HIstory ping!
Well, the Crusades were a reaction against 4 centuries of Muslim depredations. Around about 1099 the Christian World finally decided to fight back. We kept it up for over a century, but then decided that religious wars were not our thing. The Muslims felt differently. They've been fighting religious wars for 14 centuries. Haven't stopped yet.
But we're the bad guys.
It is ongoing. You are experiencing it now.
The HUGE difference with Islam, Christianity and Hinduism (the three largest faiths in our world) is that we Christians had/have/will always have Jesus. He elevated the status of women (still commodities in many places) and of all humans, even slaves.
Life is short; Jesus gave us His life for our sins. How blessed we are for His gift.
All the comparisons between faiths and cultures PALE compared to the gift from heaven we received 2000 years ago.
I have sometimes been watching a TV show or movie, which has absolutely nothing to do with Islam or Christianity, make some slur against Christians in regards to Islam.
They just don’t seem to be able to keep their hatred of Christianity from bubbling to the top.
Typically it is something like this: “That must be how God felt about the crusades”, referring to something immoral or cruel.
Bring back THE CRUSADES and wipe the earth’s butt of the murderous muslim/islamist scourge!
To me the real eye-opener is to look at the biographies of known middle-ages persons. The two I point to are Maimonides (RAMBAM) who lived in "Golden Age" Islamic Spain (until his family was forced to flee that is); and RASHI who lived in "savage" Christian France. Both of these guys were Jewish Torah scholars so both were dependent on good will of the majority populations in the places where lived.
I have yet to hear a single person tell me that I have unfairly cherrypicked among such biographies to denegrate the supposed greatness of Islam.
And then there is always The Moslem Conquest (of India) . (Such nice people!)
ML/NJ
!
Right around 911, I read Daniel Boorstin's The Creators.
It cemented in my mind why Islam is incompatible with the very soul of America, why it should be shunned and despised, and why Islamic countries are such sh!tholes.
Here are a few bare quotes to points I am sure you are aware of, but most others are not:
"The Muslim counterpart to Jesus is not Mohammed.
The reverence and mystery that Christians feel toward Jesus the Christ is what Muslims feel toward their book.
The Koranic God did not by create by making the earth, he ordered it. He decreed it into being.
"Islam" is Arabic for submission.
For a believing Muslim, to create is a rash and dangerous act."
Our religious tradition of free will resulted in Constitutional self government. Because of their religion, Islamic Sharia countries are doomed to squalor, despair and misery. It does not deserve 1st Amendment protection.
Want to see 5,000 years of religion in 90 seconds? Ready, Set, Go!
Conventional scholarly wisdom also held that German conquest ended Roman civilization and brought on the Dark Ages. Belgian historian Henri Pirenne [1862-1935] strongly disagreed.
Pirenne relied on written texts -- what was mentioned:
to build up a picture of the transition from the (Western) Roman Empire to the period of Carolingian rule.
Pirenne's contention was that the Germanic invasions were predominantly political changes at the top of society. That the Mediterannean-based Roman economy continued, that the successor states continued Roman administrative practices with educated secular officials and dominant royal authority based on tax-funded financial power, were culturally integrated into "Romania"
and it was only with the Arab-Islamic invasions and conquest of the C7th that the whole Mediterranean world is split into two,trade collapses and Latin Christendom acquires a much more Germanic and Northern nature.
Almost a hundred years ago, Pirenne argued that starting in the seventh century, Islam was a destructive, indeed a catastrophic, force that caused Europe’s Dark Ages.
Most European historians have disagreed, claiming that Islam was a tolerant, enlightened force that began to raise Europe out of its darkness. The myth of a so-called Islamic “Golden Age” in Spain is an expression of that view.
Enter 'Emmet Scott' author of "Mohammed & Charlemagne Revisited” [the history of a controversy] -- in which he takes as his starting point the thesis of Henri Pirenne that the real destroyers of classical civilization were the Muslims.
Scott refines, corrects and augments Pirenne’s insight, and he does so by taking into account two essential disciplines often neglected in studies of this period - archaeology and Islamology.
Arguing that these historians have paid scant “attention to the nature of Islam or its beliefs.” Like much of our media and government officials today, they assume that Islam is a religion like any other. Scott argues that, with its doctrine of never-ending “holy war” against all non-believers, Islam was “an unprecedentedly destabilizing influence.”
The promise under the Old Covenant and the New Covenant was a Saviour, for the Jew and the Gentiles.
“For God not His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved throught His Son Jesus Christ.” (John 3:17)
Everything about His Son was good news to us sinners:
“All we like sheep have gone astray, and the LORD has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:6)
In 1 Corinthians 5:21 we read: “For He[God] hath made Him[Jesus] to be sin for us, who knew no sin that we might be made the righteous of God in Him.”
jihad bump