What we’ve long known

A friend sends the following interesting, and politically incorrect, quotes from “Great Heresies and Church Councils,” by Jean Guitton, Harper and Row, New York, 1965 (orig in French, c 1963) for your consideration:

“The Muslim seem to have extolled not so much the blood shed by the martyr who bears witness, as the blood spilled by the figher who conquers in the name of Allah” (p. 104).

“Other religions preached holy wars only incidentally—the Muslim religion made it for long its central act” (p. 104).

“[A chain of events through Islam brought] Aristotle [to the] West, Aristotle who had done what Hegel had dreamed of doing, to write an encyclopedia of all human knowledge.  And it was Aristotle who gave to the West what Karl Marx in our time has given to Communism:  that systematic and ordered knowledge which is so necessary for massive indoctrination” (p. 107).

[In answer to the surprising question as to why Islam perdures:] “What could [the Moslems] do against cannons, torpedoes, tanks, planes, rockets?  They had to pay their tithe, of course, to a heavily armed West; they used cunning, supertfuge, and for a time they submitted.  But in the end the desert, underground resistance, obstinancy, guile, self sacrifice, and terror proved stronger than the armed force of the West” (p. 108).

“The Muslim is shocked to witness how Christianity since the Middle Ages has allowed its social and national life to grow even more secular, until many Christians live today like superstitious unbelievers rather than disciples of Jesus Christ.  Indeed, educated and cultivated Europeans who have lost their faith in God at times find their way back to their Catholicism merely by a contact with Islam” (p. 109).