Do world religions threaten the survival of the human race in the 21st century

Ronald Brown writes:

In his 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, Samuel P. Huntington prophesied that the 21^st century would be one of clashes between at least six religious-rooted civilizations: Western Civilization (Western Europe and the USA), Orthodox Christian (Russia and others), Hindu, Sinic (Confucian China, Korea, and Vietnam), Buddhic (South Asia, Tibet, and Mongolia), and Muslim. The age of the nation-state is over; fasten your seatbelts for a wild clash of civilizations. Without natural borders like the other civilizations, the Muslim world is in conflict with all its neighbors. From the Muslim regions of Thailand, Myanmar, China, and the Philippines in Asia to colonial created half-Muslim and half-Christian states of Africa, and between the Muslim migrants to Europe and the USA, Islam is at war with its neighbors.

Detail from “The Battle of the Milvian Bridge” (painted 1520–24) by Giulio Romano.

Nuclear-armed Muslim Pakistan and increasingly Hindu India under the BJP (Hindu Nationalist Party) have been at war for almost a century over the province of Kashmir. Nuclear Jewish Israel threatens to destroy any Muslim neighbor that threatens its survival. Increasingly Orthodox Russia is pushing back at Western expansion into its civilizational territory, and Christian America and Western Europe are currently at war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Nigeria, and elsewhere to resist the Muslim drive to restore the lost unity of the Islamic world and the leadership of a single caliph.
Each civilization and religious-based people that seeks to restore its once great but now lost greatness cites its holy books and history as justification. Muslim fighters cite the great victories won by the prophet Mohammad and the early caliphs over pagans, Jews, and Christians as justification for their wars to expel “Crusaders and Jews” from their sacred lands and so-called “terrorists” take this struggle to Europe and the world. Osama bin Laden wrote that he organized 9/11 to show his opposition to the stationing of American (Christian) troops in Saudi Arabia, the protector of the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina. The supporters of Israeli Dr. Baruch Goldstein compared his 1994 massacre of 29 worshippers in a Hebron mosque in the occupied West Bank to God’s instructions in Judges 2:2-3, “And ye shall make no league with the inhabitants of this land; ye shall throw down their altars … (for they are) thorns in your sides, and their gods shall be a snare unto you.”

As long as religions were armed with swords, chariots, and bows and arrows, religious warfare was limited. But today nuclear bombs, chemical and biological warfare, and man-made epidemics put the entire human race at risk. All world empires have been inspired by some form of national destiny but when this destiny becomes infused with a divine purpose there is no compromise with the enemy.

Read more > 

Concerning the humans who are a warlike species

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Warfare in World Religions: Has the Time Come to Junk All Religions and Found a New One?

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Putin's Handy use of the Russian Orthodox Church

The nave of Holy Trinity Orthodox Cathedral, the Cathedral Church of the Diocese of Chicago and the Midwest, Orthodox Church in America, Chicago, Illinois looking east toward the iconostasis. Designed by Louis Sullivan, built 1899–1903. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Since the communist state dissolved, some communist may mourn about what they lost. Several Russians are not better off than before in the Soviet Union.

In the Soviet Union it was the state which had the strings in their hands. Today in a certain way the strings may have changed hands into the ones of the Russian Orthodox priests. But they are just the puppet-strings of the man in power.

For some years now president Vladimir Putin knows to direct everything according to his dictatorial will. He also very well knows what he needs to have his acts agreed with by the majority of the people. For this reason he holds a very firm grip on the Russian Orthodox Church which raised from the ashes as if it was never forbidden in the Soviet Union.

In spite of Putin’s firm grip on power and the absence of credible opposition in the country, Putin can’t risk another uprising like the one in 2011.{Christianization of Warfare: Putin’s manipulation of history}

The last few years we could see that Putin is slippery as an eel. He knows that by giving food and games he can win the people. Not providing them with enough money to stay alive it probably thinks it is much safer to give people hopes and some institutions where they can go to to loose themselves in thoughts of better times.
It is only with the help of the church that Putin could rally most of the Russians on his side despite some disgruntlement in some sections of orthodox Slav society.

The fact that the Russians generally do not display religiosity in public shouldn’t deceive us from the reality; the orthodox Christianity is the part of “Russian identity”, comparable with “Turkishness” that also, in some degree, means Islam.{Christianization of Warfare: Putin’s manipulation of history}

In the tradition of Stalin and Lenin, Putin knows to direct his country and bring it in the adventures he loves, in the hope to become a bigger personality to be remembered in history.

