The Origin of the Modern Round of Terrorism

 In anticipation of receiving the book by Raymond Ibrahim entitled The Two Swords of Christ , I have been studying up on Islam again. My previous studies have led me to believe that Islam is a Satanic manifestation of corrupted Christianity. I think the break came during the controversy over the Arian heresy. The followers of Arius believed that Jesus was not divine. The Nicaean creed was written to affirm in no uncertain terms the Orthodox belief that Jesus was God and that the one God was three persons, Father Son and Holy Ghost. Beyond believing the Trinitarian Godhead, the idea cannot really be explained without falling into the trap of other heresies. It is something we just accept. The disciples of Arius were driven into the Arabian desert rather than giving up their heresy. Such is the sin of pride.

Today, at the American Thinker James Zumwalt has an interesting post entitled Islam's anti-Western terrorist campaign triggered by a holiday song. It wasn't just the song, though. It was...horror of horrors...can I say it...dancing! And not just dancing, but dancing cheek to cheek!

It was 1948. Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian political theorist and revolutionary who was seeking to escape persecution in his own country, came to the U.S. to study at Colorado State College. He settled in Greeley, Colorado, where its residents sought to welcome him.

Locals invited Qutb to attend a church social. He did so, but witnessed something that turned him into a raging anti-West jihadist. So irrationally profound was the impact upon him, it caused him to return to Egypt in 1951, committed to promote a violent anti-West, pro-Islamist ideology.

What possibly could have occurred at—of all places—a church social to so enrage him?

The fuse was lit when Qutb observed young couples take to the dance floor, embracing each other as a song was played. Writing about it later, he made his description of this event sound like a scene from a cheap sex novel. He claimed a “sedative atmosphere” permeated the room as lights were dimmed and the band played.

The song was a popular 1949 hit that won the 1950 Academy Award for “Best Original Song”. Its slow beat had couples embracing each other on the dance floor. Qutb reported the mere sight of these couples with their arms around each other caused him to feel scandalized by the “romantic, dreamy effect” and the “swarming legs.”

The name of the song triggering his disdain was one we still recognize today titled, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside!”

Gentle readers are encouraged to read the entire post. Qutb was a prolific writer and formulated what came to be called "Qutbism" or Islamic Fascism. This marriage between Islamic terrorism and Leftism, is what is taking the United States down currently, and it seems Europe will be lost. Both forces are Satanic in origin, seeking to destroy what God has built. And while I hate Islam and what it does to men, to women and to children, I pray for Muslims themselves. As Christ himself said, they know not what they do.

The difference between Judaism/Christianity and Islam can be seen in Genesis chapter 32, where Jacob wrestles all night with God. Let's just say that the battle was epic, but of course Jacob didn't win...or did he? God did indeed bless him and gave him a new name: Israel. What one may miss in this story is that God, YHWH, became incarnate as the second person of the Trinity to be able to wrestle with Jacob. It is this incarnate God who died on the cross for our sins and promises us eternal life with Him.

A lot could be written about just this one event, and indeed it has. But importantly, contrast this with the god of Islam. He does not want to wrestle with mere mortals but demands obedience. Islam means submission. But he is a trickster, and a deceiver so nobody knows where they stand with him. They just hope they do enough to make him happy. But is Satan ever happy?

New Evidence Confirms Jesus Resurrection

While I was raised in the Lutheran church, the fact is that I spent some time being, at best, an agnostic.  Why that is requires a bit of a story.

The pastor who confirmed us at the age of 13 (we had relatively larges confirmation classes then) so emphasized the many sins we all participated in, and the consequences of those sins, that I was convinced that God could never accept me. If He hated sin and sinners alike, He wouldn't want me anywhere near Him. Our pastor did not talk about the "grace" side of the equation. Believing that I was already sentenced to hell, I might as well have some fun along the way.  College of course did not help.  Getting married too young did not help either.  I got divorced 10 years later and remarried.  I was materially fairly successful, but I was also hollowed out inside.  There was no purpose to life.

That was the beginning of my search for...what I wasn't quite sure.  T. S. Eliot's poem Ash Wednesday haunted me during these years. There Biblical references abound, but secular readers and critics will not see them, which is too bad. We joined a church in Virginia, and I attended there for a while, but I was not ready to fully embrace the One who would save me. That required a bout with alcohol addiction. and a book called The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel. Lee Strobel is a journalist and investigator who was initially atheist, but became a Christian on the basis of his investigation into the man Jesus.  Strobel pointed out that the canonical writings in the Bible were written within 60 years of the actual events by eye witnesses to the events.  This is better than many other texts that are readily accepted though they were written hundreds of years after the facts contained in them.

