You have to give the Romans credit for one thing that we (seem) still not to have gotten right. You could have any religion you wanted long as you paid your taxes and did not practice human sacrifice. By that standard Islam might not have gotten anywhere if the Empire had still been around. We express our pride in “freedom of religion” and morph it into “freedom from . . .” and now? “War against . . .”? I’m rambling, enough to say we have a culture (here and in Europe) that seems to be looking for and forcing a decline in all aspects; aspirations, belief, ethics and the concepts of right and wrong. A society in conflicts like this is at a great disadvantage when facing one who’s belief is it’s foundation. Mike Yon published a picture of a church being rebuilt in Baghdad by locals (who were not Christian) their desire was that the Christians would return, in the UK you have a war on Christian/English traditions (replaced with . . .Winterval!?) because of some seeming “possibility” of Muslims being insulted by these traditions . . . the community of the faithful (in the UK and here) love God. Where we have conflict generated derives from two groups; the secularists (threatened by the very idea of faith and tradition) and the lunatic fringe (the Salafist heresy and it’s Shia avatar in Islam, and some tiny, obscure, less violent groups in the Christian community). Just as the Muslim Umma must take control of their lunatics, we must take control of our radical secularists. There is right, there is wrong, good and evil. There are standards for both (derived from where and what?). Without the community of faith (all religious groups) exercising it’s combined potential for great good . . . we’ll see a denigration of societies and finally a conflagration pitting the faithless against the hegemony of the death cults.
