Andrew21091 said:
You think so? Do you think that all the natives in South America accepted freely when the Spanish and Portuguese came to Christianize them? What about Africa? I don't think many had a choice there. Same with the Byzantine Empire and Kievan Rus. What was going on in the Islamic areas was the same thing that was happening in Christian countries, even Holy Russia and the Byzantine Empire. I don't like the argument against Islam that many on here espouse. Instead of offering constructive reasoning as to why Islam is wrong, people just say it is violent and include various insults. Seriously, people opposed to Christianity throw the same arguments that Christianity is a hateful and violent religion. I've read plenty of what the Church did in the Middle Ages and a lot of it isn't pretty. It usually involves massacres, crusades, inquisitions, and people being burned at the stake. When offering real arguments against Islam, don't use the same old BS about them being the "religion of the sword" or whatever. It goes nowhere.
The problem with this kind of thinking, morisco, is that you are comparing two very distinct phases of history and making some sort of equivalency out of two things that were not equal then, and certainly cannot be considered equal now. Being the descendent of some of those indigenous people, nobody has to tell me what the Spanish did in South America. It certainly is nothing to be proud of. But is also is not a fair picture of "the spread of Christianity" vs. "the spread of Islam".
In the first four centuries of Christianity, the spread of the faith was largely without the power of empire behind it, and yet it still penetrated deeply into North and East Africa, India, the Fertile Crescent, Europe, etc. Basically the entire world, as far as was known then. It was not until much later, following some internal controversies and subsequent developments in the imperial church that set East and West (and "East" and "Orient", as we understand those terms Christologically) on different trajectories that we would get things like the Crusades, the Inquisition, etc. For instance. Kevian Rus' was Christianized largely in the 9th and 10th centuries, that is to say, nearly a thousand years after the initial (peaceful) spread of Christianity.
Islam's historical trajectory looks very different than this because its impetus was different. "I have been ordered to fight all people until they declare that their is no god but Allah", said the wretched blasphemer and profiteer. Its expansion was therefore dependent on an external enemy to mobilize the faithful for the temporal victory of Allah's religion, first over the pagans in Muhammad's midst, then over the others in his surroundings (Jews and Christians), then (after much of the peninsula proper had been brought under Muhammad's control during his lifetime) over adjacent regions to the East (the Fertile Crescent) and the West (much of Europe). Along the way, however, the social and economic engines that kept the Islamic war machine going began to be transformed by the large numbers of converts, thereby denying a large source of revenue (tribute from non-Muslims) and slowing down the pace of conquest, as later converted people like the Indonesians and Malaysians largely saw it as good business sense (they were right, too).
Islam basically moderated during those times when it didn't
have to convert people by force, but make no mistake: that has always been an option, and one that is entirely consistent with Muhammad's personal examples and sayings, and certainly with the actions of the earliest Islamic rulers.
So ask yourself: Which of the apostles who brought Christianity to the world resorted to such atrocities? St. Mark was martyred in Egypt, but Egypt had blossomed as a majority-Christian society before the coming of the Islamic horde. St. Thomas was likewise martyred in India, but not before planting a community that is several million strong to this day, despite always being a minority religion in that land (something that Islam could learn, but never will: You don't have rule over the land you are in to prove the strength of your faith). Similar histories could be told of a great many other saints, apostles, and missionaries. Nothing similar can be said of any Muslim ever, anywhere, and I doubt it ever will be so, because Islam simply does not operate in that fashion. It preaches a different gospel, and we all know what that means...
Akimori: What's more, why, if they maintain that our scriptures are corrupted, do they also claim that Muhammad is prophesied in them? (like claiming he is mentioned by name in the Song of Songs)
Unrelated to any of the above: When I lived in Oregon, in a town that had a lot of Saudis and other Muslims, I saw and heard of a lot of what Isa has written about Muslims in the west going a little "freedom crazy", if you will. I got to be sort of friends with a local cab driver and he regaled me with stories (that I didn't ask for) about how strange it was that he would always be called to the nightclubs on the weekend to pick up drunken Saudis who were rude and still possessed a "holier than thou" attitude despite being pitiful losers acting not only outside the bounds of their own religion, but in ways that would make American fratpersons blush. I don't know about any of that, but I did ask my Saudi friend Meedo about it once and he became very defensive: "America is a free country! So we do what we want." It is as though Allah would look the other way while they are in the land of the kuffar. Then again, I guess Islam's Allah has always been very Mecca-centric (except, y'know, before that, when Muhammad had ordered his people to pray to Jerusalem)...and there are certainly much more exciting places to check up on than Eugene, Oregon.
Contrast that with life today among the Copts. Now, I don't know all of them in the world, but I do know all of them (I think) here in Albuquerque, NM. They're not perfect (after all, they let me come to their liturgies and such), but they are very friendly, family-oriented, not prone to excesses in anything but perhaps fasting.
Not one of them has ever said to me "I can do whatever I want because I'm in America now, not Egypt." So, if we're going to judge a religion by the piety of its members (which is a terrible idea, but seems to be a part of the OP's "pro-Islam" argument), Orthodox Christianity wins all the way.
So OP -- don't convert to Islam. Convert to Orthodoxy. You can pray and fast more than Muslims, speak Arabic (if this is part of the attraction; I know some people who converted to Islam who thought this made it more beautiful), AND (this is the best part) you get the real, actual God, not Muhammad's self-serving recension of God based on his perversion of previous scriptures mixed with various heresies that were floating around Arabia at his time.
