“The First Crusade, the only militarily successful one of the six Christian invasions, took the Muslims by surprise. They had been fighting each other and had not expected an attack from Western Europe. Searching for explanations as to why they were being assaulted by a people from another part of the world, Muslims turned to mysticism and astrology, noting that Saturn was in Virgo.
Until then, lesser jihad had been the duty of a community but not necessarily all individuals, leaving a choice for those who did not want to fight. But during the Crusades, Muslim leaders declared that when Islam is attacked, jihad is the duty of every individual.
After the Crusades the interpretation of jihad became hard line. Ebu’s Su’ud wrote in the sixteenth century that peace with infidels was impossible and fighting should be permanent and unending.
The Crusades were about power, not relgion. And the Muslims understood this. Initially, they began looking for ties and seeking negotiations with the four new Medeterranean kindoms the Christians had established in the Middle East. But slowly they built their own war propaganda machine. Just as the Christians established a term for their enemy—the Saracens—the Muslims began calling all the Christian intruders al-frani, the Franks. Clerics began teaching that defeat at the hands of the Fanks was God’s punishment for their failure to carry out their religious duties. And one of the those duties was jihad. By reviving the culture of jihad the Saracens were able to build a counter-Crusade and drive out the Franks. It has happened throughout history: peoples who go to war tend to become mirror images of their enemy—another lesson.”
Which presidential candidate hosted Saturday Night Live (hint—the musical guests were The White Stripes)?
Which one had cameos on “24” and “Wedding Crashers”?
Whose wife secretly got her pilot’s license and owns a jet?
Who is pals with Warren Beatty?
Whose daughter is friends with Heidi from MTV’s The Hills?
Whose wife once told Vogue, explaining the purchase of a 7th or 8th house, this one a beach house, “When I bought the first one, my husband, who is not a beach person, said, ‘Oh this is such a waste of money; the kids will never go. Then it got to the point where they used it so much I couldn’t get in the place. So I bought another one.”
Whose family credit cards have been known to ring up more than $500,000 in charges in one month?
Just askin’…
Ah, yeah. And Obama is the sole beneficiary of a lenient MSM, right?
In Islam there is the concept of striving toward perfection. The Quran says that a good Muslim must “strive for the cause of Allah.” In Arabic this striving or struggle is called jihad. Jihad originally meant striving with great intensity. But this striving was meant to be an internal struggle to become the perfet Muslim that God—Allah—wanted each Muslim to be. Some scholars have even argued that when the Quran speaks of conquering unbelievers with jihad, it is saying to persuade them with the force of argument, and thus jihad means nonviolent activism. This is why numerous notable Islamic clerics have said that the prophet Jesus also instructed his followers to wage jihad.
Islamic scholars have always debated the meaning of the thirty-five references to jihad in the Quran. But as medieval Muslims became engaged in a series of difficult wars, the word jihad began to be used to denote the struggle to prevail militarily in place of the original word for such a physical battle, qital. All successful leaders understand the importance of words, and it seemed a good Muslim would fight harder if the struggle were called jihad rather than qital. After the death of Mohammed, Muslims began speaking of two kinds of jihad—al jihad al akbar, greater jihad, and al jihad al asghar, lesser jihad. Greater jihad was the struggle to be a pure and good person, while lesser jihad referred to armed struggle.
I know, a lot of people love your preaching and want to hear it. Let them get saved and discipled at your community, or spend a season there, and then point them to your pod/vodcast, sending them as missionaries to reach their local communities. But don’t say, “Well, people just want to hear me, so we must make a way for everyone to either sit in one room and watch me or my video representation.” That simply makes no sense when we’re talking about maturing Christ followers who will live self-sacrificially in communities centered on Jesus, not a preaching personality.
One of the main justifications for video venues is that upwards of 70 percent of church plants fail. Giving people a “brand name,” proven communicator makes more sense. But do church plants fail because of the planter? Or is it because of unreasonable expectations, unsustainable “big launch” methods in which thousands of dollars are pumped into new churches in an effort to make them big, fast… because of the consumer mindset of many who look at the big churches down the street with not a small amount of envy?
Ultimately, video venues strike me as a poor compromise. They may be necessary at times, but are certainly not a strategy to be pursued, even alongside traditional church plants. They focus entirely too much on the preaching gifts of one person, a trend even we small “emerging” types need to counter.
The celebrity church must die. And doing anything—like video venues—that prolongs its life, even in the name of the lost, runs counter to the best interests of the Church in all its expressions, big and small, and its mandate to see more people not only reached, but gifted, trained, and sent.
If you contribute to Focus on the Family, it must be nice to know your supporting garbage like this. And if they were praying for rain at McCain event, it would be just as asinine. They will know we are Christians by our total ridiculousness.
“The arrogant-celebrity meme is a variation on the usual Rovian fare: empty of actual policy substance but evocative of playground loyalties and resentments. Basically, McCain called Obama a girl, to appeal to the jocks, and then called him arrogant to flatter the nerds.
Paris Hilton is a two-fer. Choosing a female celebrity is integral to the usual attempt to feminize the Democrat. I could see nothing racist whatever in the message, mind you, but it was, as Weaver noted, pretty asinine.
Less asinine was McCain’s two-pronged lie that Obama would rather lose a war than a campaign and that he snubbed injured troops in Germany. The former is repulsive and you can tell McCain knows it because he has a weird habit of saying it and then grinning broadly and humming a little to himself as a semi-laugh. He doesn’t own the statement even as he says it. The charge itself is about as uncivil as it is possible to be, close to calling Obama treasonous, right? And the troop snub jibe is simply, demonstrably untrue, as the McCain camp was forced to semi-concede.
So McCain’s main moves these past two weeks have been either childish or disgusting, and both times he has signaled he didn’t really believe his own message.”
The WSJ points out that Obama might be too skinny to be president. Unreal. McCain claims Obama is too famous like Paris and Britney. Now he’s too skinny. Is this the best conservatives can muster up? They’re circling the drain and grasping for anything that can put off the inevitable.
