#christianity vs islam

[lightedpath]

In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.

All praise is due to Allah, Lord of all the worlds.

The Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.

Master of the Day of Judgment.

You alone we worship, and You alone we ask for help.

Guide us on the Straight Path,

the path of those who have received Your grace; not the path of those who have brought down wrath upon themselves, nor of those who have gone astray.

[kanisa-maghrebia]

Christianity vs Islam: Which Faith Offers Hope?

[former-leftist-jew]

Christianity and Islam both say, "Only those who follow our religion go to The Good Place after Death; the rest of you sods will burn and suffer forever in The Bad Place as Punishment for not following OUR direct dogma."

Yet, it's JEWS who supposedly WE'RE the Special Chosen Few?

[menlove]

like I think if u look at two of the most powerful and influencial religions in the world rn (christianity and islam) and come away with "one of these is the Good Moral Religion and one of these is the Oppressive Evil Religion" in either direction u have fundamentally failed to understand the world and also the ways in which religion can be used both as a weapon to beat other people with and also a tool of comfort & community

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"I don't agree with those who think that the conflict is simply between two religions, namely Christianity and Islam... to me, the key conflict is between irrational blind faith and rational, logical minds." -- Taslima Nasrin

[wathanism]

it's so funny how every time i see a post abt spirituality or religion that i agree with, there's always 17 jewish folk in the notes like "posts that are extremely jewish," and i love that. no i don't know a thing abt judaism but y'all seem to be vibing so much harder than i ever did when i was muslim and i respect that

[sporadicarbiterearthquake-blog]

We don't have a Speaker's Corner here in Colorado, so we have to hold our debates wherever we can.  This Christian-Muslim debate occurred at an Marriott in Lone Tree, Colorado and involved famous (or infamous) Islamic scholar Yasir Qadhi and myself.  Apologies for the spotty audio, lots of wind and traffic noise, but I didn't shoot it.  It was shot without my knowledge by someone attending the Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), who posted the video on Youtube. 

The occasion was an ICNA fundraiser whose keynote speaker was Yasir Qadhi, Salafist Islamic scholar and then faculty member of Rhodes College, in Memphis, Tennessee. In order to keep the Rhodes job Qadhi had to pretend to be “moderate.”  In fact, however, he had posted Youtube videos stating that Christians and Jews were filthy and that it was legitimate to take their lives and property in jihad.  As for the fundraiser, those familiar with Islamic charity (zakat) know that one of the eight categories for receipt of Islamic charitable donations is for soldiers for Islam that do not wear the uniform of a nation, in other words terrorists. 

The comments on the ICNA posting of the debate, mostly from ICNA sympathizers feel Qadhi won the debate (one referred to mas a "lone wolf") but don't go into detail.  The only comment that went into thorough discussion of the entire debate came from Adrian Russe and says that I won the debate handily.  Here are his comments, what do you think?:

This is the best comment concerning my debate with Yasir Qadhi that was posted to the ICNA video, thanks Adran Russe:

"OK! Good on him, he stayed on track and never fell for any of your bullshit. He is right about pretending to be Moderate, there is no such thing, just as Radical doesn't exist. There are the Pious and Munafiqun (munafiq, singular, Islamic Hypocrites). 1 min 19 in he starts deflecting. He is controlling this thus putting him in Dhimmitude. At 3;30 a great "fuck off"on your part. Then he starts lying about modifying Islam, it cannot ever happen, to do so would be to admit it isn't perfect, so he's lying. At 4:30 he says "I'm an American" that's bullshit. Their allegiance is to the Ummah, NEVER the host, a passport is another weapon of the age. Islam has no nationality.

6 minutes in, they have a duty to further Islam, so, another lie. Sahih Bukhari (49:857) - "He who makes peace between the people by inventing good information or saying good things, is not a liar". 10:30 he starts talking about the cross (itas always going to happen) great move by the way. 10:45 he loves Jesus does he? The Quran agrees with the Bible about the virgin birth of Jesus (and his return), but not his resurrection. In fact, it even denies that he was crucified, which runs counter to all historical evidence. In the Islamic version, Jesus was taken to heaven andwill return to "destroy the cross" and all religions other than Islam. 12:00 heays "we are not preaching violence" another lie, they're muslims. Quran (2:216) –

"Fighting is prescribed for you, and ye dislike it. But it is possible that ye dislike a thing which is good for you, and that ye love a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knoweth, and ye know not." Not only does this verse establish that violence can be virtuous, but it also contradicts the myth that fighting is intended only in self-defense. 12:23 "food packages for abused women" MUSLIM women OR if not, Sahih Bukhari (55:558) - The Prophet said, "I give to them so as to attract their hearts to Islam."

