Cicero, thank you for your responding.
What you say is true. But Christianity, beginning with Constantine, has been co-opted for evil purposes more times than most Christians would like to acknowledge. The difference between Islam and Christianity is that one is divine, and the other is an imitation of the divine (Islam borrows heavily from both Judaism and Christianity).
Someone else on this thread said that Islam is a "monkey see, monkey do" religion. Fair enough. But is not Christianity a "sheep see, sheep do" religion? The difference is that Christianity is true. We really do follow the "Good Shepherd." So it is little wonder that Christians naturally resist the impulse to use "arbitrary power and violence" to achieve our ends. But those acting in the name of Christianity have fallen prey to this temptation many times, and on a large scale, in the past.
Having said that, there are many verses in the Qu'ran that advocate what CS Lewis would call (for "brevity's sake") the "Tao", or Natural Law (see Lewis' book, "Abolition of Man"). That is, Islam promotes the laws of general and special beneficence; duties to Parents, elders, and ancestors; duties to children and posterity; the law of justice; the law of good faith and veracity; the law of mercy; the law of magnanimity, etc. In short, the morals contained in the Qu'ran, in the main, are very similar to our own. But like the Greeks and the Croatians, religions are sometimes willing to kill each other over differences in religious practice (for instance, Lewis tells us that the Greeks cremated their dead, whereas the Croatians ate the flesh of their dead...both found the other's practice loathsome, yet both did so to secure a better afterlife for their ancestors). However, in the current global terror offensive, I don't think the terrorists are motivated to kill because of religious differences. Indeed, it is my firm conviction that many of the terrorists (especially the ones calling the shots) could care less about Islam.
It is my contention that the Qu'ran has been perverted by unscrupulous individuals who couldn't care one farthing about what the Qu'ran really says (in context). Where Islam--true Islam--goes wrong is that they only accept Jesus as a great prophet (like Mohammad), and not the living Son of God. Of course, that is where every other religion goes wrong as well. Muslims even believe in the Second Coming of Jesus (but not as the second person of the triune God). I am tempted to press on and write more, but I am more interested in your response to what I have written so far.
I borrowed this from another thread, because I think it sheds light on just how far the so-called Muslim terrorists are outside the mainstream of Islam. Look forward to your comments.
No Tip-Toeing Around the T-Word-Honest Arab journalists assess Islamic roots of terrorism.
FrontPageMagazine.com ^ | September 28, 2004 | David Ouellette
Posted on 09/28/2004 5:18:35 AM PDT by SJackson
The New York Times reported last Monday that Reuters’ global managing editor, David A. Schlesinger, is worried about a Canadian media conglomerate’s (CanWest) insertion of the word “terrorist” in Reuters news stories concerning groups such as Hamas and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Reuters fears that this could lead to “confusion” and “endanger its reporters in volatile areas,” indicating intimidation, and not objectivity, is guiding Reuters’ editorial policy.
But while Reuters is only talking about its dislike of seeing the T-word in CanWest stories, there are groups in Canada, such as the Canadian branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN), the Canadian Arab Federation or the National Council on Canada-Arab Relations, who are prepared to do something. While these groups are all eager to defend democratic values when it comes to protecting Arab and Muslim interests, they seem less keen to cherish the value of an independent and free press. Their lobbies are now calling on the Canadian Senate to investigate CanWest’s editorial policy and on Parliament to examine the effects of so-called media concentration.
But while Islamic terrorists intimidate Western Press agencies into not using the T-word and Arab and Muslim lobbies in North America agitate racism accusations at those journalists and media enterprises objective enough to call a cat a cat, a growing number of Arab journalists and intellectuals, quite literally in the dragon’s den, are not only calling Islamic terrorism by its name, but are courageously assessing its “root causes.” And far from shying away from the use of the T-word in connection with Islam, they go as far as explaining that Islamist terrorism is a result of the Islamic culture’s failures in the modern age.
Here are a few telling examples of the honesty which these leading Arab journalists use in taking a long, hard look at their societies without tip-toeing around semantics:
* In the aftermath of the Beslan tragedy, Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed, former editor of the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, wrote under the headline “The Painful Truth is that All of the Terrorists are Muslims” that “Islam has suffered an injustice at the hands of the new Muslims. We will only be able to clear our reputation once we have admitted the clear and shameful fact that most of the terrorist acts in the world today are carried out by Muslims.” (Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, September 4, 2004)
* Under the title “Butchers in the Name of Allah,” Khaled Hamad Al-Suleiman wrote in the Saudi government daily Okaz: “The propagandists of Jihad succeeded in the span of a few years in distorting the image of Islam, while the enemies of Islam did not succeed in doing this [even] in the course of hundreds of years. They turned today's Islam into something having to do with decapitations, the slashing of throats, abducting innocent civilians and exploding people.” (Okaz, September 5, 2004)
* Columnist Bater Wardam, wrote in the Jordanian daily Al-Dustour that “It is always easy to flee to illusions and to place responsibility for the crimes of Arabic and Muslim terrorist organizations on the Mossad, the Zionists, and on American intelligence, but we all know that this is not the case and that those who murder innocent civilians in Iraq after having kidnapped them, those who turned civilian airplanes into destructive bombs, those who exploded trains crowded with innocent civilians and those who fired on children in a school in Ossetia - they came from our midst. They are Arabs and Muslims who pray, fast, grow beards, demand the wearing of veils, and call for the defense of Islamic causes.” (Al-Dustour, September 5, 2004)
* Author and journalist Dr. Shaker Al-Nabulsi wrote in Rezqar that “If the Arabs had today a well-burnished mirror in which they can see themselves, and if they had the requisite courage to look in it, they would be stricken by fear and panic at the sight of themselves. The image [would be] that we have become the most terrorist nation and the greatest spillers of blood in the world.” (www.rezqar.com, August 14, 2002)
* More recently yet, Syrian scholar Mundir Badr Haloum wrote in the Lebanese daily Al-Safir: “Islam is in the names of all of the organizations that decapitate using knives, all the while saying the Fatiha [the first chapter of the Koran, said as a prayer] before the slaughter (...) Indeed, we as Muslims produce terrorism, succor it, and praise it. We condemn it only when forced to. Motivated by considerations of power, interests, and diplomacy, we wear a pained expression on our faces but in our hearts we rejoice at the brilliant success - a large number of casualties.”
* Journalist and former Kuwaiti communications minister Dr. Sa'ad bin Tefla said on Jordanian television: “Slaughter, destructive abuse, anarchy, and bloodshed in no way resemble Jihad according to Shari'a and resistance. These are anarchy and terrorism [and not Jihad ], and they are indications of frustration and of a culture of collective suicide reminiscent of whales (...) I maintain that we are all responsible for this culture, and that Zionism and imperialism have nothing to do with it (...) I maintain that there is, unfortunately, a culture of violence that existed before the Americans came to Iraq and the Gulf, even before the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and before the American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Sociologists of Islam in the West have long argued that if liberal reform is ever to sweep over Islam and its lands, it will originate in the West where Muslims interiorize liberal democratic values. But judging by the uproar caused by the use of the T-word in Canadian dailies at Reuters and among Arab and Muslim advocacy groups, the sociologists’ prophecy is taking on the form of a pipe dream. If such reform is ever going to happen in the Muslim world, like all self-improvement, these Arab writers show it is going to come from within.