Posted by
VeeJay on Thursday, October 19, 2006 6:48:24 AM
IS YOU IS OR IS YOU AIN’T MY ISLAM?
By Father O’Bother
Recently, the Bangor Daily News published a column by Max Boot entitled ‘Islamism, Not Islam, Real Foe’. The article was insightful in many ways but contained within it a glaring historical error. "Religions, " Boot wrote, "have no fixed eternal identity. Until the 18th century, Christianity was a militant faith whose adherents did not hesitate to kill
‘heathens’"
Setting aside the theological ramifications of the ‘no fixed eternal identity’ comment I am still stung with the all too common accusation that Christianity has just as much blood on its hands as does Islam. While it is true that some terrible atrocities have been committed in the name of Christianity over the centuries, it is not true that these heinous campaigns were ever representative of genuine Christian faith. Part of the misunderstanding on this springs from a common failure to distinguish between actual Christianity and the state
‘Christianity’ of the old so-called Holy Roman Empire. The Crusades were a blatant contradiction of Christian theology and the victims of the Spanish Inquisition were usually Christians themselves, bothersome devotees whose true faith hindered the agenda of the state ‘church’. Often times the greatest persecutions against Christians have come by way of those whose claims to Christianity were as clearly false as they were emphatic. This is not true with Islam.
One need only examine current events to see the difference between Christians and Muslims in history. This last year, Dan Brown, author of the best-selling book‘The DaVinci Code’, trashed the whole premise of the Christian faith on a massive scale, making the fictional claim that Jesus had married Mary Magdalene and the two had gone off happily to France where they created the royal line of the kings of France. Christians were offended but as far as I could hear there were no public protests and there were certainly no contracts put out on Dan Brown’s life. In Islam, on the other hand, one is dealing with an entirely different world. Let’s move ahead to this summer, when the pope quoted a scholar from the middle ages who happened to mention the violent nature of the religion of Islam. What was the reaction? It was essentially this: "If you call our religion a religion of violence again, your streets will swim in the blood of you and your followers and their children and their children’s children. We’ll teach you with the violence of our religion that we are not a a violent religion!
The difference between the multi-generational militancy of Islam and the old militancy of Christianity is actually very simple: When Christians, or so-called Christians, have shed blood in the name of Jesus (and there is no denying that they have!), they have done so in defiance of the faith to which they claimed to adhere. When Muslims have shed blood in the name of Allah, however, they have all too often done so as a direct result of their faith.