Posted on 01/19/2004 5:53:37 AM PST by SJackson
Something like a rabies vaccine.
What Islamic countries need is Christ!
But what the Reformation achieved was to remind the Christian that there was no human monopoly on truth ...
And so moral relativism had its start and its hold.
All religions including Judaism and Christianity have had tehir crazies and their periods of excessive reliance on state power to enforce a degree of doctrinal uniformity, but the excesses do not DEFINE the religion. Contrarily, Islam is quite specifiecally DEFINED as the call by the deity allah to conquer the entire world and make it submit to Mohammed's vision for mankind.
The concept of execution for "apostasy", either actual (renouncing Islam) or contrived (suggesting that the Quran is NOT God's word and needs further study), has been so tightly woven into Islamic culture that in the 1940's the Muslim President of Pakistan could write a book complaining that he can't believe people have actually started thinking it is OK to NOT execute apostates from Islam. Up until about 1850, the question did not even arise.
As to what Islam needs, once they had something like a Pope, the Caliph, and it is only during the late Caliphate that the PC view of Islam as a tolerant religion has any basis at all. St. John of Damascus was the equivalent of Lord Chamberlain to one of the Caliphs of Damascus, and was persecuted only in court intrigues, not for penning the first Christian critique of Islam (which he regarded as a heresy rather than a proper separate religion).
Unfortunately, the current lead in the race to reoccupy the throne of the Caliphs is none other than Osama bin Laden, so it doesn't look like a Muslim 'papacy' will help at all. Of course the whole of Islam has an approach to their scriptures very much like the protestant approach to the Christian canon (except no one claims the right to throw out a sura here and a sura there like Luther did with the rest of the Old Testament, but I digress): any Muslim can read the Koran and the Hadiths (life of Mohammed) and issue fatwas (religious rulings, most notoriously including Islamic anathemas with a death sentence attached, but not limited to these). How widely regarded a fatwa is will depend on such things as how well regarded as a Koranic scholar its issuer is, how politically powerful its issuer is, or how popular among Muslims the position enunciated already is.
The other poster is right, what Islam needs is Christ (and not just for the salvation of the souls of now-deluded Muslims).
Islam and Protestantism rely on a book as their continuing contact with the divine. The problem, as with all works of purported non-fiction, is one of authentication.
The case for the authenticity of the Koran is laughable ... such as: you know it is from Allah, b/c of its unique eloquence and depth. There are numerous, probably hundreds of unanswerable objections to the authenticity of the Koran, but if you are a believer then you live at the level of tautology and no criticism is worth listening to.
Protestants who believe in the Bible as the ultimate authority face a similar problem. Who authenticates the Bible, a book which (unlike the Koran) is not claimed to be the literal words of God, but the words of men inspired by God?
That is why the Catholic Church at least has logic on its side (no pun intended). The starting point, the authentication for Christianity iself, is the Resurrection of Christ. Yet the proof of that Event are eyewitnesses, whose testimony has been preserved by Tradition, the passing on from person to person.
That is why the Apostolic tradition is so significant, at least for those who believe Jesus to be the literal Son of God, and Himself divine.
The idea of the Catholic Church is to preserve the unbroken tradition, to transmit the authenticity of Christianity so that it can be traced back to the very beginning.
Islam and Protestantism (to oversimplify) both believe in every man for himself. They are unmoored (no pun intended) because their ultimate "proof" is that their beliefs are self-evident, and you must be a bad person if you do not see it for yourself.
As the history of the Catholic Church helps demonstrate, all human beings are sinful, some moreso and some less so, regardless of professed beliefs. That is the value of having an institution which is outside one generation or one person.
True, but I was ignoring that comment so this doesn't get thrown into another Crevo argument.
Galileo's house arrest was due NOT to his assertions about the shape of the earth. His detention was the result of his arrogant assertions concerning the teaching authority of the Church. Papal astronomers had advised the Pope that Galileo's ideas were probably correct. But Galileo deduced from his research theological concepts, and in that area he was incompetent. It was Galileo's proud contradiction of teaching authority doctrine that got him in trouble, not the details of astronomical data.
The Church in 1992 did not apologize for theological error. It admitted only that Galileo's detention was unwarranted.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.