#Protestant reliance on creeds

[mindfulldsliving]

A Latter-day Saint Perspective on Sola Scriptura, Creeds, and Divine Revelation

A Latter-day Saint Perspective on Sola Scriptura, Creeds, and Divine Revelation For many Christians, “Sola Scriptura” serves as a central guiding belief, emphasizing scripture as the sole authority. But Latter-day Saint theology offers a different perspective—one that values the Bible deeply while also embracing modern revelation, prophetic authority, and a broader view of God’s work. When…

[holidays-events]

10 influential women to celebrate for Women’s History Month Kristen Hubby - Mar 12, 2017 10 most influential women in history From Rosa Parks to Beyoncé, get inspired to put a few more cracks in that glass ceiling. From fighting for the right to legal, safe abortions to ending segregation, women have worked tirelessly to ensure that equality is something that isn’t just afforded to the ruling classes. While there is still a lot more to accomplish, remembering how much women have put on the line is motivational in itself. This Women’s History Month, we are celebrating the women who have helped made a few cracks in that infamous glass ceiling. Here are 1o of the greatest.

1) Rosa Parks Women's History Month: Rosa Parks Screengrab via Alice Pennington/YouTube “I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free… so other people would be also free.” Rosa Parks became a prominent leader in the U.S. civil rights movement when in 1955, she refused to give up her seat at the front of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, to a white passenger. Parks was arrested and she and her husband lost their jobs because of her civil actions, going without full-time employment for nearly 10 years. Despite their struggles, Parks’ decision to firmly stand up for herself and say, “No, I’m not,” in a deeply segregated South led to a 381-day boycott of blacks refusing to take public buses. It was the first large-scale demonstration against segregation in the country and the city was eventually forced to integrate its bus system.

2) Margaret Fuller Women's History Month: Margaret Fuller Screengrab via Studies Weekly/YouTube “I am suffocated and lost when I have not the bright feeling of progression.” Margaret Fuller was an American teacher, critic, writer, and feminist who became the first full-time book reviewer in journalism. Most known for her 1845 book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller inspired young women to strive for independence from the home, get an education, and reject the comforts of being a housewife. The first edition of her book sold out within a week and sparked a national conversation about women’s rights. She also advocated for prison reform and the emancipation of slaves.

3) Amelia Earhart Women's History Month: Amelia Earhart Photo via Pacific Aviation Museum/Flickr (CC-BY) “Never do things others can do and will do, if there are things others cannot do or will not do.” In 1928, Amelia Earhart became the first female aviator to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. As the 16th woman to ever receive a pilot’s license, she set a world altitude record for women at 14,000 feet and was idolized for banding together with an organization of female pilots called the Ninety-Nines, encouraging women to take up aviation. Earhart even planned on teaching friend and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt how to fly, pushing her to get a learning permit. But in 1937, during an attempted trip across the globe, Earhart disappeared over the Pacific Ocean. Earhart was never found, but in what would be her final letter to her husband, she wrote: “Please know I am quite aware of the hazards. I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.”

4) Betty Friedan Women's History Month: Betty Friedan Screengrab via Rebeca R./YouTube “Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to be themselves.” Born to a Russian-Jewish immigrant family, Betty Friedan was a women’s rights activist and the author of the 1963 book that essentially ushered in the second wave of feminism, The Feminine Mystique. After getting a degree in psychology at Smith College, Friedan was a housewife and stay-at-home mother for a decade until she realized she was dissatisfied with the monotony of her life. This led to a series of studies that became her thesis-turned-book about how a woman’s reliance on her husband creates false values that are damaging and invites discrimination. Friedan went on to become the president of the largest women’s movement group, National Organization for Women, campaigning for equal employment rights, women’s representation in government, legalized abortion, and more. She also founded what is now known as NARAL Pro-Choice America, which is still working to repeal strict abortion laws in the country.

