift of God based upon one’s overwhelming love for God that results in surrendering one’s total being to God. These “are not boxes to be checked on an ideological clipboard, but a matter of life and death.” [151] It is a sacrifice of one’s life to God, who sacrifices for his beloved people. “Each individual Christian and Jew must die to this world to gain the Kingdom of God.” [152]
Islam takes a different view, specifically repudiating the idea of substitution. It makes little of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son. No substitute is mentioned in the Koran. No grace allows one to bear the penalty of another. The faithful may sacrifice their lives for the community in time of war—jihad. Success in this endeavor is its own reward.
But Muslims have encountered repeated lack of success in its encounter with modernity—a crisis “expressed most vividly in the closing of the Muslim womb.” [154] And population decline in Europe ensues as its citizens incline toward self-adoration and a neo-pagan strain of nationalism that has “overwhelmed the universal impulse in Christian churches.” [154] European demographics “have never really recovered from the 1914-1918 war.” [155]

Chapter 11 How Christianity Died in Europe
Rodney Stark, in The Rise of Christianity, says that Christian prohibition of abortion and infanticide contributed to its success” as a new religion. [157] Europe recovered from “post-Roman depopulation…with its final Christianization in the ninth century. Its modern depopulation began with the failure of Christianity a millennium later.” [157] The roots of that failure began in the seventeenth century with the savagery of the Thirty Years War and culminated in what Churchill termed another Thirty Years’ War from 1914 until 1945. [157] The former resulted in animal-like behavior as people cut down corpses of those hanged to use them for meat and robbed fresh graves for the same purpose. European nations lost up to half their population—all because so-called Christian rulers were bent on mutual destruction. “It was a war between Christianity and neo-pagan national idolatry, and Christianity lost.” Even nastier forms of nationalism would arise in the 20th Century. [160]
The root of this catastrophe lies in the superficial overlay of Christian observance upon the tribal realities of Europe. “Lightly baptized” people did not want to become one universal tribe. They wanted to make themselves the one chosen tribe—hence the hatred of the Jews in European history. [164] First the Franks, then the Spanish, then the Crusades and the Inquisition—all attempts to build a tribal kingdom of God on earth, each tribe considering itself the elect of God.
This pattern afflicted Europe well into the 20th Century as the Germans and the Russians and others took turns in declaring themselves the chosen of God, with some heroic individual exceptions such as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonheoffer. During this long march of death and destruction a tiny band of dissenters slipped away unnoticed. While the Pilgrims were children of their age, they had a vision which denied the statist vision of Christian faith. These radicals “espoused a primitive Christianity they believed to hark back to the early church before Constantine. They emphasized the conversion of the individual soul as a matter of conscience, rather the imposition of Christianity from the top down.” [173] The Pilgrims sought to build, not an empire defended by the armies of a king, but a city set on a hill whose light would shine as an example for all mankind. The individual would seek personal rebirth into the body of Christ.
“After two World Wars, the Europeans had failed at being Christians and failed at being pagans. Their culture failed tragically—which is to say that the flaws built into European culture at its founding ultimately brought it to ruin.” [176]

Chapter 12 Why Some Religions Fail in the Modern World
Islam is not unique regarding a crisis of faith in the face of modernity. Ireland, Spain, Poland, and Quebec “identified their Catholic faith by nationalist resistance to external (and sometimes internal) enemies.” Once nationalistic passions “dissipated, these pockets of faith and fertility made the transition to modernity in a remarkably brief interval.” [177] “The downward spiral of fertility in the rest of the industrial world overtook the little tide pools of faith, and religious observance fell to the minimal levels observed elsewhere in the industrial world.” [178] UN research shows that fertility in strongly Catholic countries fell sharply in countries where it was rooted in nationalism. “By contrast, faith based on individual conscience can and does thrive in modernity—although in the industrial world it thrives in the social mainstream today only in the United States and Israel.” [176] The birth rate in Ireland, Poland, and Spain has dropped rapidly.
Quebec provides a case study in the evaporation of traditional religion as a political force. In a few decades near the end of the 20th Century its traditional society fell apart. Fertility fell by two-thirds, nearly half of those of reproductive age chose sterilization, and abortion rose sharply. [181]
In Poland after the fall of communism, GDP rose sharply and fertility dropped from 3 or more children per couple to slightly over one. [183] Ireland has seen church attendance drop precipitously in the last quarter of the 20th Century, accompanied by a halving of the fertility rate from four to two.
While Spain was the last of European states to follow the pattern, it happened quickly. In the mid-1970s Spanish women had nearly three children on average. Within twenty years of Franco’s death in 1975, Spain’s birth rate was Europe’s lowest. This was the steepest plunge until that of Iran in the last 15 years.

