Making A Case

This is the next installment on "Why I Am Not A Christian"


Early in my studying and teaching of apologetics, I was very awestruck at the amount and quality of evidence that demonstrates that the Bible is a supernatural book.  If you want more background on this, see my post, Knowing God: Part 1. The discovery of such evidence ended up making me angry.  Not at the evidence, but at the suppression of it.

Oh, it wasn’t suppressed deliberately by the church.  This was a suppression of apathy.  It is not isolated to the church, either.  This suppression is what has resulted in liberal, or reformed Judaism.  In fact, I would include all the sects of Judaism short of the Haredi, or what is known as the Ultra-orthodox Jews, and then apologetics as it is known in Christendom doesn’t really apply to them because to such orthodox types, they feel no need whatsoever to engage in apologetics.  They are as connected to Abraham and Moses as you are to your grandpa.  History is not some abstract thing that bores the snot out of college kids and seems utterly disconnected to anything meaningful in their lives.  To orthodox Jews, history is just as solid and real as the stones that make up the Western wall of the Temple Mount.

One might be asking, “If the evidence for the Bible is so strong, why don’t we hear more about it?  Why don’t Christians and Jews defend it?  Many people are not going to like the answer.  The secret to this problem is hidden in plain sight.  The perfect example of this is Joel Osteen’s church. In case you don’t follow him, Joel Osteen is the guru of positive thinking disguised as a Christian church. Years ago, I listened to five or six sermons on TV and understood why he could fill an arena.  His message had nothing to do with discipleship, dying to oneself, living for eternity instead of this world.  I have a very hard time thinking that Christians in Darfur would recognize his gospel, let alone try to live by it.

The natural inclination of the human species is self gratification.  We want what we want.  Because of that, we believe what we want to believe.  It takes courage and a willingness to suffer a lot of discomfort to question one’s self.  To ask, “Is this really true?  How do I know this is true?”    Name any “sin” that you can think of; something that you, personally, think is a sin.  How does it begin.  It starts because you desire something.  It grows closer to becoming reality as you dwell on it and then think of ways to justify it. As you think about it more and more, your thought patterns will center more and more on why you deserve to do that thing, and less and less about how it might hurt someone else.

This is how a man like Charles Darwin could grow up in a family in 19th century England, when most of the country and the modern world believed in the God of the Bible and His Word, and end up writing to convince others on the theory of evolution.  He was seeking ways to eliminate God from his life.  With each new discovery of fact in science, his theories become more and more ridiculous and untenable, but the people who continue to push them, have the same motivation he did. It can best be summed up by the grandson of Thomas H. Huxley, “Darwin’s Bulldog,” and the author of Brave New World:

“I had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. … For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.”  -- Aldous Huxley

There you have it.  I still believe that apologetics is the handmaiden of evangelism; that true believers should answer the objections, on all levels, to the skeptics of the Bible.  We have nothing to be afraid of, and the evidence is on our side.  But I have no illusions that you can convince someone of the truth intellectually when they have personal and emotional reasons to fight it at all costs.  Being a member of a church can be no more demanding than being a member of Rotary or the Elks club. Recognizing that the Bible is the inerrant Word of the Creator of the Universe demands radical re-ordering and prioritizing of one’s life.

This relates to even the most dedicated Christians in a different way, but in just as dramatic a way nonetheless.  It can be extremely shocking and uncomfortable to suddenly realize that many things you had been raised to believe were just wrong.  You’d been told things as if they were just fact, based on nothing more than tradition.  You had never really checked into it yourself, because, after all, that’s the job of the pastor or priest.  You don’t have time for that.  He’s the one with the seminary degree.  What does a pastor do all week, anyway?  He’s got all that time to sit in his office and research all this stuff. Right?

