A very interesting article.  I note that in the list of significant religious developments, the rise of Islam in America is omitted, as is the resurgence of fundamentalist formations -- fundamental religious, not fundamentally radical -- in the terminally collapsed millenial muslim world.

   I do not have any hesitation in calling myself a muslim fundamentalist.  I am not a radical or any kind of revolutionary; quite the contrary, I find success in my support of traditional institutions of whatever variety that produce and enhance stability in a society.  My approach in courts of law is to invite to the better course in the language of the court, and have found that to be more successful than otherwise.  Rather I regard what I do as "fundamentalist" in the sense that I observe and follow Tradition and seek what the early muslims sought:  the good in a situation, to enhance it, whereby the false in a situation falls away.  I believe that what all men of faith seek is the fundamental of their faith, not the trappings and distractions that came with the growth of empire and its concomitant internecine strife and party division.  When they find it, they work miracles with it that inure to the benefit of all, not only to the chosen few.

   I have long been concerned with the blindness of our American institutions to the realities of faith.  It is understandable -- religious experience, particularly that variety which is often made the object of humor and derision as in "Oh -- you must have had a religious experience" -- is not quantifiable even within the Houses of faith.  No effective measure exists for piety, which is instead known to God and only rarely apparent among those who are blessed to have it.  And government, dealing with mass populations and tendencies measured by statistical means, can neither find nor quantify the information it would need to regard religion and calculate it as a social factor.  But this is our protection from that very institution, which otherwise would seek to extend dominion into the houses of faith, as indeed America has sought to do with increasing success since instituting the ban on polygamy among Mormons, so that today there is no freedom of religious exericise that remains, in the legal sense, and increasingly in the practical sense as well.

   But religion is about dominion.  It is first and always a call to allegiance of a higher kind, displacing lesser allegiances to the constructs and designs of men.  All of the tools of statecraft are of religious origin.  All the elements of law and jurisprudence, all the true sciences of human nature and what it is and how it works, all of the features of human civilization that make it what it truly is and apart from those things that disort it, are of God's Designs, each is seen in a story of religious truth.  Our own constitutional federal republic is but expansion of the model established in Medina 1420 years ago, which was suzerain over Jewish, Christian, and other states -- tribes which carried on internal government, bilateral relations, and other functionalities of the state, as a religious exercise of dominion over the hearts and lives and affairs of men.  Islam recognized and supported the various houses of faith wherever it encountered them in peaceful establishment, although on occasion the leaders, jealous of their rights of chattelry and war and plunder, resisted, to their own destruction.  More often the leaders followed the mandate laid down before the muslims arrived, and on that arrival entered the faith as a completion of their own.  Where this did not occur, communities of Christians and the Children of Israel remain today, although the times between have, like all times, varied the character of their fortune, as is true of all communities also.  Where there is conflict, it is more often mutually created, and is always the result of a failure of each to recognize rights and immunities that God has prescribed with respect to the other.

   The Children of Israel were given religion, and its commensurate political supremacy and dominion, to the complete exclusion of everyone else at the time.  It was possible for a gentile to become a Jew -- the Halacha had provision for that -- by joining one or another House of Israel, attaching himself and his heirs to the Children and eventually attaining, for perhaps the fourth or fifth generation, full citizenship, most often through eventual intermarriage and a mingling of bloodlines.  The Children were extraordinarily sensitive to developments among other populations that could be called religious, or had the appearance of religion:  they were annihilated, for God had ordained that the Children be His Light unto the nations and His Evidence of the beneficial nature of His Reign.  The Bible abounds with stories wherein one or another people, placing themselves in opposition to the Children and seeking to imitate externals, such as garb, sabbath observances, festivals, or ritual and ceremony, and in some cases even re-writing the Law more to their liking and instituting similar forms of dispute resolution and adjudication, and in so doing running as competitors for the allegiance of men and rivals to the Chosen, were wiped off the map to a man, to discourage others from being so bold as to arrogate to themselves that position that God had established firmly and without peer among the Children.  And it remains so today that among those who track and observe the manifold houses of faith are those past masters and experts in discernment of such matters, the Children of Israel, who today cultivate amicable relations rather than peremptorily dispatching contenders to the pyre.

   And Islam charges the muslims to honor and respect those who have received Revelation, recognizing the Torah, the Psalms, and the Injeel, and by analogy other Scripture unrecognized explicitly by the Law, with the admonition that all will return to God, and He will tell them of that wherein they differ.