Part Three: Why It Won’t Be a Post-American World

Chapter 13 Passing the Acid Test of Modernity
America is exceptional among developed countries in that its fertility has stabilized at replacement at the same time that Europe and Japan have passed the “point of no return on the road to senility and depopulation.” [191]
Late in the present century, if present trends continue, most of the great powers of the past will cease to function, while America will still be here in a hundred years.
The reason is this. Nearly twice as many Americans say religion is important to them as do Europeans. And religious people have far more children. One study shows that half of American women of childbearing age say religion is “very important” to them compared to about 15% of European women. In both America and Europe studies show that religious women produce children above the replacement rate while less religious women produce well below the replacement rate. [192] While immigrant populations provide a temporary exception to this the religious factor is nonetheless significant. University of Chicago researchers release the following:
1. One of three families with no children claims to be “not religious;” while one in eight families with four children claim to be non-religious.
2. Among families with no children, 41% say grace before meals; 62% with four children say grace and 86% with eight or more children say grace.
3. 45% with no children strongly agree there is a God who watches over them, compared to 80% of those with four children.
4. 50% of childless families never take part in religious activities, while only one third with three children are non-practicing. [194]
To refine these statistics, mainline denominations have slightly more than one child per female, while evangelical Protestants tend to have large families. In the modern welfare state child rearing has become an act of altruism since the society provides for the needs of the elderly, not their children. So why spend a quarter million dollars raising a child, when one can spend it on vacations, fashion and plastic surgery? [195]
But societies cannot survive without altruism—those willing to die defending their society. Richard Dawkins and the “new atheists” theorize a genetic predisposition to altruism. Yet a study of the Jews (the most homogenous gene pool known) shows that secular Jews are the least altruistic as regards raising children and religious Jews show high altruism. “An observer looking at the configuration of American religion circa 1970 might well have forecast the end of faith in America, for churches and synagogues that embodied faith at that moment in time were in decline. But the fervor of evangelical Protestants, Pentecostals, and others has filled the vacuum left by mainline denominations, and Jewish orthodoxy is growing rapidly…mostly through its own fecundity.” [196]
“Two cultures are contending at the family level throughout the world: secular modernity and renewed faith. Secularists have few children and religious families have many.” [197] Despite secular blandishments, the Census Bureau projects the non-Hispanic population in America will rise another 10 million by 2050, compared to a 25% drop in Japanese population and a 10% drop in Europe. [197] Add to this the Hispanic factor and also the rise of faith in America and we have a snowball effect that should sustain and even increase American population. While America will face challenges, “Europe and Japan face a point of no return.” [198] Plagues used to weed out the weak and the old; modern demographics sustain the old while the youth needed to support them shrink in proportion. The proportion of Americans over 60 is expected to stabilize at “30 percent, while Europe’s will rise to 40 percent and Japan’s to over half.” [199]
“America was founded by radical Protestants who sought to imitate Israel’s mission…and succeeded in creating the only Christian nation that would survive the great wave of secularization and demographic decline of the past two generations. Remarkably the only other advanced country to sustain high fertility rates is the modern state of Israel.” [199]
Yasser Arafat once boasted that the womb of the Arab woman is the strongest weapon. In truth the opposite is the case. Arab birth rates are falling. Arab births in Israel are stagnant over a 15-year period ending in 2009 while Jewish births rose from 80,000 to 120,000. [201] This is highest rate in the industrial world. By 2080 Poland’s median age will be an unsustainable 57 while Israel’s will be 32.

