Yawm-ud Din

The Day of Judgement. That day upon which we must account for every vain word written or uttered. This day looks backwards to us as we look forward to it. This day haunts the Muslim as it haunts us, and stalks those form whom it is a childish tale to scare children into good behavior.

This day looks backwards upon us, in fact it does so now but for the fact of time we do not see it. This is however reality. This Truth will be known when our experience of time becomes congruent with that Day and our vision too will be backwards looking as it is even now.

For this reason it is important to remember, to manifest the remembrance, to unforget the Truth of ourselves. We are created in God's likeness and image and as Baptized Catholics have been restored to that state from a state of forgetfulness, that state of sin, into Truth. From lethe into aletheia. We are concealed in sin and unconcealed by Truth in His Name Alethea. Entombed in death we stand in life through His Name Anastasis. He is the Resurrection (anastasis). He is the Truth (aletheia).

These are Qiyam, Azkar, and Haqq.

The major difference is that in Christ we have these things through His Person as members of His Body. In Islam we are called to an existential judgment in which we have no part of God and are wholly dependent upon a deity which is ineffably distant from us.

In the end the choice for Islam or for Christ will determine the state from which we look back upon our lives on the Yawmud Din, the Day of Qiyamat. Will we be in Christ or will we be judged according to the Quran and its laws?

The Constantinopolitan Visit

A few points to share:

First: the mainstream press (MSP) has somehow confused the purpose of HH Benedict's visit, which is the Feast of St. Andrew Apostle and a meeting with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. The Turkish government is a participant only as a formality because the Pope is a visiting head of state they are the host government. So it is no sweat that the various pooh-bas of the Turkish government and elite are not putting the Pope on their schedules.

Second- you make a good point about Christianity as a religion being a cause of "horrors throughout history". Christianity is a human construct, it is NOT the indefectable Church. Thus, the various disputes, the Anglican massacre of the Carthusians, the Protestant seizure of Indian lands, etc. are the result of the secular adaptation of the Christian religious idea to Caesar.

Even alleged Catholic aberrations in the Spanish Inquisition so-called are the result of secular interference from throne and nobility; likewise the sack of Constantinople in the Crusades.

But for all of this, the Catholic Church herself has remained pure and without taint from the actions of those who have acted outside of Catholic Charity and like Peter sliced the ear off from poor Malchus with an impetuous sword. Peter even denied Him thrice. This is a mystery to contemplate.

What is to be our reaction to al-Islam? Are we to fight this scourge sent to purify the members of the Church?

Finally let us petition St. Benedict to guide and protect our Holy Father The Pope, Benedict XVI on his journey to the Eastern Patriarch so that we may reunited with our separate bretheren resist the wave of infidelity from the Quran of infidelity. Let us pray the Blessed Virgin Protect our Pope from harm and for the conversion of Mahometans.

Amen

Jahannum 1

"Iraq" as a "nation" is a fallacy imposed by the post World War I nation builders (British imperialists in their arrogance) upon a division of the Ottoman Khalifat in the region of mesopotamia.

Iraq was a geographic term used by arabs to signify "The Orient"- 'Iraq" signifies the dawning place, in Arabic.

An Iraqi in the traditional Arab designation is one who hails from the region of Mesopotamia, which to one from Damascus is to the East of is the Orient and the dawning place of the sun. Just like Egypt is al-Misri and the Occident al-Mughrib, is the area of Morocco and al-Andalus (Spain). But these are not nations in the sense of the American and European concept.

The nation we deal with is al-Islam, the people of the Quran. That is how they see themselves.

The shia and sunni battles over an ascendancy which emerged after the death of Muhammad - when the Generals Umar, Uthman and Abu Bakr seized the Khalifate over the designated heir, Ali, the son-in -law of Muhammad. This conflict has been an internal struggle from the beginning of Islam.

Consequently there has been no legitimate interpreter of Islam since the occultation of the Imam Mahdi who is hiding in a well somewhere and is expected to return and establish the reign of Islam on the earth. This is the apocalyptic vision that drives Iran and Ahmedinejad. This apocalyptic vision has been ascendant in Iran over 200 years now and this civil war which we have unleashed is just the most recent manifestation. 19th century Iranian history is replete with civil war instigated by Mahdi claimants. Lots of beheadings etc. But they did not have nuclear capability then. What will happen when the Jahannum 1 nuclear missile is fired for the first time? (Jahannum is the arabic cognate for gehenna, you get the point).

So this fight is going nowhere anytime soon and Americans are foolish to believe that a sectarian democracy is possible in that mess we have created by removing the only stability in that region Saddam and the Baath party. There is no nation of Iraq apart from Baath just as there was no Soviet Union apart from the Communist party, and there is no hope for a secular democracy in a population dominated by shia and sunni religious zealotry.

