www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall What do you think of Islam?

Beautifully said--especially the last line! WOW!

Someone from the Melkite/Antiochian/Maronite/Syriac churches should be able to give a clearer assessment on this. They've been in contact with a Muslim environment longer than most of us have(I'm no legit Melkite yet, but I live in a country where its the official religion) and I suppose we should hear their opinions out.

Wait, am I too late? Or should I say something?

I tend to agree with the second view, with reservations about the first sentence, but really disagree with only the last phrase in the first. 'Islamo-fascism' is a media/political invention/scare tactic and the solution to terrorism is to mind one's own business, not station troops in Muslim countries (the reason given for 9/11 - 'they hate freedom' is rubbish; nobody flew planes into buildings in Stockholm) and stop propping up Israel. (I'm libertarian and 'isolationist' without apology - but the real isolationism is to start wars of conquest over the objections of most other countries.)

Islam is to Christianity like Mormonism centuries later, related to it but a later invention that is no longer Christian. As Brendan Ross explained years ago there is at least some crossover with/theft from Eastern Christianity: the mosque is an Eastern Christian church with its altar and icons removed for example and in some cases the Eastern Christians had the practice first (prostrations?).

With Rome I agree that a born Muslim or anybody acting in good conscience can be saved, like in the Narnia books when the general serving Tash was really serving Aslan all along and didn't know it.

Lance,

I am afraid that Isalm is closer to your first proposed stance. Islam is a threat to the Westen society and Christendom today because it is a civilization, a politics and an educational system, and not merely a �religion.�

Hilaire Belloc predicted the future rise of Islam in his book The Great Christian Heresies. In fact Belloc, writing in the first half of the 20th century summed up the West's thinking on Islam as follows:


"Millions of modern people of the white civilization-that is, the civilization of Europe and America- have forgotten all about Islam. They never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past."


In his book Belloc classifies Islam as a Christian heresy.

Belloc states "It began as a heresy, not as a new religion....It was a perversion of the Christian religion...an adaptation and a misuse of the Christian thing."


Unlike all the other heresiarchs "[T]he chief heresiarch, Mohammed himself, was not, like most heresiarchs, a man of Catholic birth, and doctrine to begin with. He sprang from pagans. But that which he taught was in the main Catholic doctrine, oversimplified. It was the great Catholic world - on the frontiers of which he lived, whose influence was all around him and whose territories he had known by travel-which inspired his convictions."


"Thus the very foundation of his teaching was that prime Catholic doctrine, the unity and omnipotence of God."


"But the central point where his new heresy struck home with a mortal blow against Catholic tradition was a full denial of the Incarnation."


"He taught that our Lord was the greatest of all the prophets, but still only a prophet; a man like other men. He eliminated the Trinity altogether."


"In other words, he, like so many lesser heresiarchs, founded his heresy on simplification...Simplicity was the note of the whole affair; and since all heresies draw their strength from some true doctrine, Mohammedanism drew its strength from the true Catholic doctrines which it retained: the equality of all men before God--"All true believers are brothers."


"The Mohammedan movement was essentailly a "Reformation," and we can discover numerous affinities between Islam and Protestant Reformers- on Images, on the Mass, on Celebacy, etc."

-- Taken from The Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East, by William Dalrymple

"Today the West often views Islam as a civilisation very different from and indeed innately hostile to Christianity. Only when you travel in Christianity's Eastern homelands do you realise how closely the two are really connected, the former growing directly out of the latter and still, to this day, embodying many aspects and practices of the early Christian world now lost in Christianity's modern Western-based incarnation. When the early Byzantines were first confronted by the Prophet's armies, they assumed that Islam was merely an heretical form of Christianity, and in many ways they were not so far wrong: Islam accepts much of the Old and New Testaments and venerates both Jesus and the ancient Jewish prophets.

Significantly, the greatest and most subtle theologian of the early church, St. John Damascene, was convinced that Islam was at root not a separate religion, but instead a form of Christianity. St. John had grown up in the Ummayad Arab court of Damascus, where his father was chancellor, and he was an intimate boyhood friend of the future Caliph al-Yazid; the two boys' drinking bouts in the streets of Damascus were the subject of much horrified gossip in the streets of the new Islamic capital. Later, in his old age, John took the habit at the desert monastery of Mar Saba where he began work on his great masterpiece, a refutation of heresies entitled the Fount of Knowledge. The book contains an extremely precise and detailed critique of Islam, the first ever written by a Christian, which, intriguingly, John regarded as a form of Christian heresy related to Arianism: after all Arianism, like Islam, denied the divinity of Christ. Although he lived at the very hub of the early Islamic world, it never seems to have occurred to him that Islam might be a separate religion. If a theologian of the stature of John Damascene was able to regard Islam as a new- if heretical- form of Christianity, it helps to explain how Islam was able to convert so much of the Middle Eastern population in so short a time, even though Christianity remained the majority religion until the time of the Crusades.

The longer you spend in the Christian communities of the Middle East, the more you become aware of the extent to which Eastern Christian practice formed the template for what were to become the basic conventions of Islam. The Muslim form of prayer with its bowings and prostrations appears to derive from the older Syrian Orthodox tradition that is still practised in pewless churches across the Levant. The architecture of the earliest minarets, which are square rather than round, unmistakably derive from the church towers of Byzantine Syria. The Sufi Muslim tradition carried on directly from the point that the Christian Desert Fathers left off while Ramadan, at first sight one of the most foreign and alienating of Islamic practices, is in fact nothing more than an Islamicisation of Lent, which in the Eastern Christian churches still involves a gruelling all-day fast."

