Comment on The Belmont Club"The lighting of the beacons"

As an outsider I find the implosion of Anglicanism to be a sad story. Theologically their adherence to pre-Reformation Counciliar church organization was logical. In theory they could have forged an alternative to Rome in partnership with the Eastern Churches. The problems caused by claims of authority by the Roman church under Papal authority at the Council of Trent and later of Papal Infallibility in Vatican I (1870) have not been resolved.

One day an Obama like Agent of Change may ascend to Peter's Throne and the Catholic Church will prove powerless to defend itself. The more decentralized structure of the Anglican and Orthodox communions should prove more flexible in sealing off such a threat, however they have proven less robust in marshaling their forces to respond to persistent subversion. The problem with government by Councils is that they become subject to manipulation. The process is analogous to they way that David Axelrod packed the Democratic Party caucuses to select delegates for Barack Obama even where Hillary Clinton had won the primaries, as in Texas.

If the Catholic Church rallied disaffected Protestants to rejoin the traditional Anglican and Presbyterian Churches and then seize control of the administration and assets of those bodies, not for the benefit of Rome but to restore the viability of the traditional Anglo-Saxon alternative to secularism and Islam that might begin to turn the tide in Europe. It may be to late for such an effort in Europe but there is grounds for hope. The ongoing growth among traditional Jewish and evangelical Christian communities, in Latin America at the expense of the Catholics, as well as other groups, Hindu, Buddhist etc., shows that there is a widespread base for an alternative to the choices our host offers. The choice may not be between the Catholics and Atheism/Islam.

wretchard,
From one side, there is the religion which pretends to be a political movement — socialism/communism. From the other flank there is the political movement which pretends to be a religion — Islam.

This is the essential formulation and is an excellent summary. Fighting the lies of the communists in their various guises, Red or Green, is hard unrelenting work but we know how to do it. The greatest threat is that we can grow weary of the task.

In Islam god is so abstract arbitrary and unfathomable, omnipotent and at the same time fallible, as to become simply a projection of human desire. On a deep level I see little difference between Islam and secularism. For this reason I suspect that faith in Islam is really very fragile. Its support is wide but shallow. Like the authority of the Communist Party of China it justifies itself by prior military victories. It is running on inertia and is intellectually out of gas. In the next few decades improved technology will pull the financial rug out from the oil cartel, unless the West castrates itself first under a secular/socialist Green regime. If severely checked militarily the Islamic Ummah may shatter.