The Long and Holy War: part 2

“Oh East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet, until earth and sky stand presently at God’s great judgment seat.” –The Ballad of East and West by Rudyard Kipling.

Iowa – In 1529 the known world was in crisis. The Muslim hoards were running rampant over the near and far East, they had taken Constantinople, and new invasions seemed imminent. But not only was the Christian facing attacks from without, but the Holy Roman Empire and the Church of Rome was in crisis.

The church had lost prestige and become humbled after a schism, and the black plague had swept across Europe. Christian Humanists like Erasmus of Rotterdam were questioning doctrines of the church.

The Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire were old and tired institutions, fraught with corruption. Pope Leo X was rumored to have said “We have the Papacy, now let us enjoy it.” The reformation had begun; the 95 theses had been posted on the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral 12 years before. John Calvin was 20 years old. John Knox was 15. The Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire was afraid of war breaking out with the followers of Islam.

Vienna was under siege. The seat of the Holy Roman Empire, the home of the emperor was in danger of falling. Fear and confusion on the level of the fall of Rome was spreading across Christendom.

Sultan Suleiman I however, did not have the necessary artillery and men to take the city. Mining under the city walls did not work, the tunnels were either stormed and the men beaten back or they were blown up. After heavy rains and snows began to cause trouble for his campaign, Suleiman made an attempt to take the city by a massive frontal assault. They lost to the arquebuses and pikes of the Christians, and had to fall back from the attack. The Janissaries were becoming impatient, and the Muslims fell back from the city without a victory. After over a century of winning they had been stopped, the hordes could no longer advance.

About forty years later the great sea battle of Lepanto was fought, in which the Muslims also lost. The message was received; the followers of Islam were not invincible. Towards the end of the sixteen hundreds a move was begun towards colonization by the European Powers. What began as a quest for monetary gains and exploration in the new world, along with missionary endeavors, turned into a quest for empire.

Now the tides had turned, as the nations of the west began a race for empire. They became like Risk players snapping up all the territories and countries in sight. Nations from India to Nigeria were occupied by the empires of Europe.

However, as the empires continued to expand, they could not help but have friction. The Napoleonic Wars cost hundreds of thousands of men their lives as they fought all over the world, from the high seas to the back wildernesses of America.

However, prosperity in the Western Nations continued to grow. Trade, commerce, arts, paintings, poetry and technology all flourished. Even as the wars continued the modern age was coming quickly. However, the East lingered behind. As the nations of England, France, and the others continued to build empires, the Eastern nations became frozen in time. Battles such as the Battle of the Pyramids between Napoleon and the Mamelukes showed this vividly, as the French soldiers massacred their enemies, while not losing fifty of their own men.

The Long and Holy War continued, as the modern age drew near.

Andrew C. Abbott

The Long and Holy War: part 1

Iowa – In 476 Rome fell, and with it the last of the Western Roman Emperors. However, the Eastern Roman Emperors still sat in their gilded palaces at Constantinople, continuing the Roman traditions and still calling themselves Romans. After the fall of the Western Empire they began to expand themselves over the places that the other side of the empire had held. But in time the expansion was stopped by an army under the influence of a new religion. The Muslim hordes were exploding on the scene.

In 570 A.D a young boy named Muhammad was born. In 610, in a cave outside of the city of Mecca he began to have visions, which after being interpreted “properly” explained to him that he needed to begin a new religion. He ran around trying to convert everyone else in Mecca, but the people were unresponsive. So instead he went to a neighboring city called Medina and became its leader.

Muhammad soon began a war with Mecca and the rest of Arabia, and became the first leader to unite it under one man.

This new religion had 5 pillars:

·         The profession of faith

·         Daily prayers at specified times

·         Almsgiving

·         Fasting During the Month of Ramadan

·         A pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca¹

He was and is a Muslim who was one outwardly. There was, to them, only one god, Allah, all who worshiped another were infidels. Two years after Muhammad’s death in 632, the new leaders began to invade lands the borders of Arabia where they lived.

Although they were often not very unified, they began to advance Westward. In 732 they marched on France, but were thrown back at the Battle of Tours by the two handed axemen of Charles Martel. Martel’s grandson Charlemagne became the first Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas day 800 AD, in France, crowned by the Pope for services rendered him. The Holy Roman Empire, antithetical at its heart to Islam, was born. In the ensuing centuries the two states would battle long and hard.

And so the Holy War had started, between the people of God and the people of Allah. The wars continued, with the beginning of the crusades around 1,000.

There had been too much fighting among the Christians, and some church leaders gave the overly zealous knights and warlike kings a mission to retake Palestine, or the Holy Land, from the heretics.

Jerusalem was taken in the first crusade, and the land divided into four counties. However, once the Muslims unified after their defeat, they took inland the county, the county of Edessa, back from the crusading knights.

A second crusade was launched, but it was not successful.

The third crusade was launched by Richard the Lion Hearted, but he was so warlike he could not get along with the other kings, and so, although he could have ridden into Saladin’s camp alone, he could not take Jerusalem without help. The crusade fell apart, and Richard died not very long after, his brother John becoming king. While the Holy War continued, the Westerners were still advancing in social progress, through such things as the signing by John of the Magna Carta.

The fourth crusade did nothing, as the followers of Islam threw back several other halfhearted efforts of landless knights to win their way by capturing the Holy Sepulcher.