All that was many years ago now. I passed on Strobel's book to another who was seeking something he could not define. But Strobel is still at it. You can see a video of an interview of him here. I hope gentle viewers will watch it.

To the Glory of God

 Helen Louise Herndon, in an article at the American Thinker today reminds us all that there is a right way, a Christian way, to act in times when the world seems to spin out of control. The article is titled Resist Evil Without Pride and Without Hatred.

I must confess that too often I have been guilty of pride and of hatred. I am sometimes proud that I have a greater understanding of the Biblical truth of Jesus Christ. But of course, what I have is what I have been told and taught. I have a great body of people who share and reinforce the same ideas. Someone born in, say, Iran who finds the truth of Christ has much greater faith and greater courage than I, who just follow where I am led. Is it any wonder that they believe as they do when they have been taught to believe that way from the day they were born? Clearly I haven't any reason to be proud since this great gift has been handed to me. I have done nothing to earn it.

Few Muslims are willing to debate, and frankly, why should they. Christianity has been put through the ringer by both atheist and Christian scholars, and has come out the other side stronger than ever. Islam is only now under the same scrutiny, and it is showing itself to be utter nonsense. I take some pride here too, but again, I have not done anything of which to be proud. And archeological evidence keeps turning up that show that events mentioned in the Bible happened where and in the way that the Bible says they did. Now knowing that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed as the Bible says they were does not prove that God did it. That is a matter of faith. It always comes down to faith, and even that I have only because He blessed me with it. So, I have no reason at all for pride, no reason to boast. It has all been given to be as a great gift.

I have also experienced hatred for things done to others by Muslims. When Raymond Ibrahim mentions the burning of Coptic churches in Egypt for instance, I feel my sense of indignation rising. When I hear of 70,000 Nigerian Christians being tortured and killed, I feel hatred for these people. It is the same when I hear of Syrian Christians being tortured and murdered.  But then, how can one blame others for believing what they are taught. Do I not do the same? Indeed, my real hatred is for those who continue to push a Leftist agenda, when history shows that it has failed each and every time. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler, Mussolini, the Castro brothers, and Venezuela, it always ends in misery. It even failed in the United States in places like Oneida, NY. And yet the Marxist dream seems to find willing adherents in every generation. But hatred is not the answer.

In the book of Luke, Chapter 22, verse 36 Jesus tells the disciples to sell their cloaks and by a sword. The disciples respond that they have two, and Jesus says that is enough. We interpret this to mean that we need to combat the evil in this world on two levels. One is on this plane of existence with the material weapons of this world, the other is spiritually with the weapons of the spiritual world. We should certainly have and be ready to use guns and other weapons if needed. But more often, we must act, as the villagers in the story Herndon wrote about acted, to defend and save others through the giving of ourselves "for the glory of God."

As these two concepts progress in my own thinking, both lead to the same goal: “To the glory of God.” Whether Christian or Jewish, as people of faith, seeking to save a race of people chosen for extermination, an unborn child from premature death, a society from bigotry and racism, and antisemitism, the family unit from extinction, or current political violence, we must be ever mindful that the battle of spiritual warfare can only be waged with spiritual weapons and spiritual wisdom.

Between the Left and Islam, Can the West Survive?

 Andrea Widburg has noted that the West in general, and the United States in particular are under attack from two sources: the Left and Islam. She lays out her case at the American Thinker in a post entitled 21st-century Armageddon: Across the West, something evil this way comes. Each "religion" is using the other.  The Left is using Islam as its military wing and as foot soldiers, in addition to terrorist groups like Antifa.  Once in power, the Left plans to dispose of the Muslims.  Widburg's money though is on the Muslims.  For its part, Islam is using the Left's open borders and immigration policies to further its conquest of the whole world. Again, once they are in power, the godless Left can be disposed of.

For almost 2,000 years, the Christian faith has been the backbone of Western society. Growing from the Jewish Bible, the Catholic Church shaped Europe. Eventually, both the Catholic and Protestant faiths found their way to the New World, carrying with them the Bible and European values.

Although imperfect people often used Christianity for bad ends, it was still the moral force that led to a world where its respect for the individual led to unparalleled prosperity for all, along with previously unimagined safety and rights for women, children, and other vulnerable people.

Over the centuries, Christianity faced down Islam, which emerged from the Arabian desert in the 7th century. Unlike Christianity, Islam is doctrinally a religion of conquest. Christ advocated persuasion through words and deeds. It was human rulers who added conquest to the mix.

By contrast, the Koran, which represents the unchallengeable words of Mohamed, the “perfect man,” mandates that Islam’s believers strap on their swords (and, today, bombs and guns), and go forth and murder people into “submission.” It has a special animus for Jews, since they offended Mohamed by refusing to accept him as their messiah, but it’s very clear that, eventually, all must yield to its violent dictates.

