Neo-Neocon: Solzhenitsyn

I've heard of Solzhenitsyn, but never before read anything he wrote or said. I just finshed his 1978 Harvard speech courtesy of Neo-Neocon and....Wow!

Talk about predicting the future.

I read it and added my own $0.02 to the comments:

Dicentra says above: "I'm afraid that our public devaluation of religion, especially among the intellectually elite, has created a vacuum into which the structure and certainty of Islam might thrive."

At first, I laughed and said "Islam filling our moral vacuum? Right, when pigs fly!"

However, in retrospect, I've been wondering if it could happen, though not in Dicentra's exact terms. My thinking was more along the lines of "how does a murdering, fanatical theology conquer a Western world that is committed to freedom of self over any greater good? As soon as the mass murders begin (again) on American soil, the left will finally awake (ala Neo-Neocon) and get with the program."

Now I'm not so sure. Islam is a theology of works. In this theology, one's actions are your ticket to heaven. How else can an angry Mohammed Atta fly an airplane into a tower and believe he is redeeming himself?

Works are a material thing - of this world. The rapidly sinking West is engaged in its own religion of works (humanism) and all that comes with it: Sensual, material living. Under a microscope, the two (Islam and Humanism) are fundamentally the same theology: what you do is more important that what you believe.

In comparison, Christianity, in all its major variants (even the Catholic church, although many of us seem not to understand that) is a theology of faith. What you believe matters more than what you do in terms of your salvation. Of course what you do matters, but only in the context of what you believe.

You cannot work your way to heaven, but you can believe your way there. (I apologize for this horrible Cliffnotes abbreviation of Christian beliefs. Try to overlook this and catch my broader point). Therefore, a Christian can never be "good enough" to redeem himself. It takes an act of faith, a belief, that one who is good enough (Christ) can redeem the sins- for free- and will vouch for the believer at the time of judgement. That belief is supposed to drive the subsequent actions and works.

Those who perform the same actions and works, but do so in the belief that this is what saves them, have crossed into the same core theology as Islam and Humanism.

So, yes, I agree with Dicentra. I can envision a scenario where Islam conquers the west by offering salvation based on a set of black and white works instead of the more popular rainbow colored set, with the alternative being head removal for those who insist on more than two colors.