Wednesday, June 15, 2005

A Critical Analysis of 'Real' Islam

Here is an excellent one stop resource for understanding Islam, Islam Undressed - A Critical Analysis of ‘Real Islam’. Its People, Culture, Philosophy, and Practices Yesterday and Today by: Vernon Richards (Feb 13, 2005)

This one goes onto the sidebar.

From About the Author;
At the risk of alienating some, I must now delve into personal opinion, and even politics. It has been difficult to present this material factually, avoiding (or trying to avoid) personal opinion. I admit that separating my personal emotion from the passion, pain, and sorrow connected with all I have learned has been difficult, surely my feelings have leaked out all over. But now I must reveal my whole heart, the stakes being as high as they are. The issue, survival, should not be not politicized, but it is. Although I am a conservative Democrat at heart, I can no longer support the current direction of a National Democratic party that is largely ignorant of the nature and scope of the Islamic threat. It seems more a coalition of fringe myopic special interest groups than a truly National Party, none of whom seem to grasp the threat of militant Islam. My once great Party fell ill at the time of Jimmy Carter, our fierce peanut farmer appeaser, became morally and mortally ill with Clinton at the helm, and lost its heartbeat completely following the Gore Campaign. Great men like Zell Miller notwithstanding, nothing has come from the once great representative party since but the awful stench of moral death. Suffering from Hubris, it slips noisily into irrelevance, the entire country forced to endure shrill hateful screams of frustration from the likes of Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Michael Moore, Howard Dean, and John Kerry. My hope is that reasonable people will seize the party back from the fringe of lunacy and make it great again.

A personal note to any truly pious Muslims who feel their faith is compromised by the truths and logic outlined herein. The truth, from the mouths of your leaders yesterday and today, is surly a bitter pill to swallow, but please accept the reality staring you in the face and balance it against what your heart tells you is good, true, just, and right. Truth can be hard to contemplate, but when humbly accepted it will always be redeeming and cleansing. For those inclined to believe in deity, God is still God, and surely is not threatened. His existence and plans do not depend on the man Muhammad. To all believers of a caring creator, there is no God, but God, …and God is indeed greatest! But such a Creator must also embody all-knowledge and all-power, and so He must also be a God of Truth, above any inclination or need to deceive or lie. It follows that any who truly know and represent Him would be similarly disposed. By that standard Muhammad, a man of deceit who created a cult of deceit and manipulation, could not have known such a deity, despite all his self-aggrandizing proclamations otherwise. If he was inspired by supernatural visits and direction, which considering what he accomplished may be entirely possible, then that ‘angel’ who directed him could be best described as the ‘father of lies’, ‘the author of slavery’, ‘the king of contentions’, ‘the purveyor of greed’, ‘the source of false pride’. In other words, Muhammad’s extraordinary exploits and achievements were helped by that old false angel of light, the devil himself. If God lives, so does His counterpart, and that very Lucifer must be laughing that so many have accepted his philosophy based on fear, forced compliance, and worship of him and all his evil methods so hurtful to victims, and in spirit to the victimizers. Would that I could be a bug on the wall as all Islamic terrorists arrive at that way-station between life and their spiritual holding place, to watch as shock and disappointment covers their countenances and to witness their anguish and panic grow as they realize they spent their last wage of agency on Earth serving the enemy of love and free-agency, …the enemy of God.

Despite the fear and difficulties faced by those seeking to separate themselves from the ‘faith’, the difficult question must be posed to any and all true peace loving Muslims, "Why follow Muhammad? Why follow Muhammad in every respect – including his commands to do violence against those who reject him as a prophet? If you truly disapprove of Muslim terrorist actions, why continue to tie yourself and your families’ eternal future to the man?" If you truly believe that Muslim terrorists are and were wrong, then find a way to separate yourself from it. A person who chooses to follow Muhammad and trust his eternal future to Muhammad’s word, by extension approves of Muhammad’s brutal teachings …including all his brutal acts. The same will surely reap the same reward, but it will not be the 72 virgins, thrones, and mansions so often spoken of and hoped for. There are already millions of ‘martyred’ Muslims on the other side of the veil separating life from death, who lament that fact today from their spirit prison, …but the dead cannot change anything.

Because one is the embodiment of the other, the religion can and should be judged by the behavior of the people who practice it; you cannot in fact separate the two. Isa (Jesus) identified this simple fact when he said: “By their fruits ye shall know them”, or in other words it is the acts of a religion or following that define the value of the theology, …not the beauty of words, the magnificence of buildings, robes, etc etc. By this standard, (the fruits of his totalitarian religion created to promote his vision of Arabic Imperialism), we know that Islam in fact has no connection with God whatsoever. Such bitter fruits as have been described herein, along with all the branches of humanity which made them, have no intrinsic value. The many who claim it as their religion notwithstanding, an incorrect opinion based on a false premise is still wrong, even if repeated by a billion people. As such, Islam cannot serve as any kind of guide to humankind, except as an example of the utter failure of all totalitarian systems of control.

The Muslim God is a god of deception, self-gratification, and war, whereas the Christian God is one of truth, self-sacrifice, and peace. Muhammad was a man of violence who bore arms, was wounded in battle, and preached holy war against non-believers. Christ, on the other hand, healed the wounded soldier’s ear who came to arrest him. If you openly disagree with a Christian on religious doctrine, he’ll probably pray for you. If you openly disagree with a Muslim on a matter of faith, he is likely to try and kill you. In Muhammad’s day, converts were gained to Christian Faith by witnessing the constancy with which its confessors cared for others and suffered martyrdom; whereas they were gained to Islam by the spectacle of the readiness of its adherents to inflict death on others. Indeed, for devout Muslims, there seems to be no limitation to act in vile and inhumane ways towards non-believers, jihadists being allowed to enslave, rape, rob, pillage, and kill to advance Islam. In Christianity, by contrast, the direction is to ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. These two groups truly worship very different beings, and represent polar opposites in both belief and practice. Muslims claim to honor all prophets prior to Muhammad, including Jesus, yet conveniently dismiss all previous revelations regarding proper behavior in human relations. Muslims accept without thought that their great ‘seal’ of the prophets, ‘abrogated’ (canceled out) all previous revelation by all earlier prophets. Knowing almost nothing of earlier teachings, Arabs now and then swallow easily all the self-serving ideas the man Muhammad presented, whereas Christians and Jews, with some knowledge of those earlier revelations, were and are unable to accept a philosophy which effectively wipes out all previous understandings of the nature of God and directions on good behavior. Consider the radical change in religious philosophy born by Muhammad, whereas previously God loved all inhabitants of the Earth, then suddenly afterwards only Muslims. How terribly discontenting for the non-believers, for whom the newly reformed Muslim God unexpectedly had no more patience nor love. It completely escapes Muslim theologians how a perfect and fully developed and mature being (God) could suddenly decide that his previous feelings for His children, as revealed to his prophets, were in error and needed abrupt adjustment. Is the universe really that fragile, and can mans faith in God be based on that kind of uncertainty associated with a God whose feelings for his own children are in such flux? Obviously not, the concept fails all logical standards of reason. Muslim terrorists claim to kill people in the name of the one God, while vast numbers tolerate such actions, which surely is the greatest sacrilege and affront to God possible.
As an Orthodox Christian I would argue that Satan is not God's counterpart, he is a created being as are the other spiritual beings (angels, etc.) and as are we. That said, I think it is true that Muhammad did receive his inspiration from Satan and that Islam is the continuing work of Satan in the world.

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