The Sword

(I realize this post kind of rambles: consider it a meditation out loud.)

The "middle acts" of both Judaism and Islam are stories of conquest. In Judaism, aside from Genesis which can be seen as a kind of preface, there is the story of how Moses got a message from G-d, led his people to freedom, and taught them G-d's ways. That's the first act. Second act is conquest: the Conquest of Canaan. Third act is arguably, how the Israelites fell away from G-d after the conquest of Canaan.

Where the Conquest of Canaan differs from the Muslim Conquests is, the Conquest of Canaan is a limited mandate. Basically, G-d has a very proprietary feeling about the Land of Canaan: it is HIS land. Now the whole Earth is His land, but the rest of that land has been given to other people who ignorantly worship the stars and planets and animals and such. The people in Canaan now are very very wicked and His own people, the Israelites, don't have land at all. So the Lord is going to evict the Canaanites from Canaan.

Rather violently. Your lease is up. Your hair has clogged all the sinks, all your toilets are backed up, your dogs have shit all over the carpets. GTFO.

This is however a very limited mandate for the Israelites. All along the path to Canaan G-d tells them, "this particular land does not belong to you, that particular land does not belong to you. Just Canaan. Don't conquer these other places. In Canaan though, it is definitely time to kick ass or chew bubble gum, and they are completely out of gum. So that is the conquest phase of Judaism.

In Islam, the angel talks to Muhammad and he starts writing down the Quran, which is somewhat of a lengthy process. The angel does not sit down and dictate it all at once, and it is not relatively straightforward like the Ten Commandments. Which, mark up a point on the scoreboard for the clarity and simplicity of the Ten Commandments. Anyway while Muhammad takes dictation and starts gathering a following, a great many people start getting pissed off at him. Much of his earliest teaching has to do with the core of Islam, which is expressed in the saying "lā ilāha illā allāh" which is that there is no god worthy of worship other than G-d. Well, absolute monotheism is bad for business in a place that derives much of its wealth from pagan pilgrimages.

As an aside, there is every reason to believe that today's Mecca was not that place. What is today Mecca was in that time period not even an insignificant bump in the road. It was not on a trade route. It was not a famous place of pilgrimage. It was nothing. It's not even properly inhabitable, except maybe for a few sheep. That place, which was a lynchpin of regional trade and a place known for a huge variety of pagan shrines and pilgrimage sites besides, was Petra. Petra was very likely the real Mecca.

Anyway, people got mighty pissed at ol Muhammad and he vacated the premises to Medina, which lacking an economic stake in polytheism converted to Islam. And then, his initial fight was just for survival. Lots of people in Mecca wanted to see him pushing daisies. So the battles and temporary truces with the Quraish continued until ultimately Muhammad conquered Mecca. Which was probably actually Petra, but I digress.

Aaaaand... he just sort of kept going. And the Caliphs after him kept going. Until the Muslim Empire was one of the largest the Earth had ever known. And then it kind of fell apart, for reasons I am not an expert on, but one reason surely is power struggles among the Muslim leadership as to who should be Caliph. The split between Sunni and Shiite dates to one of those succession issues. Another reason is the ascendancy of Europe. Any way you look at it though, "God's Conquest of the Earth" from the Muslim perspective ground to a bloody halt. And then began centuries of retreat.

Christianity, an exception to the Abrahimic rule, did not start out kicking asses. It was a religion of underdogs, and remained a religion of underdogs for a couple hundred years thereafter. During that couple hundred years it assimilated a lot of paganism, unfortunately. However Christianity had going for it the idea that the meek, not the strong, would inherit the Earth. Despite present evidence to the contrary.

The point I am making here is that Judaism, Islam, and Christianity sort of inherited from Judaism, are religions born or at least molded in conquest. To an extent in Judaism (their territorial ambitions being more precise) and definitely in Islam, the Kingdom of G-d would enter the world by the sword.

This has not happened.

As far as Judaism is concerned, I take no issue with their conquest but it is limited as a model of the Kingdom's expansion beyond Israel. In Judaism's case it was always intended to be limited. Judaism never had a mandate to conquer the world by force. G-d's kingdom would be established in Israel and the "nations" would continue to be independent and presumably pagan, a thought that would be abhorrent to many of their Muslim kin. Over time, one would hope that Israel's example would spread and enlighten the world, but we never get to that part of the plan and Israel soon proved itself to be not much better at being G-d's agents on Earth than anyone else. That part of the plan, if it existed, fell through because the kingdoms of Israel and Judah became wicked, just exactly like everyone else.

