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Category Archives: religion
Тurkеу re-Іslаmісіzеs the Наgіа Sоphіа
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has ordered the Hagia Sophia museum, one of Istanbul’s most famous landmarks, to be converted into a mosque.
He made the announcement hours after a top court cleared the way for him to make the change.
The Hagia Sophia, a major draw for tourists, has a long and complicated history. The architectural marvel was built as a church by the Byzantines in the 6th century and then converted to a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453.
In 1934, Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s cabinet decreed that it be turned into a museum. It is widely regarded as a symbol of peaceful religious coexistence.
It is impossible to overstate to Americans how offensive and painful this is to Orthodox Christians. Imagine if St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome had been captured by the Ottomans and turned into a mosque. Imagine that for some decades, it had been declared a museum, as a gesture of religious coexistence. You couldn’t pray there as a Christian, but neither was it a Muslim house of prayer. Rather, it was a neutral space. Not ideal, not by a long shot, but tolerable. And now this.
This is not a new wound. The great and glorious church has not been a Christian house of worship since the Ottomans overthrew the Byzantine empire — with a single exception. In 1919, with Istanbul under occupation after the end of World War I and the fall of the Ottomans, a Greek Orthodox priest and a handful of Greek officers rowed ashore and made their way to the Hagia Sophia, where they celebrated the first Divine Liturgy there in nearly five centuries.
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Today’s move by Erdogan is solely an act of cultural triumphalism. There are no shortages of mosques in Istanbul. There are very few Greek Christians left in Istanbul these days. This is Erdogan rubbing the noses of Christians in our defeat.
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what Erdogan has done today is infuriating and deeply offensive. For almost a century, the Hagia Sophia has been a neutral space. Almost nobody alive today has any memory of it as a place as Islamic worship.
If you are not religious, you should still worry about what’s going to happen to the Hagia Sophia. Its Muslim conquerors covered up the church’s Byzantine mosaics, but they didn’t destroy them. After it was turned into a museum by Ataturk, the mosaics were unveiled so visitors could appreciate the art. And now? I can easily imagine that devout Muslims would want these images covered now that the building was once again a Muslim house of worship. If this happens, then the aesthetic and historical loss to the world will be severe.
What does Erdogan gain from it? This is an empty Make Turkey Great Again gesture — one that does absolutely nothing to improve the lot of the Turkish people, but stands to alienate Turkey even more from the West (though less than it ought to do, given how alienated Westerners are from our own history and religion). Russia will not take this lying down. The West (minus Greece) might not care about the Hagia Sophia, but I suspect that won’t be the case for Russia.
C’mon Putin: Make Constantinople Great Again! 🙂
Alas, some commenters doesn’t think it’s likely Putin will do so:
Alas…
Some other good comments:
Best way to remove them from NATO is to disband it; it has no good reason for still existing…
A Christian doesn’t attend non-Christian religious services of the faith he/she ostensibly converted away from, nor is he/she indifferent on the matter of whether his/her parents convert to the true faith
Therefore Nikki Haley is clearly not a Christian:
Haley converted to Christianity in 1997.[171] She and her husband regularly attend the United Methodist Church. She also attends Sikh services once or twice a year.[171] She visited the Harmandir Sahib with her husband in 2014 during her visit to India. During a Christianity Today interview, when asked whether or not she hopes her parents convert to Christianity, Haley responded, “What I hope is that my parents do what’s right for them.”[172]
Christianity permits no other gods or faiths; God is exclusionary; He tolerates no rivals, and demands one’s all.
If you are a syncretist, you are not a Christian.
If you don’t want non-believers to convert but instead to simply do ‘what’s right for them’, you are a relativist, and therefore not a Christian.
That anyone is fooled by Haley is just proof how stupid so many people are…
In brilliant, well-thought-out move, ‘anti-racists’ vandalize Dutch memorial to Poles who liberated them from Nazis
Hey,’antifa’ types, you’re always claiming that WWII Allied soldiers were the original ‘antifa’; shouldn’t you thus condemn your BLM allies for doing this?
C’mon, duke it out with them!
Of course, since you both hate Christianity and the West in general, you’ll overlook this, since you all don’t really care about WWII or anything in the past; always Year Zero with you commies…
Canadians mark 35 years since the Air India bombing
This comes after Trudeau’s disastrous visit to India last year when Jaspal Atwal, a separatist convicted of attempting to assassinate a visiting Indian minister, was invited to a reception and posed for photos with the first lady.
As some say, the visit wasn’t to India, the country, but to the Golden Temple so Trudeau could win points with the Sikh community and counter a potential rival, Jagmeet Singh, leader of the New Democratic Party, a turban-wearing Sikh, back in Canada.
Singh, a separatist sympathizer, condemned Sikh separatism and the Air India bombing only belatedly and under pressure and when he realized he was losing support among White Canadians.
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Competition for the Sikh vote in Canada is fierce as the October national election approaches. The Sikh community has weight, no doubt, and some might say disproportionately so. Of the 338 members of the Canadian parliament, 16 are Sikhs or 4.7% while Sikhs are only 1.4% of the total population.
Margins of victory can be very slim, sometimes just a hundred votes or fewer.
The wages of ‘diversity’…
Importing huge numbers of people from foreign lands means importing their sectarian conflicts and terrorism.
The current leader of Canada’s socialist party which is propping up the Liberal minority government is from that community and was known to have sympathies with that separatist terrorist movement, and pointedly has refused to answer questions about it.
None of the members of that community who are members of Parliament have commemorated the massacre.
The reason Canadians don’t think much nor care much about the victims is they rightly, instinctively do not perceive those killed, or their killers, as particularly ‘Canadian’ in any real sense of the word, in terms of having deep roots here, e.g. my dad’s people, who came with the Irish potato famines of the mid-late 19th century.
This is a foreign conflict, with foreign actors, involving foreigners, primarily.
It only became our business when we decided to import mass numbers of these people.
I would call that an error if the powers that be didn’t realize what they were doing.
But of course they knew damn well, and why: like elites throughout the West, they hate those they rule over, and wish to replace them with others; they are electing a new people…
