President Obama Compares Birth Of Radical Islam With Christian Crusade

You had better believe that I am a soldier in the army of the Lord.

All of the years of my life that I have sung that tune, straight out the the American black protestant movement, I always had to rationalize what it really meant, or would someday mean to be a soldier of any sort realizing that most soldiers risk death in battle.  The mind of a child is impressionable, and we had all better believe that the face of modern day radical Islam was formed in the womb, not just via internet recruiting. Whether Christian, Islam or Jew, the eschatology of the Abrahamic faiths involve the hope of life "ever more" and the expectation of "laying down" your life in preparation for the unending hope of salvation.

This Sunday's debate has the world questioning the value of the comparison that president Barack Obama recently made between today's radical Islam and yesterday's Christian crusade during the National Prayer Breakfast.  Apparently, the 800 years of separation in time between these events doesn't justify a reasonable example of what can happen when a religious caliphate rises among us, so some have compared the christian claim of killers like the Ku Klux Klan whose exploits are not so ancient, and who also justify their behaviors on the grounds of religious authority. The counter claim  to this is that even the Klan doesn't wave religion in the forefront of their message nor have they organized a military to take over countries.  The hope seems to be targeted at identifying ISIS as something other than angry humans with religion as their justification.

Righteous Indignation
 The beauty of religion is the detriment of it as well.  What can strengthen us to handle the challenges of life can empower us towards the sin of righteous indignation and ultimately proselytizing to the extent of life and death decisions.  There would be no foundation to any religion if convincing and converting were not at the core of each religious agenda.  Christianity might uniquely claim a power of conversion that is done to you and not by you, but that claim is widely disputed by Christian's themselves, especially those Christians who stake their life upon the necessity of coming to Christ versus accepting Christ who chases us down with God's gift of grace. Christian Crusaders were much more violent than modern Christian's, but chase you down Christian's must have lead the Crusades.

It is sad that the religion of forgiveness has yet to accept forgiveness towards OUR own days of barbarity.  Any Christian who dares challenge Obama's Crusade comparison is akin to an excuse making sinner who has yet to come to terms with the depth of their own depravity.  What Obama was hoping to convey is the nature of humanity, which has evolved relative to technology, but remains essentially unchanged relative to compassion for life.  The existence of war hasn't changed over the 800 years since the crusades nor have the reason's for war.  Some wars are for money or power or influence and some are still for the sake of religion......still.

All religious endeavors work to expand the industry, not deflate it.  Religion- or the division of spiritual thought- thrives on the premise that one ideology is more righteous than the next. ISIS is not Al-Qaeda but it is an off-shoot because they disagree politically and thus religiously about the approach and urgency of the Islamic caliphate, which recognizes no separation between church and state.  In their approach, ISIS has placed all of Islam in a position of defending themselves against an angry world that is simply uneducated about denominational distinctions within Islam.  Islam is not yet Christianity when it comes to denominational disagreements, but given time they will surely fix all of that. For now, those we call radicals simply believe as they were raised to believe from birth.  How we live or die for a cause isn't simply an idea that rises, it must be raised from the doctrine and the songs of our birth.

I eventually reconciled my role as a soldier in the Christian army, and I also learned that if I hold my peace and let the Lord fight my battle..."Victory, victory shall be mine".  I don't imagine such a pacifist melody resides in the households of radical Islam.


What Did We Expect?
ISIS should have been the ultimate expectation and direction that religion (which is of the devil) would take Islam given the signs that had developed within the age old Sunni/Shia dispute- a dispute whose violence lives in the lands where Islam was birthed.  Elsewhere in the world, Muslims have long since rationalized the absurdity of a religious war to affirm the lineage of Muhammad and have conformed to the more peaceful tenants of their faith while shunning those that uphold violence as a conformation tactic.  Though westerners should not tolerate the violence that inevitably spills into western society, we should also not expect to resolve every aspect of the religious evolution that Islam is experiencing.  Some aspects of Islam's evolution will continue to involve the bloodshed of those who have always died in the name of religion, including several innocent bystanders.  We can try hard to take sides (which is impossible), or we can try even harder to minimize the fall out by protecting the innocent from a war that has very little to do with them, even if it appears to be all about them right now.

As the Christian Bible declares that all have sinned and fall short of the glory, WE should extend that thought into the realm of religion itself, which has a track record of failure that is consistent across all beliefs and denominations.  The failure of religion is the reason for the necessity of salvation- a concept which is consistently accepted across all Abrahamic faiths.  Religiosity, on the other hand, see's the unsaved as a representation of someone pathetic other than ME- while God says that accepting salvation only makes us aware of how pathetic we are, not less pathetic.


Humanity Is One

In the spirit of oneness, Christian Crusader's sought to save the world from peril by removing the sin that separates mankind from God. What they chose to do was depraved. Removing ourselves from the depravity that we call the Crusades is how we run the risk or repeating it in other ways.  Accepting the depravity of humanity's past is how we gain the wisdom to navigate through today's and tomorrow's depravity- because the word humanity includes everyone.