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1 posted on 09/23/2004 7:44:13 PM PDT by sauerkraut
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To: sauerkraut
McDermott has it backwards. The few admirable qualities Islam exhibits are things Mohammed lifted from Christianity as it existed in his day, and still exists in the East.

He is right that Christians can find glimmers of truth in other religions, but this is only useful in seeing how Christ is the fulfillment of all that was good and true in all pre-Christian religions, not just Judaism. (C.S. Lewis called pagan ideas of dying-and-rising gods 'good dreams', the Buddha rightly rejected many pagan notions and rightly stressed dispassion, many of Lao Tsu's descriptions of the Tao fit Christ with a fidelity equal to Isaiah's suffering servant passages, and so forth.)

Islam, however, represents a decline from the Gosple, a denial of God's self-revelation and an insistence on His imprisonment in a humanly conceived transcence, a prison from which He can reveal only His will and not Himself. It represents, too, a decline from the 'high anthropology' of Genesis. "Allah has no image," is stronger than an injunction against idolatry: it denies "Come let Us make Man in Our image and likeness," and in so doing provides the basis for the perpetuation of slavery and the devaluation of human life to the point that young people with their lives full before them are devalued into guidance systems for bombs.

2 posted on 09/23/2004 9:09:20 PM PDT by The_Reader_David (And when they behead your own people in the wars which are to come, then you will know what this was)
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