5) Gloria Steinem Women's History Month: Gloria Steinem Photo via Ms. Foundation for Women/Flickr (CC-BY) ‪“We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach.”‬ A prominent trailblazer during feminism’s second wave, Gloria Steinem continues to advocate for equality and women’s rights today. The journalist and activist gained national recognition after going undercover as a Playboy bunny to expose the sexist and underpaid position. She went on to become a founding editor of New York magazine, covering progressive social issues, protests, sit-ins, and rallies for women. She later founded her own publication, Ms. Magazine, along with a number of organizations like Ms. Foundation for Women, which raises awareness of human rights, racial equality, and pro-choice activism. Steinem who once said, “Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry,” still speaks and writes about women’s rights around the world.

6) Frida Kahlo Women's History Month: Frida Khalo Screengrab via divadaniela1/YouTube “At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.” Kahlo was a revolutionary Mexican self-portrait artist born in the middle of political chaos, which she famously depicted in her artwork. She was also inspired by the many personal tragedies she endured, like contracting polio at age 6 and a tragic bus accident that left her crippled. Kahlo was politically active and part of the Young Communist League and the Mexican Communist Party. Her husband Diego Rivera, who she often called “big baby,” described her work as “paintings that exalted the feminine qualities of endurance and truth, reality, cruelty, and suffering.”

7) Beyoncé Women's History Month: Beyonce Screengrab via BeyonceVEVO/YouTube “We need to reshape our own perception of how we view ourselves. We have to step up as women and take the lead.” Born and raised in Houston, Beyoncé has become an international role model for women of all ages and colors. Through her lyrics advocating for racial equality, ending police brutality, and equal rights for women, Beyoncé has made an impact—especially as a woman of color in a business dominated by white men. Before she was Beyoncé the icon, the singer-songwriter was part of Destiny’s Child, a contemporary R&B group that preached a cool version of girl power. In 2016, Beyoncé released her visual Grammy-nominated album, Lemonade, sparking a national conversation about sex, monogamy, race, and reclaiming power. That same year, she became the most Grammy-nominated female musician of all time.

8) Malala Yousafzai Women's History Month: Malala Yousafzai Photo via DFID - UK Department for International Development Follow/Flickr (CC-BY) “I don’t want to be remembered as the girl who was shot. I want to be remembered as the girl who stood up.” During a time in Pakistan when television and music were banned, women were prevented from going shopping, and schools were closing because of the Taliban’s military hold on the Swat District, Malala Yousafzai remained not just brave but outspoken. Yousafzai wrote for the BBC Urdu under a pseudonym and appeared in a New York Times documentary about her fears of the Taliban and her passion for equal education. In 2012, a gunman entered her school bus and shot her in the head. She survived, and the attack led to protests across Pakistan, making her a stateswoman for equal rights. At 17-years-old, Yousafzai became the youngest ever laureate to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, with Time listing her as one of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World” in 2013.

9) Michelle Obama Women's History Month: Michelle Obama “You see, our glorious diversity—our diversity of faiths, and colors and creeds―that is not a threat to who we are, it makes us who we are.” Michelle Obama was the first black woman to become the first lady of the United States. Obama graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law, and went on to work as a lawyer and community organizer in Chicago. During her monumental years in the White House from 2009 to 2017, Obama became a prominent role model for women, advocating for health and wellness through initiatives like “Let’s Move!” and education for young girls abroad with “Let Girls Learn.” “It is our fundamental belief in the power of hope that has allowed us to rise above the voices of doubt and division, of anger and fear that we have faced in our own lives and in the life of this country,” Obama said, during her final address as first lady.

10) Audre Lorde Women's History Month: Audre Lorde Screengrab via BigMouthGirl/YouTube “When we speak, we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.” Audre Lorde, a self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” remains a role model for modern-day intersectional feminism. Lorde dedicated her life’s work challenging discrimination against women, people of color, and LGBT community. Lorde’s poetic works, including her most notable, From a Land Where Other People Live in 1973 and The Black Unicorn in 1978, explored the marginalization of gay communities and women of color, inspiring readers to stand up against social injustice. Her writing, which grew more personal over time, encouraged people to celebrate their differences instead of to discriminate.

https://www.dailydot.com/irl/womens-history-month/

[gibsongirlselections]

Is America Still a Nation?