Therefore, it is no wonder that when Christians start asking me why I follow Torah, they would accuse me of being like the “Judaizers” that Paul wrote about in his letter to the Galatians.  They put me in the same camp as someone who believes in legalistic adherence to the Law as the means to salvation.  In short, they don’t understand Paul’s argument, because for centuries, the clergy has taken selected verses out of the context of everything that Paul wrote and created a false doctrine.  This is why Peter wrote regarding Paul’s teaching in his letters, “ . . . as also in all his letters, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction.”  (2 Peter 3:16)

I can prove from the Scriptures that Paul never made the case that we no longer have to follow Torah and that this is in keeping with what the Messiah taught.  I will demonstrate that what Paul was teaching was that you cannot expect adherence to the Torah to save you.  Paul was indeed teaching that to make adherence to Torah a condition for salvation was to do violence to the finished work of the Messiah.  But this in no way invalidates the fact that all the apostles and the other disciples of Messiah kept and continued to teach the keeping of all the Torah in accordance with the Master’s words in Matthew 5:17-19 and Luke 16:17 “But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one stroke of a letter of the Law (Torah) to fail.”

In the next installment, we will do something that seldom gets done in the church.  We are going to look at the entire Bible as a coherent whole.  If the Bible really is the Word of an omnipotent and omniscient Creator, it shouldn’t contradict itself, and I’m convinced that it does not.  Where I’ve heard contradictions about the Bible, they’ve come from the ideas and doctrines of men.

We are going to go step by step to logically and systematically examine the question of whether or not Yeshua ben Yosef, this Jesus from Nazareth, came to start a whole new religion, or whether he was simply fulfilling and continuing an existing revelation about the nature of God and His Kingdom.  We are going to do something that is almost unheard of in the Christian world; we are going to let the text speak for itself.

You can click here to go to the next installment:  Not Wanting To Know.

Why I Am Not A Christian

I became a Christian in the autumn of 1985, had a “born again” kind of experience, but was completely a babe in the woods when it came to this new belief system.  This in spite of the fact that I was in America surrounded by Churches.  This would prove to be the problem.

Truly appreciating real science, I questioned everything.  I especially questioned my new found belief system and had doubts that nearly caused me to abandon it altogether.  But there was the breakthrough, when I found out that God does not fear our toughest inquisitions. Neither of His Word nor His creation.

Before going on, I feel the need to address the various types of readers who might stray here and need some sort of introduction.

If you are a non-believer in the God of the Hebrew Bible, but you have an open mind and simply want to understand why there is so much division among those who claim to be Christian, what follows will likely seem like incredible minutia that will be difficult to wade through. I fully understand that a major reason many people don’t want anything to do with the Bible is because of the people who call themselves Christians. If you are a practicing Jew, it must seem very odd the way the Christians do violence to the Tanakh (Old Testament) in the name of Jesus and then wonder why you don’t accept Him as Messiah.  If you are an atheist who “knows” that there is no God and that all religion is false, you will find what follows to be silly or boring, so why waste your time?  Admittedly, this topic is actually for those who claim to believe in Jesus Christ, but sadly do not truly believe His Word, except where it seems to agree with what they want to believe.

For over twenty years, I studied and taught on Biblical apologetics.  That means that I defended the truth of the Bible, revealing the volumes of evidence that demonstrate that the earth and the universe, and real science do not contradict the Bible, but on the contrary, they confirm it.  I was sharing with others the evidence that showed that the Bible could not have been “authored” by mere men.  That through prophecy and other miraculous evidence, the Bible had to have been dictated by an intelligent being far beyond our understanding.

In order for most of what I have to say to make sense and be of the most benefit, you would have to be someone who believes that the Bible in it’s original manuscripts is fully inspired by God.  By that I mean that He actually dictated the words to those who initially penned it.  My apologetics work shows up in other posts and there will be more to come as needed.  That’s not the subject of this post.  Here we proceed from the idea that God Himself wrote the Bible.
The modern western version of Christianity is full of traditions and beliefs based on assumptions, isolated texts, and traditions that crept in over the centuries. Some denominations actually operate on the idea that anything prior to Jesus can now be ignored and have no bearing on being a Christian.  This is bizarre considering a couple of things.

Christians love to cite the words of a certain Rabbi named Paul.  Paul said in his second letter to Timothy (2 Tim. 3:16): “All Scripture is God-breathed and is valuable for teaching the truth, convicting of sin, correcting faults and training in right living; . . .”   At the time Paul wrote that, the New Testament as we know it had not been canonized as Scripture.  So, what was Paul referring to?  The Tanakh.  What Christians today call the Old Testament.  This English name does not do it justice and gives the wrong impression, so I will not use it from here on out.  The “Old” Testament is not antiquated or out of date.  It still contains prophecies that are yet to be fulfilled (subjects for future posts).  From here I will refer to that section of Scripture as the Tanakh.  TaNaK is kind of an acronym for Torah, Neva’im, and Ketuvim.  Meaning the “Law” the Prophets and the Writings.

