… In the Middle East.

This, I imagine, will come as a surprise to approximately nobody. When two religions face off and one of them is allowed to kill and forcibly convert members of the other,  then the victim-religion is at a massive disadvantage.

In reality, when it comes to a conflict between civilized people and savages… bet on the savage, *especially* if they have access to roughly equivalent weaponry. When civilized people conflict, it is the ability to fight savagely that wins: Nazi Germany wasn’t defeated because the Allies had “right” on our side; we won because we had millions of pissed-off Russians on our side. We didn’t beat Japan because Democracy is inherently better than God-Emperors; we won because we firebombed and nuked their cities out of existence. Since WWII, the US has gone to great effort to *not* engage in any sort of warfare that would be seen as unnecessarily cruel… and as a result, in order to eke out even the barest victories against relatively weak opponents, we have to dump vast amounts of resources into the fight. The ancient Romans knew that sometimes you had to salt the enemies fields and poison their wells.

And so, to religion in the middle east: one religion in particular is perfectly comfortable with fighting dirty. In the marketplace of ideas, they are the ones who respond to debate by beheading children. *OF* *COURSE* they are going to dominate. This has long been the way of things. Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae from 785 was little different from many modern interpretations of sharia: it called for the murder of any Germanic pagan who did not convert to Christianity. While this and related efforts, like Charlemagne’s massacre of 4500 pagans at Verden, led to the rise of Vikings, as the Norse rose up to defend themselves and took the fight to the church that was attempting to exterminate their culture, it did, in the end, succeed in wiping out the Old Norse faith and replaced it with an alien faith from the Middle East. Here, of course, the Norse were a small population compared to the Christians, impoverished, with few allies, poorly provisioned and at the edge of the world. In the modern world, Christianity is a vastly populous religion with buckets of money. But there are few Christian theocracies of the type there once were, certainly nothing along the lines of the Islamic states. Many of the Middle Eastern Islamic states will soon enough expel the last of the non-Muslims from their lands, while Muslims in “Christian” nations will be allowed to thrive and expand. The only way for Christianity to stand up to the onslaught would seem to be to adopt Muslim policies: expel the Muslims, ban their practices. And this is not going to happen… it would be “uncivilized.” And it would be no improvement over the alternative.

The end of oil, of course, may greatly change things. When oil is no longer an issue, nobody will give a damn about the Middle East anymore. With no more oil, there will be no more money to fund global jihad. With no more oil, the local economies will collapse and devolve into horrific local warfare over scarce resources. This will not only take resources and effort away from conquering everyone else, it will also be just bad PR for the local religion. So while Christianity has, on the whole, become “civilized” over the last few centuries, it just might survive if it can hold on long enough for Islam to run out of cash.

So… Merry Christmas or whatever.