Who Rules? Sovereignty, Nationalism and the Fate of Freedom in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Roger Kimball (Encounter Books, 2020), 128 pages; $22.50.

America’s ongoing woke revolution, as many have said, borrows the centrifugal forces of 1790s French Jacobinism, so there’s perhaps never been a worse time for conservatives to quote the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen of 1789. And yet one nugget of wisdom in it could well become a guiding principle for an American right in flux. “The principle of any sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation,” reads article 3. “No body, no individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from it.”

Conservatives are by now well aware of the two-fold challenge—domestic and external—to American self-government, the principle therein stated that power is to be wielded by the people’s own representatives alone, or by a judicial branch tasked with independently interpreting the laws they pass. At home, opposition to unelected rulemakers to whom no power has been (constitutionally) delegated by Congress and the activist judges who side with them when challenged in court has been a conservative drumbeat as long as progressives have been around to make use of them. Externally, a similarly unaccountable set of transnational institutions vying to supersede national sovereignty in the name of global governance has only more recently earned the right’s distrust, although Trump’s anti-globalist zeal on this score may never leave the GOP once he exits the scene.

But beyond globalism and the administrative state lies a deeper challenge to American sovereignty that they’d be wise to face head-on ahead of November. Self-government is about a rapport between two groups—lawmakers and the people. Keeping the former directly elected and accountable to the latter is only one side of the democratic coin, the how of democracy. Who makes up the people—on whose behalf said elected representatives are meant to make law—is the inescapable other half of the same issue. And just as power transferred to unelected bureaucrats at home and abroad threatens the democratic contract from above, the ongoing fracturing of the American body politic along identitarian lines complicates the democratic experiment from below too, although in ways perhaps less fully understood at the moment.

The demos, or we the people—how as Americans “we define the first-person plural,” in Roger Kimball’s words—requires neat delineation and a sense of shared destiny for a kratos to viably emerge from it. Conservatives have woken up to the weakening of the latter. But as the left keeps waging its war on the body politic through racial identitarianism and general America-bashing, will conservatives find the pluck to warn about the demise of the American nation without sounding alarmist?

To be sure, the “American nation” never had a fully settled meaning in the first place, at least not among the right—and likely won’t for a while longer. Conservatives will continue sorting themselves, for the foreseeable future, among believers in America as a “credal nation” and those who prefer to it a more culturally substantive expression—prizing instead, though not necessarily to the exclusion of the Founders’ creed, the nationally unifying factors of language, history, culture, and even religion.

Both the credal and cultural outlooks, it turns out, are coming simultaneously under assault, so prizing one over the other offers little relief. The former—the distinctively American principles of natural rights and limited government—were first decried as a constitutional roadblock to Teddy Roosevelt’s turn-of-century progressive agenda, but today they’ve earned the open scorn of the wider left, which in the wake of The New York Times’ 1619 Project is coming around to viewing them as a fig leaf for the perpetuation of slavery, Jim Crow and segregation. The latter, cultural idea of the nation—always vulnerable to criticism for its ethnonational connotations—is coming under strain too by the corrosive effect of identitarian politics, the growing conflation of residency with citizenship in a number of liberal states and cities, and the combination of high levels of immigration in tandem with a culture at home that prizes multiculturalism at the expense of assimilation.

If conservatives hope to regain some of the lost ground in the culture, seeing eye-to-eye on what nationhood is to mean will be crucial. Extolling Americans’ shared national identity is perhaps the less well understood track of the multi-faceted realignment on the right, perhaps because it operates at a deeper, less conscious level, while supplying much of the impetus for the other major two tracks—economics and foreign policy. Underpinning the productive populism of Oren Cass and his agenda for re-shoring American jobs is a distinct nationalist disposition on economic policy, one that places the wellbeing of Americans non-negotiably over and above progressive bromides such as free-trade and even economic efficiency. Similarly, Trump’s Jacksonian foreign policy taps into an abiding resentment at the neocon obsession with regime change and democracy promotion across the furthest reaches of the globe at the expense of domestic priorities. Both of these realignments can be conceivably traced back to a re-emphasizing of the American nation as the ultimate locus that public policy is to serve.