If you claim to follow Christ, then it would make sense to note that Jesus based everything He said and did on the Tanakh.  Here is what he said in Luke 24:25-27, after he had been resurrected: “. . . ‘Foolish people! So unwilling to put your trust in everything the prophets spoke! Didn’t the Messiah have to die like this before entering his glory?” Then starting with Moses and all the prophets, he explained to them the things that can be found throughout the Scriptures concerning himself.”

Stop and consider the full import of this verse.  He was chastising his own followers for not taking seriously all of what the Tanakh had to say about his first coming to earth and the prophecies He had to fulfill. Pay close attention to the phrasing. “Starting with Moses” means he was citing Torah, the first five books of the Bible.  “The Prophets” means every book from Isaiah to Malachi.  How can one reconcile the idea that Jesus came to free us from being concerned with what the Tanakh has to teach in light of that verse?  Now add the quote from Paul that I cited above.

If you are familiar with many study Bibles, you can see that they put little notes in the New Testament to show you where to locate the references are in the Tanakh to what the Gospel or epistle writer is citing. If you have such a Bible, take some time to note how much of what is written in the New Testament is simply quoting from the Tanakh with the understanding that the reader is supposed to be fully knowledgeable about all of what the Tanakh says.

If it isn’t quite enough for you that Jesus (Yeshua ben Yosef) pretty much always cited the Tanakh for His authority on answering questions, how about if we look at His statements which are very direct about the Tanakh.

Matthew’s gospel contains what is known as the “Sermon on the Mount” comprised of chapters 5, 6, and 7. The setting is important because Messiah was teaching before a very large audience, making it clear to as many as possible  what he was all about.  In that sermon we find this statement (Matt. 5:17-19): “Don’t think that I have come to abolish the Torah (Law) or the Prophets. I have come not to abolish but to complete (fulfill) Yes indeed! I tell you that until heaven and earth pass away, not so much as a yod (smallest Hebrew letter) or a stroke will pass from the Torah -- not until everything that must happen has happened. So whoever disobeys the least of these commandments and teaches others to do so will be called least in the Kingdom of Heaven. But whoever obeys them and so teaches will be called great in the Kingdom of Heaven.”

That is a clear and didactic statement.  It’s not a parable. It’s not alluding to anything else. Because the Messiah knows the future as well as He knows the past, He wanted to get it on record in the clearest possible terms, what His disciples should understand about the Tanakh.  In order for Him to be the Messiah, he couldn’t possibly be a violator of Torah.  He was speaking to an audience almost exclusively of Torah observant Jews, who once a year, every year, heard it read in their synagogues, the following (Deuteronomy 13:1-6) “Everything I am commanding you, you are to take care to do. Do not add to it or subtract from it.  If a prophet or someone who gets messages while dreaming arises among you and he gives you a sign or wonder, and the sign or wonder comes about as he predicted when he said, ’Let’s follow other gods, which you have not known; and let us serve them,’ you are not to listen to what that prophet or dreamer says. For Adonai your God is testing you, in order to find out whether you really do love Adonai your God with all your heart and being.  You are to follow Adonai your God, fear him, obey his commandments, listen to what he says, serve him and cling to him; and that prophet or dreamer is to be put to death; because he urged rebellion against Adonai your God, . . .”

For those of you who don’t know, there is this cyclical reading of the Torah every year in synagogues all over the world. Each Sabbath in the synagogue, going back to the time of Moses, the faithful people would gather to hear a lesson, a Parashah section of the Torah read aloud.  The Torah was divided into sections so that in a year’s time the five books of Moses would be read through.  Besides that, in truly Torah observant communities, boys were expected to have memorized the Torah by the time of their Bar Mitzvah at 12 or 13.