   The sword has been drawn, to be sure; I know of no Scripture requiring its adherents to stand still while others work their destruction.  And as the Houses have deteriorated with time, which all have done, becoming as the kingdoms of men with their attendant strife and list of enemies, so also has conflict between them and their neighbors become indistinguishable from other conflicts, arising as it does on similar premises.

   But as the Children kept watch over religions of others, with a view to preserving, as God had ordained, a monopoly within the House of Israel, so also have the muslims kept watch over religions of others, with a view to preserving their rights to remain unmolested in their beliefs and observances and in the governance of their internal and bilateral affairs.  And as the Children have long since left off maintaining a monopoly, so also have the muslims of the millenial kingdom left off guarding the rights of others, becoming as all men in their lack of regard for strangers, although that is not a fair thing to say of all men but only of those who attend the prejudices and fears and suspicions of those they rule.

   Who, then, is more able to reckon the affair of faith as it plays into the lives of societies, than those of religion?  And who is less likely to regard it as an occasion of concern for future destruction than those in whom faith dwells?  The kingdoms of men and the republics of human design will collapse and fall away, and the Houses of faith will remain -- not because we are intrinsically better than they or more capable of seeing the future in the present, but because the inspiration toward felicity and peace and good fellowship is visible to us, while the inclination toward discord and strife and fear of the strange is measurable and influential with them.

   So the article is very informative, as are its omissions and failures of analysis and understanding.  It says that despite the fact that a Spirit is moving on the face of the waters, those who rule, like Pharoah and his analogues, can see the rising Flood but remain powerless to guage its depth or dimension or to stop it from pouring forth among the hearts of men.  And as the murder of the sons of Israel reached everyone but Moses, who Pharoah raised as a Prince of Egypt in his own house, so also do the tribulations visited on the houses of faith in our time reach only those whom God in His Wisdom has chosen to return to Himself, while those of us who remain have work to do that reaches into every pinnacle of power -- and we are already there, invisible to the kings of men as Moses had been invisible to Pharoah.

   Thank you, Sir, for that strategic information.  We will not use it to work your destruction, but rather we await your salvation.  And God says "Lo!  We, too, are waiting."  And only the mindful can hear.

   I'd love to see someone respond to what I wrote by laying out a comparable or analagous perspective from the standpoint of their beliefs on the same subjects.  My words deal with the political life of a people, which no one can possibly avoid but may only approach from a religious or from another perspective, "another" usually one of oppression of one form or another by one group or another, religious or otherwise.

   Many people seem to think that in a virtual moment of time, everything will dissolve into nothingness and the Saved from among humanity will become as if one inchoate mass without interrelationship among themselves but completely of one mind on all matters with but a single common perspective on all events of life.

   The faithless liken this to an anthill, ignoring the fact that among the ants there is relation, heirarchy, functionality, life and death, and that ants are perfectly attuned to God without free will or imagination to possibly interfere.  Ants act as if they have no thought for their own mortality whatever, but only awareness of their family-tribe of ants, willing to sacrifice themselves without the least hesitation to protect and defend who and what lies within the tribe.  Would that we could be like ants and so perfectly attuned to God.  It seems to me that that was what we thought Americans were like back in the forties and fifties, with heroes, role models, and others who appeared to embody noble qualities of humanity.  Now, it seems, each of the forefathers and all of those who represent the noble qualities of "brotherhood from sea to shining sea" are denigrated and turned to clay and removed from the history books and television, and the American people have no human examples to emulate.  This almost seems like it has to be someone's agenda.  In another generation or two there will be no America, just as now there is no religious sanctuary or free exercise in the laws of America, with this kind of "progress."

   So I would be interested in what people think is a necessary course of action mandated by their religion and clarified there.  I believe that what I have set forth is either a common platform or an example of the kind of map we all and each should have, clearly recognizable to the American people as a way of return to America's promises to keep.  God will not suffer a godless nation to exist.  This is the lesson of the Soviet Union, the first such godless nation to appear since the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, I do believe.  Neither will America continue into any future unless it is a god-fearing nation.  And America has so much farther to fall ...

   Or do people think that because I am an American muslim I am sounding some kind of alien call?  Then what is alien to America about faith in God's provision to all who do good and turn to Him?

To: ankaboot

   There is nothing at all alien in what you write.  I was especially struck by your insight that government has no way to quantify either the people of faith or their strength and purpose.  Perhaps that fact is one way to describe what I am beginning to see as God's armor against the unbelievers; i.e., no mere human may understand the mind of God, and no human who refuses to seek after God may understand the minds of those who fear God.

   You have also provided, in my view, a clear picture of the deterioration of American society, which only a return to God may turn around.  I, too, would describe myself as a fundamentalist, in the sense that I strive to understand God's Word, rather than what any self-appointed "speaker for God" would have me to believe.

