According to ANSAmed:
Coptic Bishop in Rome: No to Muslim Presence on Sunday
(ANSAmed) - ROME, JANUARY 3 — “I shall never accept that representatives” of Rome’s Muslim community should join us for Sunday’s demonstration called to commemorate the victims of the massacre in Alexandria. The Bishop of the Coptic Church in Rome, Msg. Barnaba el Soryany has told ANSAmed.
The Bishop was nonetheless heartened by the many other religious communities and institutions joining in the demonstration. In reference to his wish to exclude both Muslim religious and political representatives, Msg. Soryany added he was “unafraid to say so”.
According to the head of the Coptic Church in Rome, the notion that the Alexandria attackers came from outside the country is being “exploited” by investigators in Egypt.
Msg. Soryany’s voice is a breath of fresh air blowing through the politically correct multicultural miasma that has settled over most of the Christian Church for the last fifty years or so.
May he set the example for other priests and other denominations, so that others may have the backbone to say: “No! Islam is not like other religions!”
Hat tip: Insubria.
27 comments:
“No! Islam is not like other religions!"
That is because its not a religion, it is a totalitarian, cult that preaches against all religions. To call it a religion is to dignify it as such. To have muslims at this ceremony would be an insult to all those who have been murdered by them and would give succour to the Liberals and Marxists who would then point out the touching concern of muslims to all and sundry. Muslims are the biggest hypocrites and liars on the face of this planet. If I was a relative of one of those that died and some bloody mussie turned up I would spit in his face then send the sick pervert to hospital.
To opt for a wise course of self-preservation is not sin.
It's about time Christians around the world subscribed to that adage.
First of all, the Bishop is right. People can, and do, openly insult Christianity and other religions with impunity. Kathy Griffin, Richard Dawkins, etc, are not living in hiding despite their frequent attacks on Christianity.
But the problem is that Christianity is also "not like other religions". Christianity and islam both came to their current positions of world dominance the same way.
This is important because the argument about Islam's differentness is not just based on recent terrorist activities, but rather on the entire history of Islam. But when you look at that history objectively, you find that both Christianity and Islam have gained their positions of world prominence the same way: through violence.
In the case of Christianity, first the Roman Empire was forcibly converted, then the non-Romanized portions of Europe were forcibly converted, then the European "Great Powers" spread Christianity beyond their borders via slavery, conquest and colonialism.
Christianity has been somewhat better behaved lately (during the last 200 years or so, which is merely 10% of its entire history). But both Catholic and Protestant Christianity have only been dragged into the modern, secular world kicking and screaming.
Quote:
Christianity has been somewhat better behaved lately (during the last 200 years or so, which is merely 10% of its entire history). But both Catholic and Protestant Christianity have only been dragged into the modern, secular world kicking and screaming.
end quote.
False equivalency.
Christianity has been part of the making of the modern world.
Christian thinking was key in the unmaking of American slavery.
It was also important in the concept of equality under the law in the U.S. It forced people to ask the question: if people are equal in spirit, then why are they not equal under law and in society.
Christians decided that humanism would not undermine their faith.
Muslims have made no such decision at all.
In fact, their faith has enough anti-humanistic elements and conceives itself as being so perfect that no change is possible.
Christians have, for the most part, renounced violence as part of the doctrine.
Muslims have yet to even waver in that direction. They are, and will be violent and hateful of humanity for the foreseeable future.
You really know very little about the secular roots of Western thought. You didn't even care to factor in the multi-discourse nature of Western Civilization when you wrote about Christianity.
Are Muslims as individuals really more politically violent than other people living in troubled regions of the world? The conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland was nasty on both sides. I fail to see how Muslims are different in this regard.
What does seem to me to be very different is the position of women. In the mid-1980s as a much younger woman, I spent six months backpacking in Europe. Twice, in Paris, I was grabbed and dragged down the street by Muslim men, apparently in an attempt to coerce me into sex. What was frightening is that the men seemed to have no sense that they were doing anything wrong. I shudder to think what would happen if Muslims were to become a significant cultural presence in the U.S. Many (not all) won't sit with women in Islamic Centers but have no problem trying to rape them.
Jessica
Apuleius, you have made a good point about the spread of Christianity during certain points in history, but you over simplify, and there is not really an equivalence between Islam and Christianity in a larger context.
When Christianity has used force and violence to spread its beliefs, it was in fact going against the plain meaning of its scriptures. When Islam has used force and violence, it is consistent with their scriptures.
