May 11, 2008
The Foul Harvest
Right Side News
Aaron Velasquez
During the Golden Age of Islam, Western Europe was experiencing the Dark Age. Arabs kept alight the flame of knowledge, rescuing Greek culture from obscurity and allowing it to reconnect with Europe as the Renaissance.
It was during and after the Crusades that European culture began to flower anew. The Cathars built the great Cathedrals, some say with gold or other more esoteric riches gained by the Templars during their stay in Jerusalem.
As the flame of knowledge was transferred to the West, it was ironically extinguished in the Middle East. Islam and the Arab culture went into a steep decline, reaching its nadir with the teachings of Wahhabism and other extremist versions of the great religion. Now, the West is in full bloom, leading the world with progress in every aspect of life, while today's Islam finds itself infected with the memes of savagery and false pride, fueled by fear and jealousy of the Wests success.
The creative, rational, productive society of Medieval Islam has been replaced by a cult of destruction. Osama bin Laden said, "we do not worship life, we worship death." Death, violence, repression, hate, terror, and lies are held up as the highest values.
Dr. David Hawkins termed this the "Luciferic Inversion:" good is replaced by evil. Once evil has replaced good in the mind, the doorway is opened to the "Satanic Inversion," the unleashing of the most primitive animal drives in the human psyche, leading to grotesque savagery and mass death. When thought becomes action, the foul harvest of bad thinking is made manifest.
This situation is not unique to modern Islamists. The same thing happened under Communist rule all over the planet in the last century, and under Nero, Caligula and Hitler. In all of these cases, God was eclipsed by charismatic leaders, followed quickly by the inversion of right and wrong.
Without a universal truth and a guide to right behavior, anything goes. What tends to go most often is a return to the animal behaviors we have spent millennia trying to corral and sublimate into more positive pursuits. These positive pursuits are what is collectively known as "civilization," which is based on the rule of law as handed down to us from God by the world's great religions.
What has happened with Islam is a fusion of church and state, with the imams and mullahs replacing the scriptures as authority. This is just what happened in Catholicism during the European Dark Ages. In both cases, the priestly class usurped authority from Divine Scripture. They sold their souls for temporal power over the ignorant and illiterate masses. Once the schism between Catholicism and Protestantism took place, catalyzed by the advent of the Gutenberg printing press, the masses were freed from the monopoly on God which the priests had held for so long.
This has not yet happened in Islam. One would hope that as the Muslims of the world become more educated and affluent, they will begin to realize that their once great religion has been hijacked and turned to unsavory ends. The Internet will be the Gutenberg press of the age, with ability to disseminate information on any topic widely, in any language. Perhaps a Martin Luther of the Muslim faith will rise and allow the light of truth to disinfect Islam. Until then, containment of the disease is the wisest course.
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Aaron Velasquez is a successful business leader and a Sleuth of the Realm of the Clue Society, dedicated to the betterment of mankind. He is taking a sabbatical from his business interests and pursuing his Ph.D. at a leading university.
As the flame of knowledge was transferred to the West, it was ironically extinguished in the Middle East. Islam and the Arab culture went into a steep decline, reaching its nadir with the teachings of Wahhabism and other extremist versions of the great religion. Now, the West is in full bloom, leading the world with progress in every aspect of life, while today's Islam finds itself infected with the memes of savagery and false pride, fueled by fear and jealousy of the Wests success.
The creative, rational, productive society of Medieval Islam has been replaced by a cult of destruction. Osama bin Laden said, "we do not worship life, we worship death." Death, violence, repression, hate, terror, and lies are held up as the highest values.
Dr. David Hawkins termed this the "Luciferic Inversion:" good is replaced by evil. Once evil has replaced good in the mind, the doorway is opened to the "Satanic Inversion," the unleashing of the most primitive animal drives in the human psyche, leading to grotesque savagery and mass death. When thought becomes action, the foul harvest of bad thinking is made manifest.
This situation is not unique to modern Islamists. The same thing happened under Communist rule all over the planet in the last century, and under Nero, Caligula and Hitler. In all of these cases, God was eclipsed by charismatic leaders, followed quickly by the inversion of right and wrong.
Without a universal truth and a guide to right behavior, anything goes. What tends to go most often is a return to the animal behaviors we have spent millennia trying to corral and sublimate into more positive pursuits. These positive pursuits are what is collectively known as "civilization," which is based on the rule of law as handed down to us from God by the world's great religions.
What has happened with Islam is a fusion of church and state, with the imams and mullahs replacing the scriptures as authority. This is just what happened in Catholicism during the European Dark Ages. In both cases, the priestly class usurped authority from Divine Scripture. They sold their souls for temporal power over the ignorant and illiterate masses. Once the schism between Catholicism and Protestantism took place, catalyzed by the advent of the Gutenberg printing press, the masses were freed from the monopoly on God which the priests had held for so long.
This has not yet happened in Islam. One would hope that as the Muslims of the world become more educated and affluent, they will begin to realize that their once great religion has been hijacked and turned to unsavory ends. The Internet will be the Gutenberg press of the age, with ability to disseminate information on any topic widely, in any language. Perhaps a Martin Luther of the Muslim faith will rise and allow the light of truth to disinfect Islam. Until then, containment of the disease is the wisest course.
-------------------
Aaron Velasquez is a successful business leader and a Sleuth of the Realm of the Clue Society, dedicated to the betterment of mankind. He is taking a sabbatical from his business interests and pursuing his Ph.D. at a leading university.
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