As with these other two reshuffling trends, conservatives’ realignment around nationalism is merely in its “opening sallies,” in the words of The New Criterion’s Roger Kimball, one of its closest watchers. Across each of these three cases, Trump’s election—and to some extent his economic and foreign policy victories since—were a necessary shock to the GOP establishment, but as with any realignment that is to stick, the torch has to be picked up in the realm of ideas-, particularly if he isn’t re-elected and conservatives are left grappling with his legacy in his absence. This is precisely what Kimball’s Encounter Books sets out to do in Who Rules? Sovereignty, Nationalism and the Fate of Freedom in the Twenty-First Century, collaboratively produced with another nucleus of conservative intellectual innovation, Chris Buskirk’s Center for American Greatness, which publishes the namesake magazine. The compendium of essays grew out of a conference the two groups held in Washington a year ago and will be published at the end of October.

On the issue of American nationhood, the book’s essayists take unequivocally the cultural-nationalist view, most recently popularized by Rich Lowry in The Case for Nationalism (2019). It turns out that a similar weariness vis-à-vis reducing American identity to its liberal-credal expression had long ago been expressed by Lowry’s predecessor as editor of National Review, John O’Sullivan, in the magazine’s special issue of February 1994 on Demystifying Multiculturalism. Quite curiously for a Brit—or perhaps being all too aware of the failures of multiculturalism in his native United Kingdom—O’Sullivan, who calls himself a “nationalist for America,” warns that reducing American identity to credal adherence to liberty opens the floodgates to multiculturalism and its atomizing effect on the body politic. “The credal nation,” O’Sullivan writes presciently in his essay, “becomes over time a multicultural patchwork quilt.”

But the argument in fact far predates O’Sullivan himself—James Piereson’s essay in this new book provides the historical background to America’s emergence in the latter half of the 19th century and the 20th as a culturally distinct and unified nation, which is necessary context to grasp the ways in which that same national compact is unraveling in the 21st. “A nation is a creation of time and events,” Piereson writes, “and cannot be ordered in place at once,” which at least partly explains the wisdom of the Founders when they refrained from affirming the largely Protestant, English-descending cultural mainstream that prevailed in their midst. Piereson credits Lincoln—more popularly celebrated for saving the union by reasserting the principles of the Founding against the seceded Confederacy—with opening a period of cultural nation-forming that would see the American people gradually cohere around a culturally substantive expression of nationhood all the way until 1945. At just the time of the Civil War, Lincoln in fact began replacing in his speeches the term union—connoting a loose association of states with little in the way of a national bloodstream—with the term nation.

Just what exactly drove this period of nation-forming is perhaps more open to dispute. Piereson’s emphasis on wars points to their undoubtable memory-shaping effect through the shared pain of loss and the common thrill of victory. This was certainly the case in America’s victory over inter-European aggression, fascism and communism through two World Wars, to the extent they were experienced as truly national endeavors both in the war front and back home. But a range of other common attributes—from language to collective worship to mass culture a national character of grit and self-reliance—have also played an indisputable role in cementing American national identity. Be that as it may, the notion of a culturally unified American public was never much in question, until the undermining of that national cohesiveness by a series of policies and dogmas unleashed from today’s left made fretting about the demise of the American nation sound no longer wackily alarmist.

This is precisely the alarm Kimball’s book sounds, beginning with David Azerrad’s masterful takedown of identity politics and the contradictions at its core. Once the logic of atoning for past racial inequities through affirmative action outgrew itself into a constant quest for repentance, white guilt and greater diversity per se—which in many practical instances has meant discriminating against those born into the wrong race—a Rubicon was crossed in the left’s social agenda that makes any talk of American unity coming out of its ranks sound hollower by the day.