In 1453, the city of Constantinople, the bastion of Christianity, or so it was thought, still held back the Muslim hoards, despite many, many sieges and attacks over the centuries from people from many countries, including Muslims, Vikings, Mongols, and even fellow Christians in the fourth crusade when the people of Venice convinced the crusaders to attack Constantinople, who was their trading rival, rather than attack the Muslims.

To change that, an over 100,000 man army sat down before its walls. In this army there were Janissaries, children of Christians, taken when they were young, and brought up as Muslims. They were the most brutal fighters in the entire army.

They dug tunnels; the Christians turned the water course into them and drowned the diggers. The Muslims built a siege tower; the Christians put gun powder underneath it and blew it up. Finally, in desperation a massive frontal assault was begun. Somehow a door that was underground which was used to carry refuse out of the city was left open. The Janissaries found it, they poured in killing and burning. The emperor and the Patriarch of the eastern church were both killed.

Constantinople had fallen, and the Christians thought that, surely, the long, long Holy War was over. Cannons had been used to take down the walls of the city, the hordes were advancing and there seemed to be no stopping them.

However, growing up in Venice, at that time two years old when the news of the sack of Constantinople came was a little boy named Christopher Columbus. It was 1453, and a new phase in the Holy War was about to begin.

 

Through His Strength We Will Conquer,

Andrew C. Abbott

Notes:

1: Ziomkowski 2006. pp. 74.

Boring Ourselves to Death

“It is my opinion, that Americans have a deep and unacknowledged boredom.”  English poet Rudyard Kipling.¹

 

Last night I watched the documentary Captivated, a film warning about the dangers of over consumption of media. The documentary explained how our brains our hardwired to focus on anything that moves; probably a reflex to protect us from danger. However, the screens move all the time, so we are always watching. And, while we think we are relaxing, the documentary explained, we are not. We are having brain exhaustion and draining while doing nothing. It explained that the average child consumes over 50 hours of media a week. Such amounts of excess brain stimulations is harmful for many reasons.

Media is not a real world that we interact with, it is something that is in front of us, a virtual world. We watch things we do not really enjoy, simply because we are glued to it. We are always so bored, and we think we watch, log on, or view because we are having fun.

The dangers are there and very, very evident. But besides the risks involved in such mass consumption, what is on the screen, what we are experiencing, is portraying worldviews that we really do not agree with.

Mass killings, where the object of the game is to destroy, to rob, to blow things up. Virtual war games which people spend hours of time playing, reminds one of the coliseums. Many Americans would not go to the Roman Games, but we will go to them in our virtual worlds.

“Man is lost and lonely in the postmodern world.”-Francis Schaeffer.

 

The real world is not a great place to live in the postmodern world. We have to get away from our decaying society, so we escape into a virtual world. It is easier; we can always start over if we mess up after all. In the real world we may be dead beat bums, but in the game world we feel that we are accomplishing something.

The Christians usually either run from the virtual world, which includes internet, or they embrace the madness. The Christian worldview-the true one that Scriptures lay down-calls on us to take all things under subjection for Christ. That includes everything, because the earth is the Lords and the fullness thereof. (Psalm 24:1) So whether it is cows or computer clicks, all must be brought under the headship of the God of the universe. There are other things to accomplish than killing the most zombies or growing the most crops on Farmville. A world of 0s and 1s should not control us.

Mankind existed for almost 6,000 years without Facebook, we can too for a while. Staring at a screen usually accomplishes nothing.

To view the virtual world properly, we must look at every aspect of it from the viewpoint of how we can take dominion of it and use for the glory of our creator. If it is so distorted that nothing can be made of it then abandon it.

Television is not completely bad. Groucho Marx found it very educational. He said every time someone switched it on; he went into another room and read a book, maybe we should to.

Andrew C. Abbott

Notes:

1: From his autobiographical sketch Something of myself.

The Romeike Case

The Romeike Case

Iowa – Yesterday morning the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Obama Administration’s denial of asylum to the German family the Romeikes.

The Romeikes came to America in 2008, fleeing from Germany because they were denied the right to homeschool there. In 2010 they were granted amnesty here in 2012 that was overturned, yesterday, the second court ruling was upheld.

The court said that the Romeikes had not made a sufficient case, and that the United States has not opened its doors to every victim of unfair treatment, HSLDA reported. The Administration made the argument that homeschooling is not a basic human right, and thus the denial of that right does not give a reason to grant amnesty.

Mr. Romeike is a Classical Pianist, who sold his beloved Grand Pianos to afford the flight to the U.S.

The case is one of shocking implications about real views of the current administration. Eric Holder, interestingly enough, the same man involved, although we do not yet know how closely, with the AP phone records scandal.

Any group that would suppress the basic human right of parents to decide how their children are educated is but a step away from the basic human right of free speech.

Such blatant defilement of the rights protected under the constitution, as basic inalienable rights, shows that this part of the administration at least, are not upholding the true American ideals, the Christian and constitutional ideals the founding fathers and the majority, at least, of Americans still ascribe to.

Mr. Holder has shown himself not worthy of the trust of the American people. Such men are a shame to the office they hold, and cast a bane on the great men who have hold and now hold public office in the U.S.

The Homeschool Legal Defense Association, (HSLDA) will continue to appeal this case, which may eventually go to the Supreme Court.

Andrew C. Abbott