Chapter 14 Europe’s Ruin and America’s Founding
“America is different because it was founded to be different. America remains a Christian nation because it overcame centrifugal forces of ethnic rivalry through a radical and unprecedented device: the creation of a new country founded on a proposition—rather than on commonality of language, race, or history.” [205] And this while Europe was committing suicide. At that time of war and bloodshed a “seed of what became American Christianity left Europe on the Mayflower.” [205]
We may think them foolhardy to leave Europe on such a risky venture. But England was closing a noose on their necks and Spain was trying to swallow the Dutch Republic whither they had fled. James I was still trying to get control over them in exile. European tribalism was not working out well. “The Protestant radicals sought rather to adopt individuals into a new chosen people in a new promised land. [208] This theme was stressed in Governor John Winthrop’s address in 1630 and alluded to in Lincoln’s reference to an “almost chosen people.” [209]
But America would come close to slipping into the pattern of Athens, Rome and other states that lived off the labor of others—a practice that led to their demise. The American South wanted to expand slave territory to the Pacific and then south through Mexico and even into South America. Lincoln rebuffed enticements to compromise. Soldiers of the South sang songs about their right to use their property as they saw fit. The North sang The Battle Hymn of the Republic, with all its Biblical allusions to justice. [214] This was a holy war appealing “to a supernatural guarantor of such rights—the God of covenants. Americans believed that God would avenge the violation of such rights.” [214] Lincoln was more like a Hebrew prophet than a political figure, as is plain from his Second Inaugural Address. [216]
But once Lincoln was in his tomb Americans decided they did not want to be a chosen people whose God would demand such sacrifice of them. “Instead they wanted a reticent God who withheld his wrath while they set out to make the world amenable to their own purposes.” [217] Louis Menard opines that the Civil War’s horrors pushed New Englanders such a Justice Oliver Wendell Homes and philosopher-psychologist William James from their Puritan convictions toward a “vapid pragmatism that has reigned since then in American elite culture.” [218]
Since that time the liberal wing of Christian faith leaves God idling his engines of justice on the apron of life’s airport while “we arrogate to ourselves the destiny of the world.” [219] Now mainline Christians whose forebears were on the cutting edge of reform are losing membership and perhaps their will to live as their birthrates dip below two children per couple.
But the idea of America’s special place in God’s providence has taken root among evangelicals—those within mainline denominations and even more among more recent movements such as Pentecostalism. These Christians are not interested in preserving territorial hegemony. It is the Biblical promise of life after death under the kingly rule of Christ that propels them to preach the Gospel worldwide and to found orphanages, schools, hospitals, and relief efforts globally. Even in closed lands these believers are winning converts despite the threat of death.
“These evangelicals see their lives as pilgrimage.” Their road map is that of ancient Israel, with parallels with the Jews’ exodus from Egypt and crossing into a new land. They “seek an intense personal identification with Jesus,” and a willingness to suffer as did he. [221] They insist on upholding the religious basis of America’s founding. They feel closer to each other than to those in their own religious communities that appear comatose to the voice of the Lord. They cooperate no matter what logo is on the sign in front of their places of worship.
It is now “pointless to argue whether the American political model is better or worse than any other. It is the world’s only successful model. It is not easily reproduced because the American model first of all requires the presence of Americans.” [222] Europe and Japan/Korea were given new life by Americans who reconstructed defeated countries. But they too are now on a demographic path to oblivion.
Philip Jenkins writes about the Global South as the locus of Christian expansion. Even a Muslim scholar concedes that 6 million Muslims convert yearly to Christianity. China now has over 111 million Christians despite its published policies on religion. Latin America boasts over 500 million Christians, almost as many as Europe. Africa has 389 millions and Asia 344 millions. These Christians look to America—but not merely at our political system or our culture, but at our vibrant expression of the Gospel as found in the Bible. They may grasp America better than political scientists do. “The vital issue at the time of America’s founding was a theopolitical question, not a geopolitical one: How does the individual human being stand with respect to immortality?” [227] Some may be able to ignore the question with modern anti-ageing techniques. But for fragile people in the Global South mortality is every day.
“Belonging to a people who transcend mortality—the People of God—is the alternative to membership in the doomed tribes of the changing world.” [227] An increasing number of the world’s people see that “Americans are those who select themselves in to the People of God. That is the aspect of the American character that the poor in developing Africa and Asia aspire to imitate.” [228]

Chapter 15 Can American Democracy Be Exported?

“If the rights of man stem only from nature and not from God…then the principles of a good society are a matter of deduction rather than faith.” [229] This implies that people can be taught how to build a good society just as they could build a skyscraper. That was “the premise of the Bush Freedom Agenda…to establish democracies in the Middle East.” [230] Bush naively thought that the success of democracy in Japan and Germany after World War II could be replicated anywhere. But there are two flaws in this expectation.

First, there is the demographic death of every country that Uncle Sam liberated after WWII and the Cold War. Second, every free election recently held in Islamic countries has “returned Islamic radicals hostile to America” to power. [232] “Most of the countries that owe their new democracy to American intervention will be much smaller (and grayer) by mid-century…(and) their national existence will be unsustainable.” [232] Evidently the nations that have been taken under the wing of US protection “do not breed in captivity.” [233]

Meanwhile the world is terrified of fanatics who are fighting desperately to hold on to worn-out cultures in the swirling tides of modern culture. As Keynes puts it, “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” [234] He is referring to Marx, or perhaps even more, to the “Enlightenment philosophy of Hobbes, which assumes an isolated individual preoccupied with physical survival.” The idea that people “might cling to a backward or even barbaric culture, because their culture offers them a bulwark against mortality—does not occur” to this Enlightenment philosophy. [234]