In his essay on “pre and post-citizens,” California resident Victor Davis Hanson describes the growing conflation of mere residency with American citizenship in Democrat-run cities and states, which is another stealthy way of undermining the American demos that necessarily forms the basis for self-government. Driving licenses for illegal aliens may seem innocuous, but the prospect of a sizable chunk of the undocumented population getting to decide on the presidency on par with American citizens when they get ballots wrongly sent to them is a different matter.

It’s also one that Trump is right to raise the alarm about ahead of November, if only symbolically. By celebrating racial differences at the expense of race-blind Americanism, by over-stretching the privilege of citizenship and by ceding power to the administrative state and to global institutions, the Democrats have become the party of a post-national, post-democratic America. Hidden in the book’s argument is counsel for Trump to adopt one narrative ahead of November—Democrats want to end the American nation and its sovereignty as we know it. It sure doesn’t mean that a vote for Trump will magically reunite an increasingly tribalized and racialized nation, but it does mean resisting our present trend towards these gloomy scenarios. In Piereson’s brilliant summation of all these problems, America is “evolving into a multi-national, multi-cultural, multilingual state lacking the cultural underpinnings of a common culture, language, religion or nationality that we commonly associate with the nation-state.” Have conservatives realized that November is about stopping that?

Jorge González-Gallarza Hernández (@JorgeGGallarza) is a senior researcher at Fundación Civismo.

The post Is America Still a Nation? appeared first on The American Conservative.

[republicstandard]

Blackburn Cathedral is Muslim Territory after Islamic call to Prayer

The Muslim call to prayer, or Adhan, is the categorical proclamation of Islam’s supersessionism over its forebears—Judaism and Christianity. It conclusively and unambiguously asserts that God’s revelation to Muhammad has supplanted and superseded God’s prior revelations to Moses in the Old Testament and to Jesus in the New Testament. It is a triumphalist declaration of Islamic supremacy over Jews and Christians.

“Allah is the greatest. I bear witness that there is no god except Allah. I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah. Come to prayer. Come to salvation.” These affirmations are repeated twice. Islamic sects use slightly varied formulations of the Adhan, but the core is fixed. The Adhan was made part of the Sharia during the first year after Muhammad’s migration to Medina.

Muslims do not consider Allah to be the God of the Jews or Christians. Allah is not Yahweh, revealed in the Torah. Allah is emphatically not the “God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” so designated in the epistles of St Paul. On the contrary, to say Allah has a Son or that God is Triune is blasphemy in the highest (shirk), condemning Christians to hell. In 2014, Malaysia’s Supreme Court ruled that Christians could not use “Allah” for God, even though Christians used it for centuries in Malay and Arabic to refer to their God.

Former Swedish Imam Tomas Samuel explains how the Adhan is a statement of Islamic supremacy. In Islamic sources, “we discover that the prayer call states that everyone should submit to Islam, and proclaims power over the area of the ​​prayer”.[2] The Adhan is prayed for two reasons: “it will remind people of when it is time to pray, and the prayer call will proclaim Islam over a city,” he says.

Samuel quotes Omdat Al-Ahkam, a fundamental text for Islamic law: “Adhan is a very important ritual in the religious practice of Islam, one can liken it to the Muslim flag. Its proclamation shows that the people of the city are Muslims.” In Arabic, “adhan” means “information” or “enlightenment”—signifying that people previously in darkness and ignorance are now “informed” and “enlightened” about the true religion of Islam, to which they must submit. Islam means submission (from the Arabic root “al-Silm”—submission or surrender).

Consequently, when an Imam recited the Adhan in the consecrated space of Blackburn Cathedral the night before Remembrance Day, he was claiming it as Islamic territory. He was professing the abrogation of Christianity and calling upon Peter Howell-Jones, the Dean of Blackburn Cathedral and the audience to declare their faith in Allah and his prophet Muhammad (the Adhan contains the Shahada—the Islamic creed. To convert to Islam the creed has to be recited three times). It doesn’t matter if this was done in the context of a concert.

The Shahada reinforces the claim that Muhammad is the “Seal of the Prophets” (Surah 33:40) and contradicts the New Testament claim—that although “at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1-2).