I am an Orthodox Christian (Greek) and I freely concede that pagan populations were often coerced, whether violently or silently, into accepting Christianity. The film Agora dramatises this, and its depiction of Pope Cyril is not far from the truth. Even within Orthodoxy, though he is officially declared to be a saint, there are many who believe he was not. But then, Orthodoxy has more freedom to question with impunity than do most other forms of Christianity.
What we see in history is religions being violent, but never do we see followers of Jesus, the real saints (not necessarily the canonised ones) being violent. How could they be? If they follow Christ, they imitate Him.
On the other hand, when Muslims are nominally religious, they are generally docile and indifferent. It is when they become followers of Muhammad the way Christians become followers of Jesus, that they become violent, imitating their prophet.
Religion (of all kinds) is a sickness.
Christ is the cure.
"What was frightening is that the men seemed to have no sense that they were doing anything wrong."
Exactly, Jessica. And therein lies the difference between Christianity and Islam.
They did not feel they were doing anything wrong because that's what their culture -- Islam -- taught them. Christianity teaches the opposite, and certainly does not mandate war, violence, subjugation and death.
Islam does. Fundamental difference.
It's not wrong to rape the women of the non-muslim enemy because Mohammed did just that. In fact, it's a religious duty, even if it's not explicit in Islam's scriptures. What is, indeed, explicit, is that a good Muslim is supposed to imitate as closely as possible the acts of Mohammed.
Your Paris friends just followed their prophet's footsteps. They connected the dots.
Finding instances of war, violence and bad deeds within Christianity is irrelevant. Of course Christians would wage wars, kill people and rape women. Everybody does.
The question is : does Christianity induce war and rape ? Does Islam induce war and rape ? The undeniable answer is a) no, b) yes.
islam is evil - in my belief it is satan's religion - being started in the years 660 is telling. Christianity is the one faith and all Christians should be actively stating that fact to all muslims. If they want to be saved and go to heaven then they had better change their wicked ways. But of course, we are in an era where good is bad and black is white. The bible warns us of such times. God help us because worse is yet to come.
Quote:
Are Muslims as individuals really more politically violent than other people living in troubled regions of the world?
end quote.
That question is irrelevant here.
We are talking not about individual interpretations of Islam, but the scripture and principles, the doctrine of Islam right on its face.
If you have read the Koran, the Reliance of the Traveller, the Sirah and the hadiths, these documents make clear what Islam is, what it expects, and what it aspires to.
It is not Western.
It is anti-democratic, anti-humanistic, favors war and even the genocide of other cultures.
Any one with an eye to see or a brain to process will understand that all religions other than Islam are being driven out of Muslim lands. It really is that simple and, we see it writ large in Egypt and Iraq. What most don't realize is that it is also happening in Europe.
It is not just out of Moslem lands, it is out of any place where Moslems are a significant percentage of the population. Here in the US there are between 1 million and 10 million Moslems, this is less then 1 percent of the population but they are insisting that we change our entire culture to suit them. In most European nations Moslems are about 15% of the population and people are afraid they will take over the countries.
It is usually muslim propaganda when people claim that Christianity was very violent and killed people for not converting. I can only think of a few historical cases of Christian armies invading non-Christian areas primarily to convert people to Christianity. This was what happened in the northern states of Germany. Most of these were unsuccessful and people converted peacefully over centuries.
Many muslims and their leftist defenders will point to the Crusades or the colonisation of the Americas as cases of Christians forcibly converting the population. However this is false the Crusades were a response to muslim invasion of Byzantium and denial of access to Christian holy sites. When the Crusader kingdoms were established they had a mixed population of Christians, muslims and Jews.
As for the Americas, the Conquistadors went there mainly for land and gold. Missionaries just tagged along. Again there are very few cases of Christian armies killing a population for not converting. Most of the natives were inadvertently killed by Old World disease.
The same cannot be said of the Arab invasion of Persia, the Ottomans forcing conversion of sons of Christian families to fight in muslim armies or Saladdin's capture of Jerusalem. Many monks and Christian knights were killed for not converting to Islam.
The Catholic/Protestant wars are equally National in nature..
It's Irish and British warring, they just happen to have different rites of Christ..
In both cases, where they are clearly being unChristian, their beefs are purely National...
Agree?
"As for the Americas, the Conquistadors went there mainly for land and gold. Missionaries just tagged along. Again there are very few cases of Christian armies killing a population for not converting. Most of the natives were inadvertently killed by Old World disease."
Whenever Christians have long term contact with muslims, their culture becomes warped and allows for wicked deeds... Like a hangover of sorts...
I point to the Normans as another example of a people who fought muslims and used that knowledge of subjugation to invade and hold Briton...
... the Conquistadors were fresh off of the glorious conquest of the most awful people...
