Born Primitive Sacred, Baptized Christian

Robert Spencer reports:

"As the Prophet Muhammad said, everybody is born Muslim, and their parents convert them to Judaism, to Christianity, or to Zoroastrianism." So says Egyptian cleric Wagdi Ghneim.

And, yes, Muhammad really did say that: "No child is born but has the Islamic Faith, but its parents turn it into a Jew or a Christian" (Bukhari, volume 8, book 77, number 597).

This notion, that everyone is born Muslim, is a foundation of Islamic supremacism. Members of all other faiths are simply renegades from the truth faith of Islam, and must be made to feel their status as rebels by being denied equality of rights -- as Sharia mandates for Jews, Christians, and others.

Read all of Spencer's article here.

On the face of things, this goes contrary to the hypothesis of tabula rasa - the notion that humans are devoid of cultural influence at birth and beyond - "blank slates" upon which we can "write" with good intentions and education, a myth dearly loved and held by naive progressives even today. But as René Girard has demonstrated in his exhaustive study of culture, the good Islamic cleric is in a sense correct: every human being on this side of the Fall of Adam and Eve are inexorably entwined in the primitive sacred, which is what the Scimitar of Islam, without putting too fine a point on it, is.

In a real sense, it is the responsibility of every Christian father and mother, indeed, to raise their children up and out of whatever expression of the primitive sacred is locally exuded from the satanic spirit of the age: the Scimitar, neo-paganism, atheism, nihilism, etc.

And every Christian parent knows how difficult this is. The primitive sacred feels so "natural" because in our state of fallenness, hurt wants retaliation, anger retribution, shame redress, anguish a whipping boy, tumult a scapegoat. The primitive sacred knows nothing of grace and forgiveness, and the freedom that only the Gospel can give.

For a concise look at the primitive sacred origins of human culture, please refer to these three installments that look at the characteristics of paganism from the perspective of mimetic theory, anthropology, and psychology (René Girard and Jeffrey Burke Satinover).