I'm hearing a lot of rhetoric about those "evil Muslims" and all the awful things in their Koran about killing Infidels.
Guess what. Christians better get that log out of their eye. The Old Testament contains numerous examples:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
You should not let a sorceress live. (Exodus 22:17 NAB)
If a man lies with a male as with a women, both of them shall be put to death for their abominable deed; they have forfeited their lives." (Leviticus 20:13 NAB)
A man or a woman who acts as a medium or fortuneteller shall be put to death by stoning; they have no one but themselves to blame for their death. (Leviticus 20:27 NAB)
If a man commits adultery with another man's wife, both the man and the woman must be put to death. (Leviticus 20:10 NLT)
A priest's daughter who loses her honor by committing fornication and thereby dishonors her father also, shall be burned to death. (Leviticus 21:9 NAB)
Whoever sacrifices to any god, except the Lord alone, shall be doomed. (Exodus 22:19 NAB)
They entered into a covenant to seek the Lord, the God of their fathers, with all their heart and soul; and everyone who would not seek the Lord, the God of Israel, was to be put to death, whether small or great, whether man or woman. (2 Chronicles 15:12-13 NAB)
Suppose you hear in one of the towns the LORD your God is giving you that some worthless rabble among you have led their fellow citizens astray by encouraging them to worship foreign gods. In such cases, you must examine the facts carefully. If you find it is true and can prove that such a detestable act has occurred among you, you must attack that town and completely destroy all its inhabitants, as well as all the livestock. (Deuteronomy 13:13-19 NLT)
If your own full brother, or your son or daughter, or your beloved wife, or you intimate friend, entices you secretly to serve other gods, whom you and your fathers have not known, gods of any other nations, near at hand or far away, from one end of the earth to the other: do not yield to him or listen to him, nor look with pity upon him, to spare or shield him, but kill him. (Deuteronomy 13:7-12 NAB)
Make ready to slaughter his sons for the guilt of their fathers; Lest they rise and posses the earth, and fill the breadth of the world with tyrants. (Isaiah 14:21 NAB)
. . . and finally, this verse gives reason for the crusades.
Cursed be he who does the Lords work remissly, cursed he who holds back his sword from blood. (Jeremiah 48:10 NAB)
--------------------------------------------------------------
Now, I've had several Christians tell me that they're now covered by the "New Covenant", but I would submit to them that, if they're going to jump all over Muslims about the Qu'ran, they need to look to their own holy book. All of it.
There are certainly Muslims who ARE out to kill us. Just not all of them.
Yeaahh... Have you read the Qu'ran? Pardon, a translation of the Qu'ran? (Because if it is not in the original Arabic it is not the true Qu'ran.) To be clear, I _AM NOT_ jumping on "evil Muslims." But I have taken a class on Islam, taught by someone who was either Muslim or very well acquainted with the religion, and came away thinking with an overall positive opinion of it, which I still hold. But I later took a comparative religious literature class, without, I grant, a lot of guidance on the passages we were asked to read, and oh, my, those passages would put a Southern Baptist fire-and-brimstone preacher to shame. At the time I couldn't keep reading because the repetitiveness of "death to pagans/infidels" got to me, even though I was sure that there was something more interesting further in. Way, way more inflammatory than the passages you quoted.
ReplyDeleteIslam does start from a more fundamentalist starting point. The Qu'ran explicitly says these are the words of God, given to Mohammad through Gabriel (or whichever angel, I think its Gabriel). The Bible, old and new testament, does not ever explicitly say this, no matter how much fundamental Christians want to believe it to be true.
Now I still know that many Muslims are peaceful, do not subscribe to terrorism, and I've heard more about terrorism as a political tool used to divert the attention of the poor and angry masses in the Muslim home countries than I care to go into. But I think that anybody who picks up a cheap Penguin Books translation of the Qu'ran and has no other guidance will, absolutely, be shocked by what they read, and it's no wonder that they come out with such an opinion as "OMG these people are evil!" And your argument above isn't going to sway them.
The Bible has exactly the same exhortation. The point remains, for a Christian to criticize another religion based solely on that religion's Holy Book is hypocritical.
ReplyDeleteYes, islam is still more fundamentalist, just as Christianity was back in the time of the crusades. We got over it (mostly). Hopefully they will, and faster than we did.
Another hypocrisy is for someone to condemn Islam based on the Quran, defend Christianity from the Bible's equivalent verses by saying "but now we have the New Testament," and _then_ turn around and support Israel. If those O.T. verses are so bad you have to disown them, how can you defend those who don't have the "New Covenant" to fall back on?
ReplyDelete