Bad behavior rubs off and is absorbed by the Christian culture..
Oh yeah.. I'm also convinced Charles Martel's feudalism was inspired by islam...
Considering the successful armies islam raised, I'm sure it was a choice of fighting fire with fire...
=====
At the heart of feudalism is a basic idea common to any society with a warrior caste. Such men need to be provided for. In a simple economy this means that the produce of an appropriate number of peasants or serfs must underwrite the expenses of the fighting man.
http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=ac35#ixzz1A6rT3WpJ
=======
Is that not the way islam works at it's core?..
I submit that the koran has been in 'ruling class' possession since Martel's time...
Always at hand to provide advice on how to stay powerful...
"Are Muslims as individuals really more politically violent than other people living in troubled regions of the world?"
Jessica: YES. Muslims as individuals ARE categorically more politically violent than other people living in troubled regions of the world.
What troubled regions of the world do you refer to that lack a Muslim jihad presence?
If the Western press were honest and open, it would be obvious that it is jihad-waging Muslims who initiate war and torment in the most - if not all - of the troubled regions of the world.
First, Muslims often violently harass each other - especially women - via Muslim Morals Police in homogeneous Muslim societies (like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran) that follow Sharia Law.
Second, Muslim sects routinely murder each other (e.g., Iraq versus Iran war, Sunni versus Shite conflicts) after declaring each other to be non-believers worthy of death under Sharia Law.
Third, wherever Muslims border non-Muslim lands, Muslims cause unending violent turmoil in the service of proactive jihad holy war waged against non-Muslims as demanded by Islam ruled by Sharia Law.
Fourth, Muslims are very involved in the ever-increasingly violent international drug trade in order to finance violent jihad. In fact, Muslims have a growing presence in South America.
Fifth, Muslim jihadis and their Muslim enablers are responsible for the majority of terrorist acts in the world today.
@jessica,
Answer is: yes.
Take half of the Muslim population, the males, and among them especially the young.
They are far more prone to violence and anti-social behaviour than "infidels" of comparable age and social class, before politics even start to exacerbate things. This is the case even in relatively less troubled regions (still), like our societies, because of:
- Hatred of/anxiety for women >> sexual deviant and violent behaviour
- Enduring external locus of control >> extremely lacking in sense of personal responsibility
- Engrained sense of victimhood >> opposition to civil society
- Raised in culture requiring external force for social behaviour >> soft social worker's approach seen as weakness inviting exploitation
- Social pressure to use violence to show competence and strength >> anti-social behaviour
- Engrained sense of superiority and entitlement >> unprepared for reality of free society.
In troubled areas (everywhere Islam is dominant):
- consanguinity (up and above 50%) >> myriad of mental and physical deficiencies.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
The Orthodox Church fathers have taught almost from the onset of Islam that it is the anti-christ religion. The teaching of more recent fathers was that the enemy of the Last Days would be the Muslims, and it's turned out they were right.
If Jessica were to discuss her experience on almost any feminist website, the overwhelming majority of commenters would call her a racist, and the more polite, intellectual women would ask her for statistics to prove it was more than an isolated incident. They'd cite studies to "prove" her wrong. If she defended her position well and started getting a little support from other commenters, the whole thread might be deleted. This is my ordinary experience of chatting online with my fellow feminists. Maybe they'll wake up, once enough of them have had similar experiences of third world men.
Islam is a religion like a dog is a paw.
Think about it ;-)
doxRaven: Islam is a religion like a dog is a paw.
What an outstanding analogy!
"Religion" is just one pillar that Islam props itself up with. Shari'a, jihad and hijra (demographic invasion), being the others.
As can be seen in most canines, they get along pretty well with only three paws. Small wonder that religion − in its most authentic and spritually uplifting role − plays such a minor role in Islam.
What a surprise: the same person, "Apuleius Platonicus", whose precious sensibilities were offended recently by Baron Bodissey's comparison of American Indian savages with Muslims turns out to be an Equivalencist about Islam and Christianity:
...when you look at that history objectively, you find that both Christianity and Islam have gained their positions of world prominence the same way: through violence.
That's like saying:
when you look objectively, you find that both Hitler, and the guy who threatened his opponent at a pool game with a pool cue to coerce him into conceding the pool championship, have gained their positions of victory the same way: through violence.
I.e., as other commenters above have noted, "Apuleius Platonicus" is oversimplifying and ignoring key features of the historical record in order to make his equivalence.