Islam holds to a theology of territory. Central to its mission is the sacralization of new territory. When Muslims march through Britain’s city centers and immigrant neighborhoods, they are seeking to “inscribe the name of Allah” on the spaces linking their homes and the mosques, writes Islamic scholar Pnina Werbner.

First generation Muslim migrants made sacred the private spaces of their homes. Second generation Muslims are seeking to sacralize public space—including, and especially, the sacred spaces of its chief rival, Christianity. In response, the Church of England is actively encouraging the Islamisation of its sacred spaces.

Hosting Islamic prayer, Koranic readings and Ramadan Iftar meals are no longer the exception but more and more frequent in the Church of England. Chaplaincies in British universities are rapidly taking down crosses, Bible verses and Christian symbols from prayer rooms, which results in Muslims turning them into university mosques.

When liberal churches and cathedrals open their doors in the name of hospitality or interfaith relations to Islamic sacralization, they are furthering Islamic dawa, or mission. “Dawa is to the Islamists of today what the ‘long march through the institutions’ was to twentieth-century Marxists,” notes Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

“After Islamists gain power, dawa is to them what Gleichschaltung (synchronization) of all aspects of German state, civil, and social institutions was to the National Socialists,” she adds, acknowledging that the “biggest difference is that dawa is rooted in the Islamic practice of attempting to convert non-Muslims to accept the message of Islam”.

From its very inception, Islam did not seek to build new sacred structures but constructed its sacred sites on top of existing pagan, Hindu, Jewish temples or churches. The best examples are the Ka’bah in Mecca (Muhammad purifies it of idols); the Dome of the Rock built on Israel’s Second Temple; Istanbul’s Hagia Sofia mosque—a Greek Orthodox basilica; and thousands of Hindu temples, the most famous being the Babri Masjid—said to be the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. Islam does this because it does not see itself as a new, innovative religion, but as canceling and correcting paganism, Judaism and Christianity.

Islam achieves this conquest of sacred space through ritual prayer and jihad. After the Muslims conquered Jerusalem (636-637) the Patriarch Sophronius escorted the Muslim Caliph Umar around Jerusalem. When they reached the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which Christians said housed Christ’s tomb and was the site of his resurrection from the dead, Sophronius invited Umar to pray inside the great church. Umar magnanimously turned him down, explaining that his followers would use his prayer as a pretext to turn the church into a mosque and that he wanted to leave it for the Christians instead.

Once territory is conquered it remains Muslim property forever. Muslims have still not given their claim on Spain’s Córdoba Cathedral, once the world’s second-biggest mosque. In 2013, eight Muslims were arrested for defying a ban on Islamic prayer and staging a “prayer protest” during Holy Week in the Cathedral, the single most powerful symbol of Islamic rule in Spain.[8]

When Muslims pray, they are engaging with divine space. The central gesture of ritual prayer is facing the Ka’bah in Mecca. According to the hadith, the angels support ritual prayers by performing them in heaven. In particular, the angels recite the Adhan and the roles of muezzin and Imam are given to different angels. What the Imam was doing in Blackburn Cathedral was thus a copy of what corresponding angels were doing in heaven—claiming the Cathedral as a sacred space for Allah.

But the angels are not limited to heaven; they are present in the world to assist Muslims—in this case, to claim territory in which ritual prayer has been prayed. The performance of ritual prayer generates sacred space around the worshipper, notes Islamic scholar S. R. Burge.

The claim that the Adhan at Blackburn Cathedral and other churches is a “power play” intended to conquer and sacralize Christian territory, is further supported by the internal Islamic discussion on whether it is haram (forbidden) or makrooh (offensive) for Muslims to enter churches for prayer.

The Hanafi School of law says entering churches is forbidden in all cases (as churches are abodes of the devils). Shafi‘is limit the prohibition to churches that have images. The Reliance of the Traveller: The Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law Umdat Al-Salik for Shafi‘is states that it is “offensive to pray … in a church”.