There was no football, basketball, or soccer. No television, X-box, Wii, or any other of the myriad of distractions we have in the world today. Life was agrarian. You either farmed or fished or made things for those who did. People who tried to be faithful to Torah (not just Jews) held to the teaching of Deuteronomy 6, which contains the “Sh’mah,” the most well-known and often repeated pieces of Scripture known to all Jews around the world. Also, the verses immediately following that:   “These words, which I command you today, are to be on your heart, and you are to teach them carefully to your children, when you lie down and when you get up.” (Deuteronomy 6:4-7)

From the time a child was weaned, boys spent the day with daddy, learning the family business and learning and discussing Torah. Girls did the same with the mother.  There were no government schools.  If a boy began showing promise as a Torah scholar, the family rejoiced, because there was no greater honor in a Jewish community. Torah scholarship was so revered that those recognized as being exceptional at it were excused from some or even much of the labor and other family members compensated the work load.  Everything centered around Torah, and the rest of the Holy Books.

This is the community that Yeshua son of Joseph was born into.  When you read in Luke that Mary (Miriam) and Joseph (Yosef) were righteous, it means that they obeyed the Torah. Because life was all about the Scriptures and heritage and family, they knew that they were of the line of David and that Messiah was due to come from their line, even before the angel showed up to announce it.

It can be hard for us, in this modern technological world, to grasp that towns were tiny, and everybody knew everybody.  Nazareth might have had several hundred families; maybe a thousand families tops.  They were nearly all related going back many generations.  When you weren’t talking about making your living or discussing Torah or the Roman occupation, you talked about family. Everybody knew who Yeshua was.  There are songs and jokes about living in small towns.  There are no secrets, even when you try to hide things. But a Torah observant community is even far more open.  Why is all of this important?

If Yeshua had not been a faithful adherent to Torah, the claims of His disciples and the gospels could have easily been refuted and He would have been proven to be like the other false Messiahs that had come before.  Had he said anything to indicate that He was going to do away with Torah, the community would have rightly stoned Him to death as a false prophet leading a rebellion against God Almighty.

People who have been “churched” in their beliefs via catechism or Protestantism don’t have the same idea of “sinless” as expressed in the Bible.  Torah is the standard for what is and is not sin.  Most Christians in the modern world have some amorphous, liquid, shape-shifting ideas about what is and isn’t sinful.  Somewhere along the line, people took this verse from Matthew 22:40 and twisted it out of shape:
“On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (NASB)  It is fitting that I quote my friend Rabbi Michael Bugg: “A real, kosher Torah scroll is the Word of God written on lambskin, impaled on two shafts of wood (the rollers) which are called the Aytz Chaim (Tree of Life), . . .” (footnote a)  Yeshua was making the point with the Torah teachers that the two commandments were like the most important parts of a tree.  The commandment to love Adonai with all the mind, soul, and strength is like the root, the foundation.  The root is needed to support the trunk which is the second commandment. Without those two parts, a tree cannot produce any fruit.

In the case of the Pharisees and scribes, they were always concerned with the fruit, the visible, tangible stuff that everybody wanted from the tree.  They had lost sight of the very thing, the most important thing that provided for that fruit.
Today Christianity seems to have an almost opposite problem.  The church wants to have a stump in the ground that produces nothing of value and pretend that it has everything.  Is it any wonder that the unsaved world looks at the vast majority of churches and says, “Where’s the fruit?”  Torah is the God-given standard by which we can know that we are in the right relationship with Him and with our neighbor.

This is just the beginning of explaining why I don't use the label "Christian" and instead call myself Messianic.

The next installment in this series is Making A Case.

Note a: see “When The Stars Fall” by Rabbi Michael Bugg, page 226.

More on Moderate Danger

Remember when I wrote "Moderate Danger?"  I was making the point that those who choose to believe themselves moderates or centrists are not good for anybody, and are, in fact, the very enablers who make it possible for us to accelerate toward hell.  They are terribly smug in their self-righteous opinion that they are "reasonable" in their approach because they stay away from anything that might be viewed as extreme by any of the other sides.  They think themselves thoughtful, when what they are really doing is avoiding any real thought whatsoever.