The sober and reasonable assessment of comparison between these two vast civilizations (or rather, one civilization and another anti-civilization) would conclude that while Christendom was far from perfect, and many times many members of it indulged in violence even for religious reasons, Islam was not merely "slightly" worse -- it has been astronomically worse, both on a quantitative level (to pluck one example out of a fez, the fact that Islamic slavery was far more extensive, far longer-lasting, more explicitly enshrined in its founding holy texts, and far more brutal than what the West practiced, in addition to the searingly salient factor that it was the West mainly through its Christians who labored, successfully, to put an end to slavery and criminalize it), and on a qualitative level which would integrate such factors as the grotesqueness of its followers' fanaticism, the ghoulishness of its followers' violence, and the shock of its followers' ethical depravity.
Overall, the comment by "Apuleius Platonicus" is complicatedly replete with half-truths, factoids, oversimplifications and untruths, and as is usual with the writings of Leftists, is difficult to disentangle for a counter-argument only by virtue of this mushy mesh of complication, not by virtue of its cogency. Rather than expend the time and effort to unravel its incoherent bundle, I shall only tease out one of its frayed threads:
In the case of Christianity, first the Roman Empire was forcibly converted...
In fact, for the first 300 years of the astounding growth of Christianity throughout the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern ecumene, Christians were being persecuted by the extant Roman Empire, and Christians were not forming paramilitary guerilla groups to attack men, women and children -- as Muslims would do: instead, they behaved relatively peacefully (even if they annoyed the pagan Romans by persisting in trying to preach, dialogue and convert), and died as martyrs -- you know, the Christian type of martyrdom, where you bravely allow your persecutor to kill you rather than force you to betray your faith; not the Muslim kind of martyrdom, where in a fanatical lunacy you mass-murder innocent men, women and children in the hopes of being killed yourself in the process so that you may attain a Paradise of eternal sex with little girls (and possibly also little boys).
The dramatic shift of the Roman Empire from pagan to Christian occurred from the top down: when Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in approximately 325 A.D. Obviously, this could not have happened had not Christians already became influential in high places, as well as throughout the vast network of cities that spanned the Empire from the Atlantic, across both shores of the Mediterranean (Europe and Africa) and as far east as Arabia and Persia -- all by largely peaceful means.
[continued next post]
[continued from last comment]
The simplistic asseveration of "Apuleius Platonicus" would lead the reader to believe that a Christian Army, prior to Constantine, attacked and "forcibly converted" the Empire! Certainly, after Constantine converted, he marshalled the Imperial resources and armies to use in favor of Christianity; and that is where "Apuleius Platonicus", were he judicious and fair, would locate his moderated comparison -- rather than with his sloppily broad brush stroke across vast swaths of history like an ignorant house painter might with his Blood-Red #17 ruin a Da Vinci fresco.
P.S.: "Apuleius Platonicus" also makes the absurdly ahistorical and irrational claim that:
both Catholic and Protestant Christianity have only been dragged into the modern, secular world kicking and screaming.
All one has to ask to illuminate the absurdity of this statement is: "Who did the dragging of Catholics and Protestants?"
Where did all these Enlightened Moderns come from to be able to "drag" all the Christians of Christendom "kicking and screaming" into Modernity? Did these Enlightened Moderns pop out of the blue sky? Sprout magically from the ground? Invade from the Antipodes? Or did they evolve out of the same human and sociocultural material that was... Christendom!? Obviously, it was the latter; and if so, it ironically reflects well (at least in part) on Western Christians for having the capacity to so evolve.
Unfortunately, this sociocultural evolution of Christendom into the Modern West has brought in its train considerable problems, not the least of which being the development of Leftism and PC MC; but we don't want to tax the simple mind of "Apuleius Platonicus" -- which likes to envision in broad brush strokes of simple primary colors -- with too much complexity for one day.
The Hesperado
People enjoy flapping their lips, perhaps it's a way of getting more air. There is little point in defending Christianity, even historically, because history is plain and obvious, and we are all free to study it and reach our own conclusions. Christianity doesn't need to be defended by argument, since its entire proof can be found in the life of any single follower of Jesus, in any age, in any place.
That follower is not fed by arguments, is not built up by tearing others down, and lives only to serve others. The good news is just that, good news, and it is proclaimed, not defended. Just as not everyone will let themselves be loved, so not everyone will let themselves see the truth.
‘Happy is he who is not scandalized by Me...’ (Matthew 11:6).
Quote: I fail to see how Muslims are different in this regard.
end quote.
3 words:
Read the Quran.
The differences and the invalidity of your assertion will become quite clear.
Christianity did not spread through violence. Well, Orthodoxy didn't. Or it did, but the violence was against the christians. I do believe that's why christianity is different: it grew from the blood of sacrificing christians. Islam on the other hand grew from the blood of the non-muslims killed by Mohammed and his followers.
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