Goldman proceeds to outline a litany of failure in the Middle East regarding holding elections that would foster true democracy. A notable example is the reluctance of Saudi King Abdullah to meet with Maliki of Iraq. [239] What Bush did not realize is that democracy only works when there is an element of confidence that representatives will truly represent all those in their constituency and that there will be future elections to redress grievances. But all of that depends on a philosophy that assures that the rights of a citizen are sacred because they rest in a transcendent order—they “are God-given and therefore sacred. In short, democracy demands trust in an abstract idea of rights, and sufficient faith in the process to accept unfavorable outcomes. [240]

But what God?

Allawi writes, “Islam rejects the Western notion of individuality” as not “merely undesirable but impossible, an affront against the absolute sovereignty of Allah.” [242] The God of the Bible “limits his own power as an act of grace.” To Islam this is inadmissible. The individual has no autonomy, “for an absolutely transcendent God leaves no room at all for the individual.” [242] Even Rousseau admired Islam since Christianity gives us dual allegiance to what Augustine called the City of Man and the City of God. Rousseau “sacrilizes politics, which is made into an object of sacred devotion.” Thus his view is directly opposite “to the Pilgrim Christians’ politics and to their radical respect for God-given individual rights.” [243] An Islamic state, Allawi says, must be founded on sharia, which “presumes a single source of religious authority; that rules out a multi-confessional state. Let alone a secular one.” [244]

Muslims are abhorred by the immorality in American culture. Islam would not tolerate the blasphemous work of a Serrano or Mapplethorpe. Nor would the medieval state churches of Christian Europe. Why does the US tolerate such “art?”

Robert Putnam warns about “a public that is withdrawing from communal life, choosing to live alone and play alone. We are becoming observers of our collective destiny.” [246] And this impacts non-westerners even more harshly. Culture is changing so rapidly that Muslims may not be able to make the long leap to modernity. [246] Stanley Kurtz agrees that Muslims living within the duties of kinship and collective honor find democratic principles incomprehensible. Holding office should be a way of benefitting your people and disadvantaging your enemies, not of applying rules impartially to all. [247] Law #22 Optimism is cowardice, at least when the subject is Muslim democracy. [247]


Chapter 16 The Morality of Self-interest

Law #23 The best thing you can do for zombie cultures is, don’t be one of them. [249]

Augustine objected to Cicero’s assertion that a republic is “an assemblage associated by a common…law and by a community of interests.” [250] Rather, he said, the trait that affects survival is what a people love. [251] Rome fell because its loves changed from love of country to love of wealth and pleasure. This is similar to today when “the self-aggrandizing tribes of the world are once again turning from triumphalism to despondency and, as in the fourth century, willing themselves out of existence.” [252]

America has succeeded for it is “a country with the soul of a church,” as Chesterton once put it. “Individualism founded on God-given rights has triumphed over the alternative—the manifestations of the collective state—Rousseau’s ‘will of the people,’ for example, and Marx’s proletarian dictatorship, and the blood and soil nationalism that led Europe and Japan into the World Wars of the twentieth century. The only form of collectivism still embraced by a large part of the world’s population is Islam.” [252]

Goldman asserts that America has potential to fulfill Augustine’s theory “if the American republic is an assembly of people held together by a common law and a common love.” States that “suppress individual rights on behalf of…the collective will fail. Globalization and technological advance simply accelerate the pace of state failure.” [253] Even Chinese communism, while repressing traditional religions, seems to tolerate Christianity, now a tenth of its population. Why? Francesco Sisci attributes this to the fact that Christianity is open to the modern world and to science. [253]

It is America’s “love for the sanctity of the individual that, if followed, will likely lead to success; if rejected is likely to lead to failure." [254] Civil societies only change slowly over time. While America has the capacity to crush its enemies, such triumphalism will not solve anything. On the other hand, efforts of the Peace Corps and the hundred thousand Christian missionaries overseas are examples of efforts that are changing the loves of people in other cultures. [254]

Unfortunately “instead of the uncertain, meticulous work of containing failed states, nurturing prospective allies, and deterring prospective enemies, Washington has swung from a utopian effort to fix the world to the baffling pretense that the world somehow will fix itself if only America leaves it alone. The result is a self-inflicted wound to America’s world standing—to the anguish of our allies and the undisguised contempt of our adversaries.” [255-256]