I then ran across this wonderful paragraph today over at One Cosmos:

One thinks of the impressionable and emptyheaded "independent voters" who decide our elections and usher in a nightmarish future that none of them intended. But because of their spiritual and intellectual passivity, they open the way for political actors with very bad intentions indeed. For Dante, these are souls Who mourn the lack of intellect's true light.

This guy is a wealth of great insight and clever prose.

Best Statement #2 for 2011

Found this at the deep-thinking blog called One Cosmos:

Marxism is rooted in the myopic fallacy that things were getting worse for the average worker, when the reality was that, for the first time in 10,000 years, they were actually getting dramatically better. 

In this regard, Marx was not just economically illiterate, but appallingly ahistorical, a malady that continues to afflict the left to this day. The free market will eventually solve most problems that leftist policies will only perpetuate or aggravate, which means that the left is the very disease it attempts to cure. In order to carry this off, the leftist relies upon people being riveted to the ahistorical moment, so they may implement a radical solution to redeem the future. But the former never works and the latter never arrives. 

Update:  Bonus paragraph from the previous day's posting where Bob gives one definition of those who believe in the religion of being "progressive."

Again, this is anything but progressiveism; it is pure romanticism, which is always backward looking -- and not just backward looking, but backward to an idealized past that never existed to begin with. It is pure projection of present existential pain, and escapism into the past. No one is more conservative than a progressive. It's just that what they want to conserve is childhood and all of its privileges, e.g., irresponsibility, dependency, entitlement, rebellion against the grown-ups, polymorphous perversity, weak boundaries, etc.  [emphasis mine]

Todah Rabbah, Robert Godwin!

Best Statement #1 for 2011

Via the comment section from House of Eratosthenes:

“The Left is more than ruthless, they are evil. They seek to rule, not by persuasion or honest debate, but by any means necessary. They revel in slander, character assassination and violence. They are steeped in hatred for all who oppose them. They seek to create and hold a monopoly on news media and editorial opinion; they support voter fraud and stolen elections; they prosecute political opponents on trumped-up charges in kangaroo courts. They have raised “the politics of personal destruction” to a high art form. Fairness, civility and common decency are unknown to them. I do not see the American Left as fellow citizens, I see them as sworn enemies for whom I feel little or no commonality or fraternity.

The Left has, however, finally convinced me of the truth of one of their key precepts: Politics is war by other means. They proved that in their orgy of hate and slander following the Arizona shootings. I shall not forget again.”

I’m fresh out of mercy."

That's right.

Proof Positive

Yesterday I posted about making a choice about what kind of society you want to live in.  There is no easy choice because life is a struggle no matter what you do, and choosing the path that's best for you means lots of careful thought and learning to discern between what is real and what is fiction.

Helping to prove my point about how intellectually lazy people can be, I found this post at Bayou Renaissance Man.

Now stop and ask yourself how much more of a delusion you can create if you have a lot more people and a lot more resources to use for your propaganda.  Add to this the factors of complexity of subject matter.

Thoughtful Question

Col. Bunny over at Eternity Road asked the question at the end of a thoughtful piece.

"If life with the ridiculous, laughable, pathetic God of creation is so horrific and unbearable, what do you think it’s going to be like without God?"

 It is most interesting to me because he says he is not a Christian.  It is sad to me that over my life I have noticed that some of the most moral people I've met have refused to take on any religious label, and most often would make the point of saying that they weren't a Christian.  And here I am today, after a long time of wearing that label, now no longer able to, but for completely different reasons. I'm unable to wear that label because of the vast majority of people who wear it, but for whom it means little or nothing, and the resultant damage they do to it.  Perhaps I should one day post only on why I am not a "Christian."  I am a Messianic believer; a follower of "the way," as recorded in Luke's book of Acts.

In the developed world, we have so bought into scientism and materialism. Yes, scientism, not science. What used to be scientific endeavor has eroded into finding or making up data to support political agendas, rather than seeking the truth. The squashing of intelligent design theory and the global warming hoax have proved that in spades.  The modern world is so full of people who are so thoroughly confused about real science and the scientific method, that they simply accept anything the media tells them about "news" from the world of science.  Most people simply read or hear, "Scientists said . . ." or "Study revealed . . ." and they just buy it all, lock, stock, and barrel.  Then months or years later when it is revealed that the data was misinterpreted or the methods were sloppy or the conclusions incoherent and wrong, nobody pays attention.

