Ronnie W. Rogers, “Taking every thought captive…”

When I was in England in 2004, the number of Muslims attending a mosque surpassed the number of Brits attending the State Church of England. I asked a friend of mine, who has served for a number of years planting churches in London, if this meant that they now would request parity?  To which he responded no, they are demanding preference.

England is now clamoring to make several concessions to Islam, like changing school curriculum to remove facts that are offensive to Islam, which includes how Christianity really influenced the western world.

Europe seems to have an insatiable appetite for ridding itself of every Christian vestige in order to accommodate secularism and Islam.  Tragically, they have forgotten that every secular country desired the demise of a free England, e.g. Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler, and that Islam is not a religion that accommodates, but one that must, by Koranic mandate, dominate.  Islam brings not just religion, but a religion that is inextricably tied to an Islamic state, which, when powerful enough, will displace the present state of affairs.

We found that the Brits we talked with outside of London were very concerned and even outraged at the Islamization of their beloved homeland.

While there I read a book by a British Historian Michael Burleigh, entitled “Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror.”  What caused me to buy the book was a statement that I saw while perusing it in the store.  Burleigh said, “The Americans are wrong”, and he meant that Americans were wrong to think that Europeans were going to sit idly by while Islam takes over their countries.

He did indeed write a compelling book, and I for one hope he is right, but the last five years have not been encouraging.

David Aikman, initially educated at Oxford, completed a Ph.D. in Russian and Chinese history at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist and a foreign policy consultant based in the Washington, D.C. area. For a time he was the TIME magazine Beijing bureau chief.

In his book, Jesus in Beijing, Aikman recounts the words of an unnamed scholar from one of China’s premier research institutes, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The scholar was speaking to a group of 18 American tourists in Beijing in 2002, and here is what he said:

“One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world,” he said. “We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt.” ¹

1. David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003), 5-6. [↩]

“On Feb. 24, 1895, The New York Times warned of the next Ice Age, and in 1923, the Chicago Tribune warned that ice would soon make Canada uninhabitable. But by 1933, the same papers were warning of the greatest rise in temperatures since 1776. Reports two decades later also spoke of a spike in global temperatures. Even TIME magazine reported on global warming in 1951, just two decades before [an] article on a new Ice Age.”¹

The June 1974 issue of TIME Magazine quoted scientists warning of a new Ice Age.  Newsweek, one year later, claimed that the evidence for such catastrophic predictions was massive.  The New York Times, in 1975, noted that “a major cooling is widely considered to be inevitable.” 

“The global average temperature dropped from its seasonal norm in recent months, and the Northern Hemisphere has had unusually extensive snow,” The Times report claimed. “But many experts have said those developments are almost assuredly a short-term wiggle on the way to more warming and melting from the influence of long-lived greenhouse gases produced mainly by burning fossil fuels and forests.”

“The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a report March 13 that confirmed global temperatures were at their coolest levels since 2001. Pacific storms dumped record snowfalls in the American West, in the Northeast and in Canada. China experienced its harshest winter in a century. Snow cover in Siberia and Mongolia is greater than at any time since the mid-1960s, and even Iraq saw snow this year for the first time in recent memory.”

“One of the most telling signs invalidating the predictions of catastrophic global warming is the expansion of Arctic sea ice. After a supposed record thaw, the ice has returned. A report from the Canadian Ice Service, which has kept records on sea ice since 1972, noted above-average coverage of the Arctic. Gilles Langis, a forecaster with the Ice Service, said the ice also is 10 to 20 cm thicker in most places. The report from the Ice Service was corroborated by the Denmark Meteorological Institute, which said the sea ice between Greenland and Canada was at its most expansive in 15 years.”

“The nice thing about sea ice is that there is no analysis needed,” Stan Goldenberg, a meteorologist with NOAA’s hurricane research division, told Baptist Press in an interview. “This is raw data. You can look at the levels and see that it is colder.”

Now, I think climate change is an interesting topic and we as Christians should be informed and live lives that demonstrate good stewardship of what God has entrusted us with. However, unless your profession is related to climate change in some way, your focus should be on issues where there is no doubt that evil stampedes, e.g. divorce, child abuse, abortion, drug and alcohol abuse, secularizing of the public square, etc., lest, in two or three decades, after having trampled over a morally decaying culture in order to stop man-made global warming, one finds himself with a wasted life and frostbite.

1. see http://www.bpnews.net/BPnews.asp?ID=27656 for entire article from which this information was gleaned [↩]