   It is clear that those of the Jewish faith, Christians and Muslims, all "People of the Book" worship the same God; what is more difficult to understand is why we so often fight among ourselves.  It is said that we all see but dimly, but there are times that I fear we see not at all.

   Thank you for your contribution to the discussion.  I find your perspective helpful.

From: logos

To: logos and others of piety

   ... government has no way to quantify either the people of faith or their strength and purpose.  Perhaps that fact is one way to describe what I am beginning to see as God's armor against the unbelievers; i.e., no mere human may understand the mind of God, and no human who refuses to seek after God may understand the minds of those who fear God.

   But it also means that those who rule in the name of the people will, as they have everywhere else, seek to pit one group against another without regard for consequences other than that it should become a fearful thing to be of those of faith or be known to observe any precept advanced by those of faith.  Deniers have always resorted to terror against the weak of faith, to separate the pious from them.  Look at the Thread that asks about bomb threats in local school districts and tell me that the terror has not begun against the people of faith.

   As in Palestine, the first attack to weaken the resolve of a people to resist the imposition of tyranny is toward the young and defenseless children of the people who might offer such resistance.  Do you imagine that God will bring His Plan to fruition and not take witnesses from among the faithful including the girl who confessed Christ to her Jewish killer and then he killed her?  He was surely not among the faithful and God knows best what she believed that gave her such courage in the face and fact of death.  That the blind are blind also to us merely means they will attack the innocent and the upright on mere suspicion that they might offer some threat.  The faithful are not likely to go unblooded, but He will admit those He chooses to be His witnesses to faith of all kinds.

   You have also provided, in my view, a clear picture of the deterioration of American society, which only a return to God may turn around.  I, too, would describe myself as a fundamentalist, in the sense that I strive to understand God's Word, rather than what any self-appointed "speaker for God" would have me to believe.

   He has provided His Word by the tongues and pens of all those He has sent to show His manifold Ways of being that which He created in us, His Reflection in His Creation.  See how Jesus said to his listeners "God has given you the Law and the prophets" by quoting to them from all of those God sent before him to pave the way for His Endless Kingdom and Covenant.  Even the ways of turning to Him are drawn clearly for those of faith who seek those ways in good faith in the Scripture they were given.  It is following the bedazzled and blind, who think that faith without understanding and works and conduct is a way to achieve in our lives that which He has commanded for us, that is a departure from Him, that those who stand on Scripture do not seek therein the ways to His Pleasure but instead listen to the flowery words of men which do not draw for them those Ways.

   It is clear that those of the Jewish faith, Christians and Muslims, all "People of the Book" worship the same God; what is more difficult to understand is why we so often fight among ourselves.  It is said that we all see but dimly, but there are times that I fear we see not at all.

   This is why I have answered at length, to reach this.  God does not burden you to understand my faith, although the converse is not so true.  He provides you with ways to live at peace with every man, even with those who deny Him, who cannot be understood because they have not reason nor sense nor Guidance and blindly wander about, while His Light is available to illuminate the Ways for all.

   But it is not the burden of another to understand your way, it is yours.  And it is not everyone's burden to see and recognize piety in others, but rather God gives to each in due measure and those of greater piety bear more of a burden for seeing piety in others and respecting it and setting the right example for their fellows.  My job is to see the one who regards me in a dimmer light and see that it colors his view, and then to apply to myself what I have been given so that I may deal with him according to God's design for humanity and not for the evil one's who prevents another from a brighter light.  It is not my job to instruct your brother, but yours; why should I seek to change his light completely, or yours, to that which is illuminatory for me?  In the case of the weaker, who sees not the light he was given, how might he see another?  And in the case of the stronger, why would I seek to take from the weaker the greater light he needs, or to in any way weaken a House of faith when the greater value is in strengthening all in His Knowledge?

   So yes, there are those in each House who cannot see at all those in other Houses.  Instead they are able to see the pious in their own House, at least one would pray for that.  That is sufficient for them, as what He has given to you and to me is sufficient for each as we travel through this life, and He will inform us when we reach Him whether the good we have done outweighs the error we may believe.

   Thank you for your contribution to the discussion.  I find your perspective helpful.

   And I have only my perspective, and benefit when you or another asks me or tells me and enables me to widen and refine it.  Your strength strengthens me, it does not weaken me; and I pray also that the converse is also true.  What is with God is not of limited supply, and none can take from another by drinking at the same or at different fountains, for all who seek He is Able to provide satisfaction.

   Thank you for your response.  As always, it is a source of benefit.