In fact, our moral incoherence is what appalls so many Muslims who prize faith in God and family morality. The more immersed we are in abortion, pornography, drugs, homosexuality, and the break-up of the family, as well as the rationalisations for these things, the more appalling we appear...We are losing [the fight to "defeat the ideology of hatred and resentment"] because belief will always trump unbelief. And the moral relativism under which so much of the West lives is simply a form of unbelief.

We are failing because we are so confused over essential issues concerning the meanings of life, family, and moral worth that we cannot coherently articulate a set of ideas to project beyond saying we are for "democracy." That does not work. As Harry Jaffa wrote, we are "telling others to accept the forms of our own political institutions, without any reference to the principles or convictions that give rise to those institutions."

I can't help but wonder how long it could be before we Americans disown and dethrone ourselves as world leaders in anything.

What, after all, was wrong with 9/11? As has often been remarked, it was an act of barbarism. But what does that mean? What is the moral import of an act of barbarism? One can only answer fully by defining what civilisation is - the act of recognising another person as a human being. The definition of a barbarian is someone who cannot perform this act - often because he has either come from or chosen a universe of meaning that does not contain the term "human being." It is hard to overstate the catastrophe resulting from this incapacity or refusal. If one is unable to recognise another person as a human being, then one does not know the difference between the animal and the human, or the human and the divine. Confusion over these matters leads to slavery, human sacrifice, cannibalism, and other horrors.

It also led to Nazism and Communism, both of which denied a common humanity. Now, we are in another struggle - this time against Muslim radicals who assert their perverted standard of faith as the litmus test for life or death. Share it or die. They serve an angry god who demands human sacrifice, first from other Muslims who do not subscribe to their darkness, and then from us. To fight this new war of ideas, we require a firm conviction in the justice of our own cause, and the means to explain it to our enemies and to friends. We need to recover our own civilisation in order to defend it.

- Robert R. Reilly, 9/15/06, "9/11: a chance for the West to rediscover itself"

HT: Mark Shea.