A few days ago, the CSM had an interesting pair of stories. The first one was entitled The Caliphate: One nation, under Allah, with 1.5 billion Muslims. The basic idea would be:
that Muslims should abolish national boundaries within the Islamic world and return to a single Islamic state, known as “the Caliphate,” that would stretch from Indonesia to Morocco and contain more than 1.5 billion people.
Talk about your horrible ideas. Look, if you want to practice a religion in the privacy of your own home (or neighborhood), that’s great. It’s when you want to create an official, state-sanctioned religion that forms the basis of your society that I’ve got a problem with, especially when you say crazy things like this:
Hizb ut-Tahrir promises that a revived Caliphate will end corruption and bring prosperity - though the group doesn’t say how. It will let Muslims challenge, and ultimately conquer, the West, its followers say.
[...]
“Islam obliges Muslims to possess power so that they can intimidate - I would not say terrorize - the enemies of Islam,” says Abu Mohammed, a Hizb ut-Tahrir activist. “In the beginning, the Caliphate would strengthen itself internally and it wouldn’t initiate jihad.”
“But after that we would carry Islam as an intellectual call to all the world,” says Abu Mohammed, a pseudonym. “And we will make people bordering the Caliphate believe in Islam. Or if they refuse then we’ll ask them to be ruled by Islam.”
[...]
“And if after all discussions and negotiations they still refuse, then the last resort will be a jihad to spread the spirit of Islam and the rule of Islam,” he says, smiling. “This is done in the interests of all people to get them out of darkness and into light.”
In other words, “We want to save you, by killing you if you don’t believe what we believe”. What do you say to something like that? If ever there were a complaint about religion, it would be the common meme across many religions about the necessity to prosetylize. From my pseudo-analytical armchair, I can’t rationalize this urge, other than to think that it stems from a desire to “fit in” your society. If you have minority religious beliefs, by definition you don’t match the rest of your peers. What to do then? Your choices are either to change your beliefs (hard) or change your neighbors’ beliefs. Which do you think most people would choose?
The other article that appeared on the same day as the Caliphate one was entitled Backstory: Praying for petroleum. This story just goes to show you that Islamists don’t have a monopoly over lunacy. John Brown is convinced that there’s oil buried in Israel somewhere:
Brown’s astonishingly unshakable faith in the riches buried here is based on Bible clues and his own sense of God’s calling. [...] His theory derives from Old Testament references to earthly abundance, which he interprets to mean oil - the black, sticky kind, not olive oil, the only kind this nation currently has in abundance. Running his finger down the tissue-fine pages of his Bible (as indispensible to Brown as a BlackBerry to a conventional businessman), he stops at Genesis 49: 25, 26 and reads aloud about “the Almighty who shall bless thee with the blessings of Heaven above, blessings of the deep that lieth under….”
“In other words,” he interprets, “oil.” And he reads: “They shall be on the head of Joseph.” Flipping forward to Deuteronomy 33:24, Brown continues: “And of Asher he said, Be Asher blessed above his sons; let him be acceptable to his Brethren and let him dip his foot in oil.”
He looks up, triumphantly: “You see?”
Wait, it gets better.
Even if these “blessings of the deep” do mean oil, where’s the “X marks the spot”? Easy, says Brown, pointing to a map of the ancient “Twelve Tribes” of Israel. First, he points to the territory of the two tribes of Joseph: the Manasseh and Ephraim. Together, the outlined areas resemble a head in profile. Next, he points out the territory of the Asher tribe, a long, leg-shaped area stretching down the coast of northern Israel. Where the “foot” of the Asher territory touches the “head” of the Joseph territory is where he believes there’s oil.
Wow. Well hey, John Brown, if you want to spend your millions of dollars chasing biblical oil, have at it. The only thing I wonder is, what is the relationship between your success or failure in finding oil and your faith in believing that a bunch of papyrus scrolls written a couple thousand years ago by multiple authors with ulterior motives completely after the fact is actually historically accurate?
Biblical oil in the ground is the new pie in the sky.