“What painful irony!” notes Peter Jones of truthxchange. “Spiritually-ignorant young people, foolishly worshiping “the great Satan,” singing as they die; “I will love the Devil and his song,” butchered in cold blood by religiously-driven Islamist jihadists claiming to serve Allah destroying the “great Satan,” in actions of clearly Satanic inspiration.”
Dr. Jones writes:
What distressing symbolism. The gruesome scene of 89 young Europeans mercilessly gunned down in a Paris theatre by equally youthful radical Muslim assassins will forever be etched on our minds, for it provides an ominous image of our global future.
I am reminded of a recent book by a personal friend, the Anglican Evangelical Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, whose Pakistani family has roots in both Islam and Christianity. The title of his book is truly prophetic: Triple Jeopardy for the West: Aggressive Secularism, Radical Islamism and Multiculturalism (Bloomsbury, 2012). These three elements all came together with astounding clarity on that woeful night of November 13, 2015 in what now clearly represents a “triple jeopardy for the West.”
A trifecta of spiritual rebellion—secularism, radical Islam, and multiculturalism—combines various seductive forms of Oneism (what Paul calls the Lie in Romans 1:25) and draws people away from life-giving Truth. In none of them is there any hope, since the Twoist God who saves, and who is the personal source behind past Western Christian civilization, notably absent from contemporary discourse. The union of these three forces focuses attention, for one crucial moment, on our desperate state of human vulnerability. Where will it all end? Is there hope?
Secularism: Jihadists pose an enormous problem to contemporary Western civilization, which cannot find any serious answer to such heartless, gratuitous slaughter. While proposing to bomb ISIS installations in Syria, political leaders put hope in the long-term spread of Western values and propose “faith in humanity.” As German leader Angela Merkel said: “Our strongest response to terrorists is to carry on living our lives and our values as we have until now—self-confident and free, considerate and engaged.” But are these values merely the empty fumes of a worldview once highly influenced by past Judeo-Christian principles? Will a civilization, deliberately scrubbed clean of such principles by “liberal progressivism,” offer the same attraction? For fear of trespassing on the boundaries of civil rights, the name of God may not be mentioned. The Islamists, observing the West’s cultural degradation, call us “the great Satan.” Ironically, former West German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, who died this year at 96, doubtless got it right back in 1990 when he admitted that Islamic immigration into Europe “kept him awake at night in its refusal to integrate with Western society.” Continue reading
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