We have caught the Tiger by the nape of the neck, but now that we have it in hand, what do we do with it? It will not be tamed, turned loose it will only devour us. The only solution is to cage it or kill it.

Weapons for the Holy War

"We shall break the cross and spill the wine... Allah will (help) Muslims to conquer Rome. ... Allah enable us to slit their throats, and make their money and descendants the bounty of the mujahideen,"

Dear Brothers and Sisters:

We live in times not unlike those of our Father St. Francis. We have a holy war declared upon us and there are calls for the death of our Pope. Like St. Francis we are called in these dangerous times to rebuild the Church which has fallen into ruin.

As children of Francis we must be militant and our weapons are fasting, prayer, penance. To fight a holy war, one must be holy, and holiness will be the mail with which we are clothed. Prayer our sword, fasting our shield, penance is our steed. Helmeted with the Truth and bearing the Cross as our standard let us not be afraid.

Our Holy Father goes to Constantinople to meet with the Patriarch I am praying for the reunion of our separated brothers. Our Mother of God will be our light in the dark nights to come, let us be of good cheer an know that in the end Her Immaculate Heart will triumph.

Dehellenization, the Church and the face of Jihad to come

The Question:
Romans 1:16

For I am not ashamed of the gospel,
for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes,
to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

Why the Greek? Why did the Apostle in an address to Romans make this reference to Greeks?
Why did he not write specifically, 'to the Jew first and then the Roman'? Or more broadly 'to the Jew first then the Gentile'?

These questions I wil allow to sit, the issue is that "Greek" as well as "Jew" are fundaments of what is now Catholic. The assertion that Christianisty is a phenomenon of jewish origin is only a partial truth.

Thus the reformed evangelical emphasis on sola scriptura does not stand because sola scriptura cannot of itself explain the nuanced meanings of the New Testament, originally written in Greek, without discernment of the Greek foundations of its textaul basis. The words do not stand in the text isolated from the cultural nuances of their meaning - thus the first chapter of the Gospel of John is only partially understood if read in the translated text, be it Vulgate or German or English without recourse to the Greek and the textures of meaning which surround Logos in the context of that chapter.

The understanding of the hypostatic union of the Logos with the man Jesus is not feasible outside of the Greek context. The emphatic necessity of liguistic and conceptual clarity with regard to the hypostatic union of the human and divine natures of Christ is thrust upon us by the Jihadists who would declare Catholicism polytheism and catholics as mushrikun - those who join partners with Allah. Of course we do not join partners with Allah, but then how is this explained, how are Muslims to be evangelized if we ourselves do not understand the Hypostatis which is a fundamental of the Catholic faith? Quicumque vult salvus esse...

In the face of the growing threats from secularism and Jihadism, the simplistic proof texting of the Evangelical is inadequate to the challenge. Sola scriptura fails to meet the chalenge.

Imperfect understandings of the hypostatic union of the Divine and human in Christ gave rise to monophysitism and nestorianism and the initial schism of the Church at the time of Ephesus and Chalcedon.

It was the rejection of the Ephesene definitions which gave rise to the Quranic misrepresentations of Christianity and the 1400 years of conflict which arose from sectarian confusion regarding the nature of Christ and of His Mother as Theotokos.

Dehellenization as decried by the Pope in his Regensberg address is more than an academic issue, it threatens the very understanding of the nature of our Redeemer as has been understood since the foundation of the Church. Indeed it threatens our understanding of daily reality. And this latter is alluded to in the final sentences of this address. More later.

Jihad

We are in jihad friends.

Enough of the "War of Terror" rhetoric. We are in Jihad, a conflict with greater depth than the idea of World War III. Jihad is the struggle for religious domination by Muslims. We are slowly but surely falling victim t our cherished ideal of "religious freedom" by suppressing public exressions of Christianity and promoting Godless secularism. This type of splintered and narcissistic approach to society makes the entire culture vulnerable to the inevitable take-over by the Ummah which has no conception of freedom of religion or individual rights - theirs is a view of submission to Allah and obedience to his decrees.

While America titillates to Paris Hilton's latest escapade, the Mujahid prepares dreaming of the eventual surrender of America to the shariah.

Islamic Reformation

The situation at hand is the result of a "Reformation" in Islamic scholarship and jurisprudence which took place circa 1100 AD with Imam Ghazali's rebuke of philosophical method in two books, The Incoherence of Philosophers and The Revival of Religious Science. Islam has already had a reformation, a return to the textual basis of Quran and Hadith and a Dehellenization. This is the reason there have been no major Islamic scholars in 800 years. Apologists for Islam will state that Muslims developed algebra, astronomy, etc, etc., but look at he historical record- this stops in the 12th century AD because of the rejection of systematic philosophy and the process of dehellenization.

We stand at risk in the West of the same by two different threats - dehellenization and the textualism of Evangelical protestantism and the dehellenization and deconstructionism of postmodern philosophy.