Obviously, he would not go for the erstwhile soviet communism or socialism anymore. People could say the whole lot of things; though in reality Russians are prone to easily buy the glorious age of the soviet empire, without favouring its Marxist-Leninist value system.{Christianization of Warfare: Putin’s manipulation of history}

Putin has found a very good solution by searchings deep inside Russian history, where he finds the Russian Orthodox Church, an institution that despite some oddities is still worth eulogizing because of its resilience even during the protracted Soviet era.

The church, despite its rise in Russia just during the middle ages, had served as the only “national” identity; majority of Russians could remember and accept it more than the defunct Marxist value. It teaches them, amongst others, that mother Russia is always in danger from outside barbarians, and it is one of their sacred duties to do preemptive strikes far away to save the nation. {Christianization of Warfare: Putin’s manipulation of history}

People do love tradition and lots of spiritual rituals. They love all the ostentation the Orthodox Church is offering them. In those churches they can burn candles and ask for blessings.
The priest have lots of time in a long service to convince people their national leader is doing the best for the country and is fighting against the godless people in the East.
As in the old times the Russian Orthodox Church has found the barbarians to fight against and to ask their churchgoers to fund their necessary tasks to protect the nation for further decay by such ungodly people.

Putin is a graduate of soviet intelligence academy. He knows how to manipulate/herding people into his frame. So when he wants to legitimize his war, he would brand name the adventure to make it as a war against the Orthodox Church. With his autocratic apparatus he then spreads that framing, using everything including Christening and blessing the aircrafts and the missiles being used in Syria while presenting that his war against ISIL in Syria is also the orthodox’s war. {Christianization of Warfare: Putin’s manipulation of history}

However, the question that must be baffling to Putin and his war veterans shamelessly involved in killing the innocent Syrians is whether his manipulation of history by linking Russian warfare with orthodox Christianity would ever succeed. The reply is definitely in the negative, particularly in view of the majority of the Russians living with communism in depth of their hearts. Thus, the course of action adopted by Putin in his present war games would force him to meet his Waterloo, Inevitably. {Christianization of Warfare: Putin’s manipulation of history}

In discussing the Moscow Patriarchate Russian Orthodox Church (MPROC) in the context of modern foreign and domestic policy of Russia, it should be noted that, any large religious organization is a complex and multi-faceted mechanism that can hardly be clearly defined in terms of the political preferences of all its members. {How Russian Church serves Kremlin propaganda}

However, we should recognize that at the moment the official involvement of the Russian Orthodox Church (first and foremost – its highest Church hierarchy) in the political process is so great, that the Church in many ways has become one of the common elements created by the Kremlin propaganda machine. {How Russian Church serves Kremlin propaganda}

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Flemish government’s approval of €150,000 funding for emergency aid to Syria

A residential neighborhood of Tartus before all the war damage (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The conflict in Syria has been going on for almost five years, and the humanitarian situation is becoming desperate, Flemish minister-president Geert Bourgeois’ department for foreign policy said, with more than 12 million people in need of aid.

There may be lots of aid organisations willing to help, but the problem has become so disastrous they are not able to cope with the restricted funds they have.

Some organisations, like Caritas International even work with people who are displaced in their own country, many of whom have fled from fighting around the city of Aleppo to end up in coastal areas.

They need shelter, as well as drinking water, food, health care and education for the children. The aid from Flanders will help provide essentials for some 20,000 people, particularly in the towns of Tartous, Mashta al Helou and Al Waadi.

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Please do read more about the Syrian refugees and international problems around the Syrian crisis:

1. Can We Pay The Price To Free Humanity?
2. Built on or Belonging to Jewish tradition #3 Of the earth or of God
3. Europe’s refugees just follow the ancient routes for the peopling of Europe in the Neolithic
4. Forms of slavery, human trafficking and disrespectful attitude to creation to be changed
5. Welfare state and Poverty in Flanders #3 Right to Human dignity
6. Welfare state and Poverty in Flanders #8 Work
7. Are people willing to take the responsibility for others
8. If Europe fails on the question of refugees, then it won’t be the Europe we wished for
9. State of Europe 2015 – Addressing Europe’s crises
10. Economic crisis danger for the rise of political extremism
11. Schengen area and Freedom for Europeans being put to the test as never before
12. Why Russia backs Assad: a view from Russia’s anti-imperialist left
13. Disintegrating Syria whilst diplomatic talks and poker-play continues
14. Complaining and fighting asylum seekers not giving signs of thankfulness
15. bORDER-Gastrofest
16. The New gulf of migration and seed for far right parties
17. Consequences of Mass Immigration in Sweden
18. Asylum seekers crisis and Europe’s paralysis
19. Still Hope though Power generating long train of abuses
20. Daring to speak in multicultural environment
21. Refugees At The Border- A Blessing Or Burden?
22. Poster: Please Help The Refugees
23. The World Wide Refugee and Migrant Crisis and a possible solution for it
24. Social media and asylum seekers
25. Israeli leaders delight in Europe’s cruelty toward refugees
26. My two cents on the refugee crisis
27. Blow to legitimacy of the capitalist system
28. Propaganda war and ISIS
29. Meeting to focus on humanitarian issues for Syria
30. Chemical warsite and Pushing king of the South
31. UK forces EU to lift embargo on Syria rebel arms
32. Russia supplying weapons to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime
33. Speciesism and racism

