THE MYTHS OF CHRISTIAN EUROPE. I wrote some notes a few months back on Pandaemonium on Rethinking the idea of ‘Christian Europe‘. I reworked that post into an essay, which has now been published in the latest issue of New Humanist. And I’m posting it here, too. UPDATE: The original post (which is much longer than this essay) won the 2011 3QD Politics and Social Sciences Prize. In the warped mind of Anders Breivik, his murderous rampage in Oslo and Utøya earlier this year were the first shots in a war in defence of Christian Europe. The claims about the ‘Muslim takeover’ of Europe, while widely held, have also been robustly challenged. Christianity has certainly been the crucible within which the intellectual and political cultures of Western Europe have developed over the past two millennia.
Christianity may have forged a distinct ethical tradition, but its key ideas, like those of most religions, were borrowed from the cultures out of which it developed. Today, however, that debt has been almost entirely forgotten. Coffee Cup Apologetics. RZIM | HELPING THE THINKER BELIEVE. HELPING THE BELIEVER THINK. About. What Ever Happened to the New Atheism? 1. The Revelation of St. Arbitron “And behold, a door was opened, and I heard a voice saying, ‘In the name of Zarathustra and Inherit the Wind and the H.M.S. Beagle, I will cleanse thee of ignorance and iniquity.’ And I looked, and a throne was set atop the bestseller list, and on this throne sat Richard Dawkins, bearing in his right hand The God Delusion. And a great cry went up throughout the land, yea, even unto the last airport bookshop. So, at any rate, apostles of secularism might recall the mid-Aughts a century from now.
One answer was, simply, the temperature of its rhetoric. To the New Atheists’ credit, their anti-jihad jihad was an interfaith affair, targeting not only bearded Wahabbists but Orthodox Israeli settlers and Bible-thumping televangelists. Today, though, the religious foment that seemed just a few years ago to be a species-level threat looks more like random variation in a global evolution toward unbelief. 2. How successful is he? 3. “The Drum Major Instinct"** Table of Contents King's "Drum Major Instinct" sermon, given on 4 February 1968, was an adaptation of the 1952 homily ‘‘Drum-Major Instincts’’ by J. Wallace Hamilton, a well-known, liberal, white Methodist preacher. King encouraged his congregation to seek greatness, but to do so through service and love. King concluded the sermon by imagining his own funeral, downplaying his famous achievements and emphasizing his heart to do right. This morning I would like to use as a subject from which to preach: "The Drum Major Instinct.
" "The Drum Major Instinct. " The setting is clear. Now very quickly, we would automatically condemn James and John, and we would say they were selfish. And so before we condemn them, let us see that we all have the drum major instinct. And you know, we begin early to ask life to put us first. Now in adult life, we still have it, and we really never get by it. Now the presence of the drum major instinct is why so many people are "joiners. " Now that's a fact.