In keeping with Col. Bunny's question, it is interesting to note that even many of the philosophers who doubted God's existence or denied it outright, at least thought about the consequences of their ideas. They reasoned that man is a wild beast and needs to be ruled by his superiors of the same species, and that using the concept of "God" is a good way to keep the herd in line.  I wish I still had all my files with the quote from one 19th century philosopher who said that if people didn't believe in a God, the elites would need to invent one to keep the people in line.   In the times of monarchs with absolute authority, this was known as "divine right," and was useful for keeping the people cowed. Philosophers all the way back to Plato have understood that people had to have some kind of belief in a cosmic being with ultimate authority or society would break down into anarchy. Of course, past tyrants would have salivated at the modern technology we have today that could make it possible to watch and threaten the masses into near complete submission.

Many who have dislike or outright hatred of Christianity love to ask, "What about the crusades?"  Young skulls full of state propaganda from government schools are convinced that "religion" is the cause of all the world's ills. Pay no attention to the fact that it was Nazi socialism, Lenin and Stalin's communism, Mao, Pol Pot, and others who adhered to a doctrine that specifically and militantly prohibited the God of the Bible from having any part in the ordering of their societies, and executed, -- not just killed in war -- murdered upwards of 50 million people combined.  I'd like to resurrect some of those people and ask them if they would prefer living under a king who believed he would eventually have to stand before the judgment of a righteous God, or if they thought the concept of living under the Ten Commandments was just too much of a burden.

The Hitlers and the Maos and those who would be our "progressive" leaders can't tolerate any fundamental, true belief in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  Why?  To believe in the God of the Bible would lead to radical ideas about man being endowed by his Creator with certain unalienable rights.  People might start believing that man is not meant to be a slave to the state in order to serve the good of the masses. You true believers in the God of the Bible are a hindrance to our well-ordered society.

Life is hard. This is true for but a few buckets in the ocean of humanity. There is no system of human government which can change that fact. Not one. Whether you choose to work for material wealth like an Edison or a Ford, a Rockefeller or a Gates; or you decide to live on the streets and beg for your sustenance, life is a struggle. In a free society, men get to choose which struggle makes them happiest. In a totalitarian state, unless you are willing to lie, cheat, and murder, you will be told what struggle you will endure.

The founders of the United States may have disagreed on many doctrines of various denominations of Christianity, but they all agreed on the basics of morality as expressed in the Judeo-Christian Bible.  People like Bill Maher and others can make all the baseless claims they want to about the founders not being Christians.  A few exceptions do not alter the history as recorded in the deliberations in Congress or the federalist papers or in the personal correspondence of those founders. And I dare you to walk through Washington, D.C. and point to the words and pictures carved into the buildings and tell me that the founders didn't care about the influence of the Bible on government in the affirmative. The fact is that the overwhelming majority of the founders were indeed men of the Bible.  Dr. Benjamin Rush, signatory to the Declaration of Independence said that if the Bible ever got replaced as the basic primer for education in America, we eventually would not be able to build jails fast enough. How prophetic.  John Adams, the second president, said, "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

Something Col. Bunny alludes to but does not state specifically is that nature abhors a vacuum.  We are all going to live by somebody's set of values.  There is no such thing as a valueless society.  Muslims, and yes, I mean ALL muslims, adhere to the doctrine of their prophet Muhammed, and they can all claim various levels of adherence to the dictates of this Imam or that Imam, but when push comes to shove, and the powerful clerics who exercise the real muscle and  issue the fatwahs and direct how Sh'ria law is to be obeyed, the rest of the so-called "moderate" muslims will fall in line.  Muslims do not believe in "live and let live."  They believe that all the world is destined to be under Islam; under "submission," which is what Islam actually means.  If you are not prepared to fight to keep this ostensibly Judeo-Christian society from being overrun by muslim jihadis, then welcome to dhimmitude under an Islamic caliphate.

So, which system do you want to live under?  If you think Islam is the way to go, you can convert and move to a country which already has Sh'ria in place.  If you like the fully socialized Utopian dream, Cuba, North Korea, or Venezuela awaits you.  But how about doing the rest of us a favor and leave us alone.