Existing, religiously-speaking, at a regularly changing point somewhere on the continuum between Agnosticism and Atheism, I’m not one who subscribes, or is even particularly influenced by, this vision of Easter below.
However, even I couldn’t help being moved by this picture, taken by Reuters’ Philippe Wojazer just under a week ago, one of first images of the inside of Notre Dame in the immediate aftermath of the disastrous fire, of the Christian Cross, still standing almost defiantly in its place on the High Altar, despite the conflagration.
It could well have assumed an even greater significance today, with the shocking news of the massacre of over 200 Christians celebrating Easter Sunday at church services and hotel in Sri Lanka, from all indications carried out by Islamist-Jihadist suicide bombers.
Critics can say that what follows is something of an emotional reaction. Well, maybe, but so what? I couldn’t care less.
Others might say that what follows is “Islamophobic”. Again I couldn’t care less, not least because “Islamophobia” is a wholly specious term, an entirely invented concept, first coined by the International Institute for Islamic Thought, a US front organisation for the militant-Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, as a means of silencing any debate on, criticism of, or even scholarly enquiry into, the nature of Islam, particularly its violently supremacist and intolerant Wahhabist and Salafist strains.
Notre Dame is not merely a Catholic, or even a Christian place of worship. It’s an exemplar of a Western civilisation that owes its unique place in our heritage as much to post-Reformation and Enlightenment liberal and secular philosophy as it does to Judeo-Christian ideas. But a Western civilisation that’s under both threat and attack from a millenarian, politico-cultural totalitarian ideology increasingly inseparable and indistinguishable from the religion in which it wraps itself.
So the message this particular Agnostic-going-on-Atheist is taking, this Easter Sunday of anti-Christian terrorist carnage, from the juxtaposition of that image of the Notre Dame interior with the Sri Lankan atrocity, is this.
That the Cross will never succumb to the Crescent.
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A Libertarian Rebel 