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While living in the Muslim world, I had thought that European society was under threat from the moral traditionalism of Islam. When I returned to Europe, I realized that Islam is a lesser threat to us than we are to ourselves. There is not much left to save in Western society; our task now must be to recover what has been lost. I am grateful to Islam for helping me see this. Though I continue to reject elements of Muslim society, I have come to admire its sense of faith, which brought me back to my own. I still struggle in a society that rejects my beliefs, and in which isolation or compromise often seem the only options. At least now I have a spiritual orientation and a path forward.

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And I appreciated that I had just experienced a society which, for all its faults, provided a sense of community, companionship, and transcendence that was lacking in Europe. I realized that these qualities had existed not just in the persecuted Christian groups with whom I identified, but in the broader society as well. The Muslim society I thought I despisedand still do, when it comes to the oppression of women and Christianslooked superior to my own when I considered the sense of purpose it provided to its people. I watched some of the friends I had grown up with drink, party, and engage in all kinds of sexual activities without much thought. I saw them in a different light.

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Frok said:

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I thought it was an interesting article.

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And I appreciated that I had just experienced a society which, for all its faults, provided a sense of community, companionship, and transcendence that was lacking in Europe. I realized that these qualities had existed not just in the persecuted Christian groups with whom I identified, but in the broader society as well. The Muslim society I thought I despisedand still do, when it comes to the oppression of women and Christianslooked superior to my own when I considered the sense of purpose it provided to its people. I watched some of the friends I had grown up with drink, party, and engage in all kinds of sexual activities without much thought. I saw them in a different light.

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This is very true. Our society is becoming rather meaningless and it seems almost nothing is sacred anymore.

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Science and reason have, from the beginning of time, played a secondary and subordinate part in the life of nations; so it will be till the end of time. Nations are built up and moved by another force which sways and dominates them, the origin of which is unknown and inexplicable: that force is the force of an insatiable desire to go on to the end, though at the same time it denies that end. It is the force of the persistent assertion of one's own existence, and a denial of death. It's the spirit of life, as the Scriptures call it, 'the river of living water,' the drying up of which is threatened in the Apocalypse. It's the sthetic principle, as the philosophers call it, the ethical principle with which they identify it, 'the seeking for God,' as I call it more simply. The object of every national movement, in every people and at every period of its existence is only the seeking for its god, who must be its own god, and the faith in Him as the only true one. God is the synthetic personality of the whole people, taken from its beginning to its end. It has never happened that all, or even many, peoples have had one common god, but each has always had its own. It's a sign of the decay of nations when they begin to have gods in common. When gods begin to be common to several nations the gods are dying and the faith in them, together with the nations themselves. The stronger a people the more individual their God. There never has been a nation without a religion, that is, without an idea of good and evil. Every people has its own conception of good and evil, and its own good and evil. When the same conceptions of good and evil become prevalent in several nations, then these nations are dying, and then the very distinction between good and evil is beginning to disappear. Reason has never had the power to define good and evil, or even to distinguish between good and evil, even approximately; on the contrary, it has always mixed them up in a disgraceful and pitiful way; science has even given the solution by the fist. This is particularly characteristic of the half-truths of science, the most terrible scourge of humanity, unknown till this century, and worse than plague, famine, or war. A half-truth is a despot... such as has never been in the world before. A despot that has its priests and its slaves, a despot to whom all do homage with love and superstition hitherto inconceivable, before which science itself trembles and cringes in a shameful way.

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agdad4x said:

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This discussion reminds me of the joke about the guy that went to heaven and St. Peter was showing him around,

the two came to a mansion up on a hill and the new guy could see a grand party going on, boozing and what have you happening, they walked past the mansion and the new guy asked who was in the mansion and St Peter replied "the Baptist"...they get to do in heaven what they could not do on earth,

the two continued past several other mansions with pretty much the same response, then they came to another mansion and St Peter said "Quiet, we have to sneak past these people"

after the two had gotten past that mansion, the new guy asked who that was and St. Peter replied:

"those are the Catholics, they think they are the only ones up here."

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