Hanbalis consider it offensive, but some limit this to churches containing images. There are fatwas permitting Muslims to enter churches, as long as it is not “for the purpose of worship or receiving blessings or confessing your sins or beseeching favors from other than Allah”. “If entering the church will lead to any bad consequences such as if it means approving of the Christians’ shirk and their claim that Allah has a wife and son”, then the level of makrooh may reach the level of haram according to Al-Mughni.

“If your going to the church is just to show tolerance and lenience, then it is not permissible, but if it is done to call them to Islam and create opportunities for you to do so, and you will not be taking part in their worship and you are not afraid that you may be influenced by their beliefs or customs, then it is permissible,” declares the Fatwa al-Lajnah al-Daa’imah.

In 1955, Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin delivered the William James lectures at Harvard University. The lectures were entitled ‘How to do things with words’. They resulted in one of the most significant developments in linguistics known as the speech-act theory. In some cases, ‘to say something is to do something’; to say something actually makes something happen. This is Austin’s thesis.

Can saying make it so? Yes, says Austin. A priest pronouncing a couple husband and wife is not using words describing who they are but is actually making them a married couple. Austin calls this performative speech. Words have the power to redefine and re-order reality. Prayer is performative speech.

The Adhan at Blackburn Cathedral wasn’t a demonstration of Islamic tolerance, but a speech-act proclamation of Islamic supremacy. This isn’t the first time Blackburn Cathedral has genuflected before the altar of Islam. In 2007, it appointed a Muslim woman on its staff as its Dialogue Development Officer. In 2009, Bradford Cathedral appointed another Muslim woman as Inter-faith Development Officer. Earlier this year, Blackburn Cathedral hosted a “Jihad of Jesus” seminar.

Peter Howell-Jones, Dean of Blackburn, is now a dhimmi—an Islamic subject. The bishops of Blackburn Julian Henderson, Jill Duff and Philip North—two evangelicals and one Anglo-Catholic are dhimmis.

Blackburn Cathedral is now Blackburn Mosque.

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[scottxrt]

American Life Style

New Post has been published on http://scottxrt.com/new-begining-of-life

American Life Style

The American way of life or simply the American way is the unique lifestyle of the people of the United States of America. It refers to a nationalist ethos that adheres to the principle of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. At the center of the American way is the American Dream that upward mobility is achievable by any American through hard work. This concept is intertwined with the concept of American exceptionalism, the belief in the unique culture of the nation.

Author William Herberg offers the following definition:[1] 1937 Louisville, Kentucky. Margaret Bourke-White.[2] There’s no way like the American Way

The American Way of life is individualistic, dynamic, and pragmatic. It affirms the supreme value and dignity of the individual; it stresses incessant activity on his part, for he is never to rest but is always to be striving to “get ahead���; it defines an ethic of self-reliance, merit, and character, and judges by achievement: “deeds, not creeds” are what count. The “American Way of Life” is humanitarian, “forward-looking”, optimistic. Americans are easily the most generous and philanthropic people in the world, in terms of their ready and unstinting response to suffering anywhere on the globe. The American believes in progress, in self-improvement, and quite fanatically in education. But above all, the American is idealistic. Americans cannot go on making money or achieving worldly success simply on its own merits; such “materialistic” things must, in the American mind, be justified in “higher” terms, in terms of “service” or “stewardship” or “general welfare”… And because they are so idealistic, Americans tend to be moralistic; they are inclined to see all issues as plain and simple, black and white, issues of morality. — William Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: an Essay in American religious sociology

Further information: individualism, dignity, humanitarianism, philanthropism, self-improvement, economic materialism, general welfare, moralism, and black and white thinking

One commentator notes, “The first half of Herberg’s statement still holds true nearly half a century after he first formulated it”, even though “Herberg’s latter claims have been severely if not completely undermined… materialism no longer needs to be justified in high-sounding terms”.[3]

In the National Archives and Records Administration’s 1999 Annual Report, National Archivist John W. Carlin writes, “We are different because our government and our way of life are not based on the divine right of kings, the hereditary privileges of elites, or the enforcement of deference to dictators. They are based on pieces of paper, the Charters of Freedom – the Declaration that asserted our independence, the Constitution that created our government, and the Bill of Rights that established our liberties.”[4]