11 Mar America’s 250th Birthday – A Changeless Declaration, Forever Opposed to Sharia
There is a divine inspiration behind the Declaration of Independence that deserves reflection by all American citizens, and by all who wish to become American citizens.
Understood rightly, it eliminates racism and sexism[1].
Understood historically, it contains ‘final’ truths about the nature of men and women and their relationship to the purpose of true, limited government[2].
Understood prospectively, it defines the conflict between America under the Declaration and Constitution vs. America under sharia (Islamic law).
To wit: the Declaration of Independence shows this conflict to be irreconcilable. It must be understood as such.
To see this conflict fearlessly and correctly may permit a comparatively peaceful Abraham/Lot parting of the ways—i.e., Muslims who desire to live a sharia-compliant life can, should and ultimately must move to established, sharia-compliant countries (e.g., Pakistan); they cannot live a sharia-compliant life in America. And Americans can avoid impossible-to-resolve-without-war conflicts with Islam by supporting this parting of the ways.
To fail to see this conflict correctly is to potentially sentence millions of human beings to a future of violence, turmoil and upheaval. No decent human being should want that.
___________________
So why is this conflict irreconcilable?
The Declaration is final: all men and women are created equal.
- Sharia makes women, expressly and unambiguously, unequal and subordinate to men.
These two positions cannot be reconciled; there is no middle ground.
The Declaration is final: all individuals are endowed by God (of the Bible) with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
- Sharia compels the deprivation of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—a/k/a killing—of those who violate sharia precepts: a Muslim cannot leave Islam; the attempt to do so (apostasy) is punishable by death; one cannot criticize or question Mohammed or sharia; doing so is punishable by death. These edicts do not emanate from the God of the Bible; they emanate from Mohammed’s Allah.
These two positions cannot be reconciled; they posit radically conflicting ‘gods’ and worldviews, and drive radically conflicting consequences in society–e.g., is the Islam-sanctioned killing of an apostate prosecutable homicide, or not? (Politics is downstream of culture, and culture is downstream of theology.)[3]
The Declaration is final: the only just government is government that emerges from the consent of the governed.
- Sharia is both ancient and permanent; it can never be amended or adjusted by anyone, and certainly not by the consent of those subject to it.
These two positions cannot be reconciled; America under the Declaration enables its self-governing citizenry to be free to establish new laws and amend or repeal old laws as new times and circumstances may require; Islam requires its adherents to submit unconditionally to sharia—an unchanging and all-encompassing regimen of ancient laws.
But here’s the good news and open secret of the Declaration: it, too, is changeless; it cannot be amended. It is the ‘birthing’ document of the United States of America. It stands, and will always stand, by its own words. People of different eras have argued and will continue to argue the nuances of what those words mean, but the divine inspiration behind them remains, and tends over time to cause those arguments to settle and converge on singular truth.
___________________
The principal author of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, presciently shed further insight into this conflict. He wrote:
“Almighty God hath created the mind free…No man shall be compelled to frequent or support religious worship or ministry or shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion.”
Allah, and Allah’s sharia do not permit the mind to be free. Sharia compels the absolute worship of its Allah and imposes suffering and death on those who hold a differing religious opinion or belief. Sharia does not permit men or women to be free to have their own opinions in matters of religion.
________________
The conflict between America—defined by her Declaration and Constitution—and Islam, defined by sharia, cannot be reconciled. In terms of what governs a society, honest objective experts on both sides of this conflict would agree: it’s one or the other.
But in the coming weeks, months and years, social media ‘experts’ of various kinds and political partisans of all stripes will hyperventilate about the sacred First Amendment and its ‘freedom of religion’ in an effort to insist that: (1) the irreconcilable can or must be reconciled; and/or (2) two wholly opposed governmental systems can operate together in one nation. These efforts will be driven largely by fear—fear that any alternative to forced coexistence will result in uncontrollable violence.
On the contrary, it is a forced coexistence of different peoples determined to live by irreconcilable ideals that is more likely to trigger uncontrollable violence.
But violence is not inevitable. Decent human beings of every background do not naturally wish death and destruction upon others they don’t even know, over differing private or public religious opinions they might hold.
Americans in particular are traditionally very decent in this respect. Millions of individual Muslims are no doubt similarly decent.
So back to Abraham and Lot…those two seemed to draw on their common humanity to resist avoidable strife: they went their separate ways. That’s the parallel to consider: America, whose citizens expect and demand to live in freedom, and Muslims who insist on submitting to or living by sharia, need to go their separate ways. There are 50+ Islamic countries: that is where sharia-adherent Muslims should want to live, and America should consider helping them to move.
Unfortunately, the Islamic holy book and Islam’s founder do not seem open to an Abraham/Lot approach; they expressly call for jihad, or holy war, to establish a global caliphate governed by sharia. That has been the mission of Islam since its inception. As applied in America, it is effectively a mission to overthrow the Constitution.
_______________
If the Abraham/Lot approach is dismissed as irrelevant or inapt, here is what the world in general and Islamists in particular urgently need to understand: the call for a global caliphate governed by sharia defies and denies the American spirit, and Americans will never submit to it.
The American spirit is the essence of the giant that can be awakened and filled ‘with a terrible resolve’ to destroy that which threatens freedom. The Declaration gave official birth and character to that spirit; the Declaration is changeless; and Americans for generations have loved, embraced and embodied that spirit. It won’t be destroyed by sharia. Best not to try.
Eric Georgatos
[1] See “America’s 250th Birthday: Relearning the Declaration of Independence”, HERE.
[2] See “America’s 250th Birthday—Rediscovering President Calvin ‘That is Final’ Coolidge…and His Take on Mamdani’s Worldview”, HERE.