[Blogger]

To posture that Islam has anything to do with Christianity of any ilk is preposterous. But if you had to align Islam with one, it would certainly be the church of Rome which insists there are some on earth more deserving of God's grace than others
This is not the only similarity between Rome and Islam. The idea of rituals that HAVE TO be performed in order to gain God's favor is something that Islam got from the prevalent religion of its day. It would not have gotten that idea from Protestantism. The idea that one doesn't know for sure until after one dies whether or not one has found favor with God is an idea that Islam got from the prevailing religion at the time of its birth, not something that they would have gotten from Protestantism. In fact, the idea that Islam was keeping an eye on what all of those bishops were doing, at least at a surface level, is attested to in the fact that they have astutely observed in their Quran the deification of Mary by the Roman Catholic church: "And behold! Allah will say: "O Jesus the son of Mary! Didst thou say unto men, 'Take me and my mother for two gods beside Allah'?" He will say: "Glory to Thee! Never could I say what I had no right (to say). Had I said such a thing thou wouldst indeed have known it. Thou knowest what is in my heart, though I know not what in Thine. For Thou knowest in full all that is hidden. "[Qur'an 5:116]

Gee, if your religion is so unclear to the casual observer as to who it thinks God is, shouldn't that indicate that there is a problem? Certainly something that SHOULD give one pause for consideration.

[Campion]

The idea of rituals that HAVE TO be performed in order to gain God's favor is something that Islam got from the prevalent religion of its day. It would not have gotten that idea from Protestantism. The idea that one doesn't know for sure until after one dies whether or not one has found favor with God is an idea that Islam got from the prevailing religion at the time of its birth

The "prevailing religion" in Arabia at the time of Mohammed was paganism, not Catholic Christianity.

And of the few Christians on the Arabian peninsula, many (perhaps most) of them were Nestorians or Monophysites, not Catholics.