My thought has not change! It is the work of the devil.
Stephanos I

Stephanos, withthat attitude of yours, how will you cponverse with Muslism to convert them?

I woudl rather say that Muhammad was misguided, which in itself may offend Muslims, but they say that the Churhc Fathers where misguided or diliberate frauds.

If, however, I show respect to the Muslim, they will reciprocate.

I do not think that Islam is any mor hte work fo the Devil than Montanism, which also emerged with a Prophet, or Mancheinism, another Prophetically elergent sect. Mormonism also arose form this same end.

But Mormons arne't evil, and Im sure Menancheians and Montanisst wherne't either.

They where simply misguided.

The Muslim is simply within a system that is at odds with truth and needs gentle correction. But they see us as the way I just desciebed, as in error, and in need of correction.

So it is best to simply present he cause of CHrist, and be witness to him, especially in how we live the faith.

Dear Zarove,

Stephanos is a priest of the Roman Catholic Church. Please be more respectful when addressing him.

He is refreshingly honest and forthright with his feelings, and has challenged me to think about my true feelings on more than one occasion.

If he (and anyone else for that matter) cannot be honest here, among fellow Christians, where on earth else could he be?

Alice, Moderator

I didnt ask him not tp be hoenst, and did show him respect. I di dnot know he was a Priest, but my point remains.

We cannot simply lable Islam "The work of the Devil" and leave it at that. Our mission as Christians is to save the lost and to live accordign to Chrits dictates. Jesus woudl have simply corrected their errors, and this si what I'd seek to do.

Islam shoudl be treated as any other Heresy, and in that way corrected, rather than sen as Demonic.

Dear friends,

without saying for sure that all heretics are damned, I think it is safe to say that all heresies have been inspired by Satan, that is, Satan is the author not only of deception and confusion, but of division.

So even if adherents of a particular sect might be "good" people, or might in fact, in individual situations, find a ray of grace unto salvation, I think it is safe to say that deviations from orthodoxy have diabolical influences. Satan opposes truth.

Islam has a demonic origin, in the sense that it is based on a false revelation. That does not mean that we have to tell Muslims to their face they are demon influenced. We can respect them, love them, and share Christ with them. I know good Muslim people, some of whom put some Christians to shame. Individual Muslims might be good people, with good basic values, but they are still in need of the saving work of Christ.

Our faith clearly states that the Lord Jesus Christ is God and the final revelation of God, and Islam comes along and says no, he isn't, that Muhammed is the final prophet. These doctrines cannot both be true. We then must conclude that the Enemy has perpetrated a falsehood.


Blessings,


Lance

Thank you Alice! I for one can be honest as to what I think about something. That does not carry over how I treat someone.
I always treat people with respect.
I have very many friends among protestants, who hold me very dear and near to them, but they still know my opinons about protestantism, as I have to listen to theirs about Catholicism.
Stephanos I
Anything which is contrary to the truth is in effect somehow the work of the devil. He is the author of lies and divisive spirits, is he not?

On the note above, it is not that they claim Muhammad was the last prophet that conradicts Christianity to be insurmountable to any unity with it, but their cliam regardign Jesus Christ.

Many Christian groups beleive that all Mirales ended at the close of the Apostolic age, and other still deny Prophets while allowing the occassional healing.

Within the Orthodox and Catholic Chruches though, Prophets have come since the time of Christ Jesus, althugh their revelatiosn are not required to be eblive damong the faithful.

Nevertheless, Muhammads claim to be the last Prophet, while still bothesome to Chrustendom, is not the greatest contention Islam and Christianity share with each other. Rather, it is their claim that Jesus himself was a Prophet, and not the son of God. They dny th eIncarnaiton, and Jesus as the living word, as well as the Atonement.

This is the vital differenc ein terms of Christ Jesus, not the Prophethood of Muhammad.

I am well aware of what muslims believe.
And I am well aware what Protestants and Orthodox believe.
Stephanos I
And I am well aware of what such groups like Mormons, JW's and Adventists believe.

The January edition of the "One" Magazine from the Catholic Near East Association had a very interesting article about Islam entitled, "A Common Word Between Us and You."

The preface states: "On 13 October 2007, a year after 38 Muslim scholars sent an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI, 138 Muslim religious leaders addressed an open letter and call to the pope and other leaders of the Christian churches concerning the common ground between Christianity and Islam. This landmark document, with its Quranic exegesis, boldly identifies love of the one God and love of neighbor as common and core values for Judaism, Christianity and Islam."

http://www.cnewa.org/mag-article-bodypg-us.aspx?articleID=3308

Ray

I would of told him that I have no guilt over what a bunch of Anglo-Saxons did to blacks, my ancestors at the time were themselves slaves to the Tsar. I also would of told him it was Arab invaders (and arabs are white for those of you who didnt know) who spread Islam to Africa.


"most good"? I find the way they treat their females to be disgusting. As far as theology is concerned they are wrong and follow a false prophet, but perhaps an alliance of convinence with the moderates would be acceptable under certain circumstancs. Such as fighting off government sponsored secular atheism in Western society.