Let's stop right there for a moment and note that we are actually talking about two very different gods, here. The God we read about in the Bible, YHWH, is the Christian God. Jews and Christians both worship YHWH. While He is no pacifist, he also does not condone murder, either on a personal level, or state sponsored. So Christian jihad is not in the cards.  Persuasion is.  At the same time, he insists on self defense and thus condones "just war." The Muslims' idea of convert or die is anathema to Him. By contrast, the god of Islam sanctions all sorts of behavior that YHWY finds abominable including pederasty, rape, stealing, murder and I could go on. I think it is fair to call Islam Satanic.

Just as Satan apes God, so Sharia is the ape of the just law of God. But Sharia is just a bunch of tribal rules writ large. Rape, raiding and murder of other tribes was just the norm in ancient Arabia, and these were rewritten as something you now do for your god. How great is that? And if you raid, and rape, and kill enough, you get 72 virgins who are ever new, and you will never tire out. How great is that? Islam is obviously a false religion, but its promise of infinite sex in the next life is enough to get men to kill and be killed.

Europe’s love affair with socialism started with the French Revolution, which was the antithesis of the American Revolution. The American Revolution enshrined individual liberty derived from a Biblical creator; the French Revolution was a ferociously anti-religious statism. The American Revolution created the most successful nation in history, a success Americans freely shared with the rest of the world. The French Revolution created...um, modern France.

Marx and Engels took socialism to the next level. They believed that an all-powerful state would eventually fulfill people’s material needs, allowing them to become their own gods, freed from the limitations of Biblical morality—a morality expressed in the Seven Noahide laws, the Ten Commandments, Jesus’s teachings, and Paul’s ministry. In the modern era, people are also being told that their state-derived god-like status will relieve them of the burdens of human biology itself.

Socialism, however, did not create Paradise. In the 20th century, it created 100 million dead in concentration camps, gulags, killing fields, battlefields, and the black hole of chronic poverty, starvation, and tyranny. It has never worked. But the true believers did something very clever: They gained access to the West’s media and education systems. And so, despite socialism’s unending list of failures, it has an equally unending source of acolytes.

All together, the United States is under extreme attack from Leftists, who advocate for criminals, illegal aliens, unlimited abortion, drug gangs, and on and on. Add to that we have now within our borders, indeed within our Congress itself, Muslims who advocate for the destruction of our laws in favor of their tribal laws. Can we survive? Ultimately, it is all in God's hands. Let us hope to be worthy of being saved, because we can not do it ourselves.

The Sun Causes Earth Temperatures to Rise and Fall

 We are a little over a month away from the UN's big confab on climate change known as COP 30, or the 30th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Brevity is not the UN's strong suit. Prior to that event, you will hear all sorts of drivel claiming that the "world will end in 10 years unless we do something now!"  Naturally, that something is always to stop using fossil fuels.

The use of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas necessarily produces carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4).  Thus, burning fossil fuels is a very grave sin according to the climate alarmists.  But, "very important people" such as Leonardo DiCaprio and John Kerry will fly to Brazil in their private jets to lend a hand to the COP 30 proceedings, thus adding yet more CO2 and CH4 to the atmosphere.  While there, they will dine on sumptuous meals while back home, we can barely afford hamburger.

Note, that I do not begrudge these people their private planes.  I would own one of I had a need for it.  The problem is not that these people fly all over in private jets, but that they do so while lecturing the rest of us who use automobiles to get to work every day that we should give up our cars and drive horses and buggies or just walk.

Anticipating the onslaught of climate alarmism, Douglas J. Cotton has a post at the American Thinker entitled Why climate models fail. They fail, in that they cannot replicate past climates, because their premises are flawed. Cotton is not, as you may have guessed, a climate "scientist" but instead views the climate problem through a physicist lens understands a field called thermodynamics.

Mainstream climatology models are fundamentally flawed because they ignore a now established physical reality: gravity — not radiative forcing — governs the temperature gradient in the troposphere. This gradient arises from gravity’s direct influence on individual air molecules, slowing those with upward velocity components and accelerating those moving downward. The result is a vertical stratification of molecular kinetic energy — what we measure as temperature.

To visualize this, consider a sealed vertical cylinder, initially devoid of air. Introduce air molecules through a central aperture. Those that ascend lose kinetic energy (cool), while those that descend gain it (warm). This produces a stable temperature gradient — an equilibrium state of maximum entropy — where the sum of kinetic and gravitational potential energy remains constant with altitude. There are no unbalanced energy potentials; the system is in what we physicists call thermodynamic equilibrium (not to be confused with thermal equilibrium).

