Ever wanted to be a Crusader?

Well, you may get the chance! Seems there is at least some folks who think a new Crusade to liberate the Levant from the Infidels is a dandy idea!

Read it here: http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/04/19/imagine-the-loss-of-the-christian-holy-places/comment-page-1/#comment-12488, though I will give you a sample:

"Later it hit me: What if the mad leader of Iran fulfilled his pledge to wipe Israel from the map with the Iranian nuclear weapon, coming soon? What would we Christians do without the Mount of the Sermon?

Without Capernaum? Without Nazareth? Without Cana?

Without the lovely and mystical city of Jerusalem–without Golgotha, and the Mount of Olives, the Garden of Gethsemane, and the Tomb?

Back in the 1940’s, when Reinhold Niebuhr started Christianity in Crisis to support the war against Nazism, he abandoned his earlier pacifism, and his earlier too-simply pious way of wishing evil away, and called for a new tough-minded Christian realism.

He rooted this realism in the writings of St. Augustine....We do not have much time to wait before getting that argument going. We must get it done soon, in order to be able to act in time.

What is at stake is whether any future Christians will be able to sit and pray where Our Lord Jesus once preached the unforgettable Sermon. And much else besides.

Compare his words to that of Pope Urban II's call to the first Crusade, here: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/urban2-5vers.html. Here's a highlight:

"From the confines of Jerusalem and the city of Constantinople a horrible tale has gone forth and very frequently has been brought to our ears, namely, that a race from the kingdom of the Persians, an accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God, a generation forsooth which has not directed its heart and has not entrusted its spirit to God, has invaded the lands of those Christians and has depopulated them by the sword...it has either entirely destroyed the churches of God or appropriated them for the rites of its own religion...Let the holy sepulchre of the Lord our Saviour, which is possessed by unclean nations, especially incite you, and the holy places which are now treated with ignominy and irreverently polluted with their filthiness.

On whom therefore is the labor of avenging these wrongs and of recovering this territory incumbent, if not upon you? You, upon whom above other nations God has conferred remarkable glory in arms, great courage, bodily activity, and strength to humble the hairy scalp of those who resist you."

So, lovely! Seems what we really need, folks, is a new Crusade to the Holy Land! Admittedly (and I am happy to report it), the comments on Novak's essay seem to show most of the readers think he's as nuts as I do. But still, nut-cases tend to be like cockroaches; for every one you see, there's probably a hundred you don't.... And while this sentiment is nothing new among the more extremely evangelical circles, this goon may be the first to all but plagiarize Pope Urban II.....