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Propaganda war and ISIS

Map of the Muslim Population by Percentage in the World (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

All places with connection to Christian culture, like St. Elian's tomb, the monastery around it (Mar Elian Monastery), an ancient structure located just outside a Syrian town captured by the group earlier this month, got bulldozed down.

What began as demonstrations against the nation's Ba'athist president, Bashar al-Assad, has become a complex fight among the Syrian regime; moderate rebels; Kurds; and Islamists, such as al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State. Muslims made use of it to convert people to what they call the true Islam and to go and destroy all 'heathen' monuments.


Places where archaeologists have worked excavating and preserving like the site of Palmyra for 40 years are destroyed for being a witness in later centuries.

The torture and beheading of leading Syrian archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad had to be again one of the many killings to frighten people and to make them choose for ISIS.
Already hundreds of Christian families have fled central Syrian towns as Islamic State fighters advanced toward them. But also Muslims are looking for an escape of the terrorist so called Muslim fanatics. More and more Mohammedan people are daring to speak out that it can not be that those ISIS people would be real Muslims. Problem is that some Muslims are finding ways to accuse Israel of infiltrating and funding groups against Muslim groups so that the Muslim world would be destabilised. Some said to me that they had seen video where when zoomed in could be seen fighters wearing a David star. I myself did not see any proof of that yet and consider it propaganda material which is used to set one group of people up against an other group.

The Druze, a centuries-old Arab community and an offshoot of Shia Islam, is the latest religious minority in the Levant to suffer the wrath of Islamic extremists. Jabhat al-Nusra or the Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliated group fighting the Assad regime in Syria, in June of this year killed nearly two dozen members of the Druze community in Syria’s northern region near the town of Idlib. Nusra, like the Islamic State (ISIS or IS) and other radical Sunni groups, views the Druze, much like the Shia, as “apostate” Muslims that should be killed. Islamic militants have already attacked Shia and Christian communities and their places of worship in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain.

In her thoughtful New York Times Magazine article, “The Shadows of Death,” Eliza Griswold has chronicled the plight of Christians in the Middle East and how attacks by radical Islamic groups have led to the Middle East emptying itself of Christians. This is a sad tale for the Christian community, for other religious minorities, and for the region as a whole. The Druze community in Syria is becoming understandably apprehensive about whether it would face a similar fate.

As the intolerance of religious minorities —Christians, Druze, and Shia— bubbles to the surface, the Sunni majority becomes more regressive. The artistic, cultural, economic, religious, and social diversity, which has been part of the multiethnic and multi-religious mosaic in the Levant and across the region, is rapidly disappearing to be replaced by backwardness and retrogression.

In the mean time those looking for a better place to live in Europe are considered by several Europeans a threat to their Judeo-Christian society with a danger of having Muslims infiltrating our Western culture, plus finding people who do not want to adapt to our Western culture, but making stronger groups of people they fear would become 'parasites' in our economy and having them wanting to have mosques build in our regions.

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ISIS has released pictures of the destruction of St. Elian's place in Homs and the Baalshamin Temple in Palmyra

ISIS has released photos of the destruction of St. Elian's tomb, chapel and monastery in Homs, Syria.

The abbot of St. Elian Father Jacques Mouraud was kidnapped in the area on May 21st and is still missing.

On Sunday, Syrian activists reported that the ISIS militants blew up the Baalshamin Temple, which dates back to two thousand years, in the ancient city of Palmyra in central Syria.

Maamoun Abdulkarim, Syria’s antiquities chief, said ISIS placed a large quantity of explosives in the temple of Baalshamin on Sunday and blew it up, causing much damage.

“Our darkest predictions are unfortunately taking place,” Abdulkarim told the AFP news agency.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed the destruction of the temple.

Another Turkish-based activist, who is originally from Palmyra, told the AP news agency, that sources from the city said the temple was blown up today.

The ancient city, which is a Unesco World Heritage site, is famed for its well-preserved Greco-Roman ruins, and the Baalshamin temple, built nearly 2,000 years ago, is one of the city’s best-known buildings.

Palmyra is a large site, visited by millions

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