Akhir pekan yang cerah di penghujung masa cuti dimana kesempatan berkumpul dengan keluarga, kami bertiga berniat menyegarkan badan dan otak yang butek ini dengan berenang di kolam renang air panas di daerah Slawi Jawa Tengah. Setelah sarapan kami segera bergegas kembali ke kamar mengambil pakaian renang masing-masing, tak lupa dengan segala perangkatnya. “Ayah, aku duluan kesana sama bunda ya”, teriak Si Ucrit. Saya mengiyakan dengan teriakan pula dari dalam kamar mandi karena musti buang hajat setelah sarapan. Rugi ya, habis sarapan dan ngopi kok malah keluar lagi, pantesan nggak nambah gemuk..!
“Ayaaaaaah.., udah belum?”, teriak istri saya dari luar kamar yang sudah siap dengan tas belanjaannya. “Iya bentar”, sahut saya sambil bangun buru-buru dan mengenakan celana panjang tanpa CD. Karena, CD bekas semalam sudah beralih fungsi menjadi “kain pel”. Srrrttt…, retsleting saya tarik ke atas dan, wadoooooh…. Saya menjerit! Si bulu sialan itu lagi-lagi bikin ulah dengan menahan tarikan retsleting dengan sadisnya pas di tengah-tengah! Walhasil, saya meringis menahan sakit. Mau minta tolong sama dia saya nggak tega. “Ayaaaaah….., cepetan dong! Udah siang ni, ntar keburu habis nggak jadi masak deh..!”, masih saja dia berteriak. Huh, nggak tau apa kalau saya lagi berjuang membebaskan retsleting celana dari penjajahan bulu sialan itu?!
Akhirnya setelah terbebas dari siksaan itu, dengan hati-hati saya naikkan retsleting ke atas dan mengenakan kaos siap berangkat ke pasar. Di jalan, istri saya senyum-senyum sementara saya masih cemberut menahan rasa nyeri yang masih cenut-cenut di bawah sana akibat proses pembebasan tadi sedikit banyak ada beberapa bulu yang tercabut dengan keras. Dan dengan santainya istri saya mengomentari tentang si pubic hair ini mulai dari nggak macho kalau botak sampai kepada kasus di Guci yang bikin malu plus repot kalau tragedi retsleting terjadi lagi, tanpa mengacuhkan kepedihan saya hiks..
'The Adoration of the Name of Jesus' by El Greco 1578-80, National Gallery, London
The term, 'Southern Christians' needs our attention and Spengler's reminder of Philip Jenkins' fascinating book, 'The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South' is indeed timely. (You must read the entire article, and in particular the second page)
It is timely, because in these foreboding times, clarity of vision is of supreme importance, not least so as to overcome any feeling of despair, but instead, to refocus on how each and everyone of us can do his or her best to forge a better world for our children.
Programs, like the series at the Carnegie Council called 'The Resurgence of Religion in Politics', help us recapture the all important strategic overview, especially, when we are granted a rare understanding of the grand motivator, which is driving key strategic decisions of foe and friend alike:
The fact is, that the race for souls in the most populous parts of the world is won by Christianity.
The distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University, Philip Jenkins doesn't tell us what spurs Thug-In-Chief Ahmadinejad, but his statistics do:
In fact, if you want to project the countries in the world that will have the largest numbers of Christians by 2050, here's one projection. At the head of the list would still be the United States, followed, in no particular order, by Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, the Congo, Ethiopia, the Philippines, and China. Let me give you a list of the countries that were not included in that list: Britain, France, Spain, Italy. Is anyone here old enough to remember something called "Western Christianity?" [...]
Well, if this was just a change of geography, a change of ethnicity, then it would be interesting. But I'm suggesting that it is rather more than that, because the kinds of Christianity that are growing in the Global South—a term by which I mean Africa, Asia, Latin America—are different from what we are used to in the Global North. They are much more enthusiastic; they are much more supernatural-oriented; they have much more of a belief in trans-stream vision, prophecy. [...]
The sooner we understand that our Thug-In-Chief is performing to all Muslims across the globe, we realize his ambition to counter Professor Jenkins' projections.
Anti-Western rage fueled the 1979 Iranian revolution, and Mr. Ahmadinejad has tried to rekindle its energy by spreading Iran’s influence beyond its borders. Battling Washington, chiding Arab leaders and claiming to promote the Palestinian cause have made him extremely popular on the streets from Cairo to Morocco. [...]
