Islam and Christianity

Islam is full of discrimination-against women, against non-Muslims, against Christians and most especially against Jews. Hatred is built into the religion. The history of Islam, which was my special area of study, could only be characterized as a river of blood.

Mark Gabriel, former Muslim, former professor of Islamics at al Azhar University

The Birth of the Muslim Brotherhood changed everything:

Founded in 1928 by a then-obscure figure called Hassan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood proclaimed the revival of an imaginary original purity in religion, asserting that a diluted and distorted Muslim devotion had undermined Islamic resistance to European imperialism. Yet the Muslim Brotherhood was modernistic in its reaction against modernity, adopting the characteristics of competing leftist and rightist militias in Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. It flourished as an aggressive, paramilitary formation, and established a network in the Arab East, India, Turkey, and Indonesia. While some of these branches were no more than fantasies typical of radical conspiracies, the Muslim Brotherhood did become an open ally of Hitler in seeking enhanced German influence in the Islamic world. Decades later, its Palestinian wing gave birth to Hamas, one of its most successful offshoots, and it has grown very powerful in many Mus…

If you have hung around with 20-something (or 30-something) single American evangelicals, this will be hilarious. If not, then please just ignore this video.

Hugh Fitzgerald says:

...Western governments simply will not stop to examine, will not dare even to discuss, the nature, the meaning, the menace of Islam and Jihad. Those whose duty it is to protect us will continue to pretend that what goes on in mosques is as "religious" in nature as what goes on in churches or synagogues. But it isn't. Visits to mosques, or tapes of what goes on, or the testimony of those who have jettisoned Islam but can still recall what they heard (or if their faces are not recognized, enter mosques still) confirm that what goes on is dangerous to Infidels, to their legal and political institutions, to their physical security....

And you thought I only blogged about Anglicans, Catholics and Orthodox. Ya haram!

Southern Baptist extraordinaire David Rogers asks questions about how to square Paul and James:

As I have thought about faith and works, and their relationship to salvation, I have struggled with the apparent conflict between the teaching of Paul and James. If we are honest, and have thought much about it at all, I think we all would admit to struggling with this very same thing.

He then proposes a hypothetical situation which I will let you read. But here is what I wrote:

A good place to start is by realizing that Catholics and Protestants use the word justification quite differently. In Protestantism we view in a very forensic sense, that is, like in a court room. It is the beginning of our salvation when our present, past, and future sins (that last is debated among evangelicals) are forgiven and we move into a curious status that Luther called simul justus et pecatur–at once just and a sinner. After that…

Interesting stuff here:

Murals found on cave walls in Afghanistan prove that painting with oil had been going on in Asia for centuries before artists used the technique in Europe, scientists said this week.

Until now, art historians believed that oil painting started in Europe in the 15th century.

Just check out this picture from the CNN website.

But guess what? This important work done by Buddhist monks in the 7th C. has been defaced, quite literally. The faces of the people have been destroyed.

Why? Allahu Akbar.

Bamiyan, about 130 kilometers (80 miles) northwest of Kabul, was once a thriving center of commerce and Buddhism. The paintings, scientists say, were probably the work of artists who traveled along the Silk Road, the ancient trade route between China, across Central Asia's desert to the West.

The Taliban used dozens of explosives to demolish the Buddha statues in Bamiyan.

Imagine what Afghanistan could be today if it were not for Islam. Imagine what Afghanistan can be some d…

Paul talks about catechesis (§44) then as another form of evangelism. Is this not more of the same? I suspect that Vatican II blew a whole in rigorous catechesis and I have heard of people being confirmed after attending one or two classes. Which is better than nothing. But not much better.

He then discusses (§45) using the media--mass communication--to reach people. This goes on here in the Middle East, but not by Catholics. Only by evangelicals, and they do a great job at it too. (Obviously the intrepid and indomitable Abouna Zacarias is a fine exception among the Oriental Orthodox; though I would in all honest call him evangelical Orthodox.) So there is an opening there, waiting for someone to step through.

I have long said that some Muslims find the free-church, do-what-you-wanna-do model of worship unattractive even if they are attracted to Christian doctrine and the person of Christ--this point is incontrovertible. They might well be attracted to Catholicism. But no one is expos…

Great stuff from Newsweek:

[...] By quoting a Byzantine emperor's sharp critique of Islam, Benedict XVI drew worldwide criticism. Others, however, including significant personalities in the complex worlds of Islam, took the pope's point about the dangers of faith detached from reason quite seriously. And over the ensuing 19 months, there have been potentially historic tectonic shifts going on, both within Islam and in the world of interreligious dialogue.

Benedict has received two open letters from Muslim leaders; the October 2007 letter, "An Open Word Between Us and You," proposed a new dialogue between Islam and the Vatican. That dialogue will now be conducted through a Catholic-Muslim Forum that will meet twice yearly, in Rome and in Amman, Jordan. The forum will address two issues that Benedict XVI has insisted be the focus of conversation: religious freedom, understood as a human right that everyone can grasp by reason, and the separation of religious and politica…