No Commitment!

Rev. John Krenson asks us a question I’ve been asking myself a lot these days: Why are we so afraid?

Culturally and religiously we are on the defensive in this War on Terror. And it makes no sense to me. We accept immoral expressions of outrage by Muslims across the world and yet fail to have any of our own justified moral indignation at their actions. Instead we apologize for causing their reactions. Perhaps I should apologize to my four year old for his little temper tantrum this morning and for the time he slugged his sister in the face with a toy.

We hold the high ground – we believe in individual liberty, we believe in religious tolerance, we believe in women’s rights, we believe in a narrow window for the just use of war – and we should not be afraid to stand tall and to express our outrage at the insane reactions we are seeing across the Muslim world. In fact their actions prove the point made previously in Danish cartoons and the quote from Pope Benedict. It is all well and good to be sensitive but it is quite another thing when Muslims actually manifest what we criticize. It is quite another thing when there is lack of reciprocity in Muslim treatment of Jews and Christians. They have yet to practice what they preach – except for the spread of Islam by the sword and the convert or be killed part.

I do not understand our fear. We have, objectively, the superior culture which provides more personal freedom and a stable civilization in which those freedoms can flourish. No culture has ever done so much to allow each human being the room to flower as he or she sees fit. Our pre-eminent theology, which could be loosely described as Rational Christian is clearly superior in any number of ways. We spent countless hours wrestling with our beliefs, how they affect us spiritually and how they impact the world around us.

Yet we are scared to death to say such things, even though they are manifest. We would rather see ourselves murdered and enslaved than fight for the supremacy of our culture and religion.

Why? Have we grown that self-centered that we would hold onto the warm glow of faux humility even as killers beat down the door?

Perhaps what drives Muslims rage in parge part is our willingness to only talk a good game. We are full of speeches and chest-puffery about our freedom and liberty. We’re also very eager to shrug off any commitment those freedoms bring. Heck, “no commitment” might as well be our national motto today. From marriage to pregnancy to schooling children to picking a cellphone plan, we readily pick the option that makes us the least responsible for our actions. Muslims see that as weakness – a moral failing – and in that they are exactly correct. We are weak. We are immoral.

We have forgotten how to finish the jobs we start, whether we voluntarily started them or not. That is the source of our fear. Hollywood, the MSM, a goodly number of our politicians, none of them can look Islam directly in the eyes because they know, deep in their hearts, that Islam has the will to fight for what it wants and they simply do not. They lost that about the time they, in a marijuana-addled counterculture haze decided that fighting for our high morals was no longer somthing we should actually do but something we could talk about and still reap rewards. They decided that they could simply reward themselves for talking tough about freedom and liberty and peace without actually having to commit to them. They then turned the word “commitment” itself into a jingoistic slogan trotted out to fool the rubes. They replaced courage and conviction with cynicism and “cool” mockery of the very things we need to remain free.

Today, their decades-old delusion has made itself quite at home in most of our hearts and we need to root it out. If we do not, we will have good reason to fear because that delusion that makes it so easy to shy from commitment is what will eventually kill us.

(h/t: Instapundit