Thus, what drives the surface temperature of the earth is not a gas that represents 0,04% of the atmosphere, but the Sun itself. Try as we might, there is nothing we can do to change the Sun.

The Government Cannot Always Protect You, But It Shouldn't Keep You From Protecting Yourself

 Over at Ammoland today, Sean Malony has an article entitled The Second Amendment: America's Timeless Equalizer for the Weak and Vulnerable, that makes the point that the Second Amendment to our Constitution is as relevant today as it has ever been:

The Second Amendment matters today for the same reason it mattered in 1791: government cannot always protect you, but it should never prevent you from protecting yourself.

Gentle readers should go and read the article in full. Yes, it is preaching to the choir, but the choir needs preaching to in order to keep the faith in the face of constant propaganda opposing the faith. But I am done debating these issues. I doubt I have changed a single mind other than my own. But the choir still needs to be preached to.

Trump Hates Both Sin and Sinner, as God Directs

 I know, I know...I have been harping on the threat of Islam for the last week or so, and you come here for gun news.  I'm sorry, but there appears to be a reason for it.  Douglas Schwartz today at the American Thinker has an article explaining Why Trump Hates His Enemies. Now, I don't know if Trump is that familiar with the Bible or not, but in the Psalms we learn, as we do elsewhere as well, that God hates His enemies, and expects us to hate them as well. The fact that God forgives men who are repentant and loves them does not cancel out the hatred felt for both the sin and the sinner.

Who preaches hatred while eulogizing “a missionary”?

Trump spoke deliberately.

He’s preparing America for war while placing enemies on notice. He doesn’t support understanding the sinner and seeking to reform him. He hates the sinner and the sin.

So, President Trump hates the people who support the murder of Charlie Kirk. Good for him. But his hatred goes further. It extends as well to the Islamist who are planning war against the United States. Of course, they frame it as vengeance for things done to them. But, just like a bully, they started it and then look at defensive reactions as somehow out of bounds.

Schwartz presents an abundance of evidence that Islam is planning an attack on America comparable in scope to that of October 7, 2023 on Israel, but scaled up to America's giant size. In many ways, it sounds much like Kurt Schlichter's imagined story line in his book The Attack. But this assault will feature the Bin Laden sons for Al Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah and who knows what other Islamic terrorist groups. They have been training, sneaking into America, strategizing how to turn our system against itself. They will use our technology against us. Note that they never build or use their own stuff, because they never build anything. Instead, they tear down. Even the great wealth of the Saudi's is only because the West needed oil, and Western corporations went and drilled for it, transported it, refined it and distributed its products, while paying the Saudi's for the privilege.  We're funding the attack on ourselves.

Tomorrow Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth is scheduled to meet with flag officers (those with the rank of general or admiral.) Some commenters have supposed that he should have a zoom call instead. But Hegseth is correct here. He doesn't want anyone hacking into his call, and he has learned that electronic communications are not secure. Schwartz points out that if Trump attends, that will also be a signal that war is imminent.

Sarah Adams, Jane Doe, etc. aren’t wild conspiracy theorists. Shawn Ryan (a former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor) hosted her multiple times on his podcast, as well as interviewing Trump, Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, Tom Homan, etc. He isn’t Tucker Carlson promoting crackpot agendas advancing our enemies’ objectives. Lara Trump has also interviewed Adams. Congressional representatives Tim Burchett, Elise Stefanik, and Eli Crane are among those warning about upcoming terrorist attacks. Al-Qaida training camps are flourishing under the Taliban, reconstituted under Hamza bin Laden’s leadership, Osama's eldest son. Individuals such as Sarah Adams or Laura Loomer promulgate information gleaned from open sources or intelligence community leaks. Trump possesses the highest quality intelligence. When he restores the War Department’s name and convenes his military leadership, this means, unlike Pearl Harbor, 9/11, or Abbey Gate, intelligence isn’t ignored, resulting in reactive responses. This time it will be proactive.

Note any threats Trump issues against Middle Eastern officials while attempting to preempt or respond to attacks. Iran, the Taliban, al-Qaida, and Qatar’s leaders may soon experience turbulence.

Gentle readers should get a cup of coffee and read the entire article, as well as check into the hyperlinks. Some of them are quite long, so break it up if necessary. But prepare, as much as you can. If you have a permit, or live in a Constitutional Carry state, carry always. Keep your head on a swivel and stay safe. Remember too, that God put us here for such times as these. We don't want to disappoint him, but remember too that He is always in control, and He will win our battles. We must trust in Him.

Update:  Gentle readers are reminded that the Left is working with the Islamists to bring down America.  Afterwards, they will no doubt fight among themselves, but for now, the enemy of my enemy is my frenemy.