What's In Store For Us - Page 10

Further, where do the other “People of the Book” claim that the way to God is murderous conquest? Nowhere. This is the great deceit of Islam. Have any of you checked the status of Jews and Christians under Islam lately? It’s miserable, that’s what.

Indeed, by contrast, most Muslims are treated far better in Christian countries than in their own. There is a long history of mistreatment of non Muslims in Muslim countries. Least among the penalties are the taxes Jews and Christians pay - Jews and Christians who have lived in the same communites for millenia - purely for the importune fate of believing in Yahweh or Jesus.

Lastly, part of the mission of Islam is to make the whole world Islamic. The life of Mohammed is not, like the life of St. Francis, one of renunciation of violence, but the perpetuation and glorification of violence. The Islamic world was converted, as was the Christian world, by giving one’s life rather than convert, but by murdering those who refused to convert. When Islam stopped being a religion of conversion by the sword, Islam contracted and lost all momentum. Yet one can not deny that there is great power for Islam, and that the conversion to Islam by much of the world has been for base or evil reasons. Islam, (per se) is not false, it has some corrupting influences.

Here is a bit of preachifying: You folk who denigrate Christianity as a progenitor of war and strife and inhumanity, have you investigated this vile islamist movement in any meaningful way? Must you always blame the society that created tolerance and liberty? All societies are flawed, since humans are flawed, but the Christian societies have brought more good to the world than any other.

That Islam acknowledges the One God should not be lost. Jewish tradition acknowledges the belief in God as a truth of Islam. I believe and Alex believes, as should we all, that the Islamic belief in the God of Abraham is a vital truth. It is the corruption and reinterpretation of the meaning of God that is at issue.

My belief is that corrupting Islam is the greatest tool Satan has devised to defeat Christianity.

Here is a brief statement about the Crusades, before the critics get their panties in a bunch. The First Crusade was called for by Pope Urban at the end of the eleventh century. The Pope hoped in one small way to send Christian soldiers to liberate the Holy Land from the Muslim invaders who had conquered it. Pre-modern Europe was a mess of wars, petty and large. The Pope hoped also that an external enemy would unify Europe and lessen the strife. It is in this circumstance one hundred years later that would lead to the conversion of St. Francis. There is some good to be said for the attempt, but the best that can be said is that almost from the start the Good Intentions were subverted, and the subsequent Crusades did much to besmirch the name of Christianity for centuries, and inculcate a fear and distrust of Christians by Muslims. The Crusades were bad, not all bad, because of good intentions, but bad. Some would say evil. Some wold say that the Crusades were the worst thing Christianity did. But they were based on good intentions.

Article Author: Paulie at the Commons

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