Others see an even more ambitious post-Iraq agenda reflected in Mr. Ahmadinejad’s high profile on the issues of Jews, the Holocaust and Israel.
“It is for public consumption in Arab countries,” said Mustafa El-Labbad, editor of Sharqnameh, a magazine specializing in Iranian affairs and published in Cairo. “It is specifically directed toward deepening the gap between the people and their regimes and toward embarrassing the rulers so that the regional power vacuum, especially after Iraq, can be filled by Iran.”
Or, you could call it Phase-1 in his master plan. Controlling Middle Eastern Oil supplies by toppling one regime after the other, is the starting point in his quest for the creation of a global, Shi'a dominated, caliphate (don't miss Andy McCarthy's succinct summary of Arthur Herman's action plan against the Mullahcracy).
Asia, and China in particular, depend on Arab Oil; a dependency, which our Thug-In-Chief certainly intends to put to good use (all it take is a Chinese UN-veto to ensure the continuing slaughter of Christians by Muslim Jihadists on the African continent). For his vision to succeed, he must reverse the rise of Christianity amongst his favorite demographic, the poor in the South; those, who can be most effectively inculcated with Islam's murderous teachings, namely Jihadist doctrines. Professor Jenkins continues:
Let me stress one word. When we look at the emerging Christianity which will be such a force in the 21st century, there is one word I stress: poverty. The average Christian in the world today is a very poor person, inconceivably poor by American or European standards.
If you look at the world's poorest today, then I suggest a rather surprising observation. The largest single religion among the poorest is not Islam, it is not Hinduism. It is Christianity. The problem of extreme poverty in the world is, above all, a Christian issue. This radically affects the way in which people read the Bible, a book which was written by and for a very poor community.
Jenkins' research explains also otherwise often hard to understand motivators for us 'civilized' Christians, that are guiding our friends at the Vatican, most of all the Holy Father, in matters of abortion, birth control and homosexuality: 'Southern Christians', and in particular those in sub-Saharan Africa reject, what Spengler terms, the 'issue of syncretism'.
The Christian problem of having one's cake and eating it, too. Christians too often wish to keep one foot in their Gentile past and another in the Kingdom of God. This dichotomy, I have argued on previous occasions, ultimately doomed European Christianity.
The Vatican knows, that it must resist liberal re-interpretation of biblical doctrine to avoid losing appeal to millions of Southern Christians and potential converts - over 6 million Muslims convert to Christianity every year.
Despite the fact that Muslims by virtue of being poor and uneducated are much more reproductive than others, Islam as a religion is not growing but dying fast.
More and more Muslims are discovering that the violence evinced by some of their coreligionists is not an aberration but is inspired by the teachings of the Quran and the examples set by its author. Muslims are becoming disillusioned with Islam.
No small surprise, especially when you read the whole transcript of Professor Jenkins's lecture; you will understand why both the Old and the New Testament have such a strong appeal in poverty stricken, predominantly agrarian communities in Africa and Asia; and why our Thug-In-Chief is in such desperate need to whip up hype to distract from his domestic morass (let me just mention the fast spreading news of the already widely known hypocrisy on Iranian streets, which basically reduces Islamic clerics to nothing more than dirty little pimps), why he is afraid that he is loosing the battle for souls.
I leave you in hope that like me, you too take courage from more myth destroying gems courtesy of Professor Jenkins:
One of the most important changes around much of the world in the last decade or so has been the spread of sub-replacement fertility. [...] In the last twenty years, the birth rate in Iran, for example, has fallen from six children per woman to two. So the United States now has a higher fertility rate than Iran.
Most Muslim countries in the Near East and North Africa are now rapidly approaching European birth rates—Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco. All these countries are now heading basically for Spanish and Italian rates—not just without government encouragement, but despite government encouragement in many cases to do the opposite. The places that still have the very high rates in the Muslim world are places like—well, you can guess—Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, the Gaza Strip.So that [the spread of sub-replacement fertility] is spreading as a global factor right now.
No wonder, why Thug-In-Chief Ahmadinejad and his fellow Islamofascists are so hell-bent on keeping at least Iraqis, Afghans, Somalis and Palestinians under their draconian yoke - otherwise, who would be left to strap their suicide belt on, other than some of our disgruntled academics...
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If applicable, alpha channel. Crop the video down to the masked area. Note that it takes longer to encode.