Barak Obama took an unprecedented position in his United Nations speech of 2009 where instead of a determination to use America’s hegemony to rid the world of evil he expressed a determination to rid the world of hegemony. [256] Since then he has pursued a policy of placating the Muslim world. This seems to be leading to more of “failed states from North Africa to the Persian Gulf.” [258]

While technology and globalization give us a world that multiplies the “power of innovative individuals,” this has not touched the Muslim countries. Other than oil, the exports of the entire Arab world are less than that of Finland. Meanwhile once backward parts of Asia have become economic giants in one generation. In 2008 patents from the entire Muslim world were 133. Israel alone had ten times that number. “It is not only that the emperor has no clothes, but that the empire has no tailors.” [258]

Bush’s policies may have been naïve, but the belief that America is exceptional should be retained. Islam’s lack of interest in modern science and technology is married to a “religious establishment hostile not only to individual initiative but to religious freedom, the education of women, and other indispensable aspects of modern society.” [259] The result is that Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Pakistan are at near-term risk of state failure. To repeat a point, their loves produce frail and fragile states. And their weaknesses make them dangerous.” [259]

Using force against terrorism is within the definition of just war. “But there has been no greater folly in American diplomacy than the conceit that American intervention could make modern democracies our of states with a pre-modern civil society.” We may possibly have been right to get rid of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Hussein in Iraq. But to settle in to create a democracy in these countries was an overreach.

But the current attempt to “re-set” our relations with these countries may prove futile.

Goldman poses this contrast. Truman, against the advice of his entire cabinet, recognized Israel “because his reading of the Bible led him to believe the Jewish people had a sacred purpose in returning to their ancient homeland.” It seems Obama is now favoring Islamic nations. Is this the influence of the religion of his Kenyan father and Indonesian step-father, and of the culture that his anthropologist mother sought to defend against the incursions of globalization?” [261] Obama seems willing to gamble our policy on supporting “inherently unstable and potentially hostile regimes. It may be the most detrimental foreign policy decision taken by an American president in living memory.” [261]

Failure of other states certainly poses a danger to us. But the deterrence that proved effective in the Cold War came close to failing in the Cuban crisis and at other times. We should not forget that the Russians were more rational than Iran seems to be, for one example. Meanwhile we now find ourselves in a very dangerous situation. Our attempts at nation building are failing—fast. “Prospects for a state’s failure or success flow from the character of its people and its civil society…. “ We “should seek alliances with states that in some way approximate [our] own exceptional character—in other words that love what we love—employing our good offices to help them succeed after our fashion. And we should isolate and contain the maleficent influences of states that, repudiating our principle, love other things.” [263] This is a kind of Augustinian realism. Even as he accepted the failure of Rome in his day, we too must accept the likelihood of many nations failing in decades to come—in ethnic-bound Europe and Islamic states especially. The bulge generation will grow old and the birth dearth generation will be too feeble to support the coming burden. [264]

What, then, is America’s role?

“Foster friendships that will make the world a stabler and safer place.” Assist “other countries who to some extent emulate our founding principles.. We cannot implant this Augustinian love—for the God who grants men inalienable rights by irrevocable covenant—on barren soil. We can only respond where others embrace it of their own volition.” [264]

This means cutting our losses in Middle East nation building where our troops tend to become hostages more than peacekeepers. Their presence is detrimental to our interests.

It also means containing rogue states that threaten our security whether in the Middle East or in Korea.

Use our military to destroy enemy threats but not to occupy.

Let burgeoning India take the lead in South Asia—it has the resources to do so. [266]

Engage China selectively, recognizing its multi-ethnic character and the concerns that arise from that. Lead in the effort to keep a balance of power between China and Japan. [266]

Clarify our interest in Eastern Europe. For example, we have little obligation to countries such as the Ukraine, but much toward Poland, due to ethnic dissimilarities and shared values.

“Countries with whom we share a common love, in Augustine’s understanding, we draw near to us. Others should respect us, and, if need be, fear us. A nation that knows it has nothing to lose is a dangerous entity—for example, Iran. We cannot engage it. We shall have to ruin it. America needs to rediscover its own exceptionalism. Our nation was built of brands plucked out of the fire of their own ethnic cultures—individuals who chose to become Americans as the Pilgrims did, to flee the failure of their native countries.” [268]

While not a perfect country America is an example of what a good country can be. “Its founding proposition, the unalienable rights of human beings granted by covenant with the creator of the universe, offers hope to all the peoples of the world. But it cannot impose this proposition on peoples who are determined to destroy themselves.” We can do our best for others who share our national premise. “But as for the living dead among the nations, ‘We will not speak of them, but look, and move on.’” [268]