There's a moral to this story: power attracts corrupt people, and it doesn't matter whether that power is secular or religious or anything else. Corrupt, scheming, shrewd and ambitious people seek and gain positions of power, to the exclusion of anyone less so. So in a sense the Christians are right: if the Kingdom of G-d is going to enter the Earth, it won't be through the powerful. The meek may have not inherited the Earth thus far, but if the Earth is to be inherited by a holy people, only the meek can qualify because human power corrupts.

In any case, the horizon of opportunity for bringing forth the Kingdom at the point of a sword has now likely expired. The world has a new religion: secularism. And it cannot be defeated at the point of a sword. The whole conquest-for-God thing, aside from its limited and necessary application in the Conquest of Canaan, was never really such a great idea. Now, the Conquest of Canaan had to happen or we would not have the Tanakh (for Christians the Old Testament) today. Other than that, it had limited application in the ancient world and no application in the modern.

Even many people worldwide who consider themselves Muslim, or Christian, or Jewish, are usually functionally secularists. To determine that, do not look at what they say they believe. Look at how they live. If they are living just like secularists, they are secularists. If they watch the same TV, go to the same movies, drink the same beer, surf the same porn, work on the same Sabbath day, and vote for the same policies as secularists, they are secularists no matter what they say.

Secularism is the new religion, and it needs no point of a sword to spread, though it can certainly use it. It spreads by appealing to people's most base impulses. It is both a civilization and an anti-civilization: anti-civilization in the sense of being against any truly noble aspiration of the human spirit. Against the uplift of the human spirit. People are consumers, they consume, that is what characterizes them. Obviously decadent and self-indulgent people consume more, which is better from the point of view of the masters. They are workers, to pay their human masters for the consuming. Their human masters grow more and more wealthy and powerful. Working and consuming are the two sides of the secular man: they are enslaved to consumption and they are willingly enslaved. Qutb called it Jahiliyyah, the great world-ignorance, which originally referred to pre-Islamic paganism but which he used to refer to the new paganism, Westernism and secularism.

And we should not assume that they are merely indoctrinated into secularism, though of course they are also indoctrinated. The vast mass of humanity genuinely want to live as selfish consumers and cannot now understand anything else. Harkening back to Sayyid Qutb, who has been much on my mind the last few days, he seemed to believe that the wool had been pulled over the eyes of the masses. That they had somehow been deluded against their will. No, they choose secularism because they want to. They may want to also call themselves Christian, or Muslim, or Jewish, but if that interferes with their secularism, watch out! If they really have to choose between G-d and money, or the esteem of their peers, or going to see the latest blockbuster movie everyone is talking about, then you will see where their hearts are.

And so, G-d's conquest of the Earth by the sword, having somewhat achieved its limited objective in Judaism and having essentially failed in Islam and being renounced by Christianity, leaves us without much of an alternate plan. You cannot defeat secularism with a sword. You cannot defeat it with words, or preaching, or acts of self-sacrifice, or it would have been defeated already. You cannot defeat it at all. Which is rather a shame because it sucks: for us and for the whole planet really.

So what is our game plan in the face of the apparent victory of secularism over all? Wait for G-d's action? No doubt He will act, and it may be rather extremely unpleasant when He does. Communicate our views? Preach? Secularism dominates the means of communication: it may permit people like me to talk about G-d in some obscure corner of the internet, far off the main highways, but it controls the narrative overall. The sword? As jihadists the world over have no doubt learned to their grief, that also does not work well. The West may cede Afghanistan to the Taliban, a remote and unimportant country, but it would never back down in any area that really mattered to it. Trying to institute the Kingdom of G-d by the sword these days is an awfully expeditious way to die pointlessly.

Acts of unselfish self-sacrifice? Ask Paul Hill. The State put him to death for (violently) trying to stop abortionists from murdering babies, and nobody cares and few have even heard of him. Sure, he shot abortionists, so that comes under the category of the sword, but then he didn't try to defend himself legally and willingly accepted the death penalty for trying to save innocent human lives and that was the self-sacrifice part. A noble but wasted gesture, in this society. Nobody cared.

Every time we try to play by any of these rules (except the first,) we lose. In the case of the first instance, waiting for G-d to act, when He does it might be really really bad and possibly final. I don't have answers, just the question.

There is no god but G-d. Lā ilāha illā allāh. Hear O Israel: the Lord your G-d, the Lord is One.