Posted on 10/16/2001 8:12:34 AM PDT by SocialMeltdown
Mohammed himself consciously rejected the Gospel which many of his fellow-Arabs had embraced. He had a Christian wife, Mary, whom he abused for refusing to convert to his false doctrine (perhaps we should venerate her as a confessor). I have said it before on other threads, at its roots, Islam is antichrist in the sense the Holy Evangelist and Apostle John the Theologian used the word in his epistles.
He felt that a truly Aryan religion would fulfill the exact same cultural functions in Europe that Islam did in the Middle East, forming a theological rationale for total war and conquest, the liquidation of unassimilable populations and the propagation of the race (through numerous wives as breeding machines, etc.).
As others have pointed out, allah is and was the common noun in Arabic for god. Capitalized as Allah, it is a direct translation of our word God. What difference does it make that a term formerly used to refer to a pagan god is now applied to God? The terms used in the NT for God were titles or common nouns used to refer to the pagan gods. Does that mean that the NT somehow was not referring to the One True God?
Similarly, Mohammed makes very plain that when he uses the term Allah he means the One True God Creator of the Universe. I happen to not agree with his claim to inspiration by this God, but he certainly was not referring to any other.
This war started as an aggressive attempt on the part of Catholics to roll back Protestant gains and essentially wipe outsProtestantism. It escalated into possibly the worst war in history, despite serious competition, eventually reducing the population of Germany by 50-75%. Both sides massacred opponents. By the end of the war, the "Protestant" side was led by the Catholic French. It is just silly to talk about this crucial conflict as mainly about Protestants attacking Catholics. Essentially everybody attacked everybody else and massacred them. The most famous massacre of the war was by the Imperial Catholic army. They killed every living thing in the Protestant city of Magdeburg.
Or the massacres perpetrated by the Calvinist Cromwell in Catholic Ireland.
Cromwell was not a nice person. Much of the fury of his army was due to their belief that they were avenging massacres of Protestants by the Irish. These massacres were probably not as widespread as Cromwell's army believed, but they certainly happened, with apparently about 3,000 English settlers slaughtered. Cromwell's massacres have been greatly exaggerated by Irish sentimentalists. Much greater damage was done to the native Irish by the Penal Laws which were enforced for the next couple of centuries.
Or the slaughter of Polish Catholics by the Protestant Teutonic Knights.
I'm really curious about this one. What are you talking about? The Teutonic Knights were a Catholic religious order similar to the Knights of Malta. They conquered an extensive area on the Baltic. Eventually one of the their grandmasters converted to Protestantism and secularized the Order, which basically went out of existence. Their domain formed the center of what eventually became East Prussia.
But most of the killing of Poles was done while they were still Catholic. They pretty well exterminated the pagan Prussians and warred against the Poles, claiming they weren't really Catholic.
Or the church-burnings by the Protestant Know-Nothings in the US.
Or the Star Chamber and Tyburn in England. Or the burning of Servetus.
Catholics were persecuted to various degrees in England, there's no denying that. However, for most of this time they were adherents to a foreign power that really was aggressively attempting to overthrow the English monarchy. They were viewed by other Englishmen, rightly or wrongly, in much the same way that Commies were viewed in America during the 50s and for much the same reasons.
Servetus was not a Catholic. His views were considered by both Catholics and Protestants. He was actually under sentence to be burned by a Catholic court when the Genevans caught him. He was burned by Protestants because they caught him before the Catholics did. I cannot think of another case of Protestants burning someone for heresy. The Spanish Inquisition and other Catholic institutions did it for centuries.
Protestants have committed more than their fair share of atrocities and far more Catholics have died at Protestant hands than the other way around.
I'd be interested in seeing your statistics on this. With the primary exception of Ireland, most Catholic minorities were comparatively well-treated in Protestant countries after the first flush of enthusiasm had diminished. In most Catholic countries, there were centuries of persecution of Protestants.
Actually, I don't consider myself either Protestant or Catholic, although as a non-Catholic professed Christian I assume you would class me as Protestant. I wonder why you so angrily reject the possibility that "your people" may have done some evil in the past, believing that it was God's will. My understanding is that Pope John Paul II has no such difficulty.
Sorry about that.
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