The only example of Muhammad ever providing charity to non-Muslims was when it served the purpose of expanding personal power, either to buy conversions or loyalty. 12:40 Syrian refugess = Muslims, Any Christians coming out of Syria were missing by the time they reached international water because they wouldn't pray, and their children were kept to manipulate EU authorities. Those Syrian refugees who made it here do not need any charity from the U.S, there are enough arse lickers here to help them.

13:25 the last resort, Label Words. He knows Richard knows. Label words are another tactic to subdue. He has made up his mind and he is not falling for their deceit called Tawriya = Intentionally creating a false impression by saying something that is technically true, when knowing that the listener will interpret it in a different way. THAT was brilliant and God bless him for not falling for their deceptions. I thoroughly enjoyed watching that. Know whose enemy you are, and why."

Islamist leader Yasir Qadhi debates me at fundraiser for ICNA

Love to be called “brilliant.”  But if nothing else my presence on the sidewalk in front of the Marriott with a sign that read “ICNA:  Terrorist Front,” clearly disrupted the event including having the keynote speaker feeling he had to confront me.

[aregularhuman]

WAIT TILL YALL HEAR ABOUT THE ORTHODOX CHURCH- my favourite fact abt Russia is that the only reason they’re orthodox is bc in 988 knaz Vladimir deemed orthodox churches more beautiful than catholic (and also political reasons)

One of my favorite things about the difference between Protestant denominations and Catholicism is that Protestants made their whole thing being So Fucking Boring(tm) and normal that if you were raised around Protestants with little to no connection to the Catholic Church when you find out about all the saints and rituals and bones and shit it genuinely comes off as a little like...pagan isn't the right word exactly but you know what I mean? Like for my entire life good Christians sat on folding chairs in a beige basement eating shitty donuts from Albertsons and told me liking Pokemon and Halloween made me a sinner and then I go to see an old Catholic church and there's just like. A fucking ancient corpse in the room?? That everyone is praying over??? Like????? And THIS is actually the religion all the "Pokemon normalizes devil worship" guys originally came from several hundred years ago??????

It's wild okay. It's just wild.

[vladhungrygen]

11 Ways Islam and Christianity Are Different

Whether you are a Muslim seeking to understand Christian beliefs, or a Christian curious about the Islamic faith, this will give you a basic understanding of the worldview of both religions. Islam began in 610 AD with Prophet Muhammad’s first revelation from Angel Gabriel. Today, there are over 2 billion Muslims globally, making Islam the second-largest religion behind Christianity. The Islamic…

[ao-fc]

Judeo-Christianity vs. Islam

[owenthetokencishet]

From now on every time I see somebody use the term "judeo-christian" I'm shoving this image in their face

Their savage Asiatic AI-operated drones vs our benevolent Judeo-Christian AI-operated drones

[readfull]

What is the Quran? Understanding The Quran

What is the Quran? Understanding The Quran. The Quran is a book that is viewed in a distorted way by many people. But when you read this post, you will understand what really the Quran is. No matter whether you are a Christian, Jew, or adherent of any other religion, understanding the Quran will undoubtedly bring great benefits to you. The Quran is the divine book that Muslims believe in.…

[filmizle48]

Christianity vs Islam Country Comparison (2023)

[jessicalprice]

culture isn’t modular

I did a thread (actually several) on Twitter a few years ago about Christianity’s attempts to paint itself as modular, and I’ve been seeing them referenced here in the cultural christianity Discourse, and a few people have DMed me asking me to post it here, so here’s a rehash of several of those threads:

A big part of why Christian atheists have trouble seeing how culturally Christian they still are is that Christianity advertises itself as being modular, which is not how belief systems have worked for most of human history. 

A selling point of Christianity has always been the idea that it's plug-and-play: you don't have to stop being Irish or Korean or Nigerian to be Christian, you don't have to learn a new language, you keep your culture. 

And you’re just also Christian.

(You can see, then, why so many Christian atheists struggle with the idea that they’re still Christian--to them, Christianity is this modular belief in God and Jesus and a few other tenets, and everything else is... everything else. Which is, not to get ahead of myself, very compatible with some tacit white supremacy: the “everything else” is goes unexamined for its cultural specificity. It’s just Normal. Default. Neutral.)

Evangelicals in particular love to contrast this to Islam, to the idea that you have to learn Arabic and adopt elements of Arab culture to be Muslim, which helps fuel the image of Islam as a Foreign Ideology that's taking over the West.

The rest of us don’t have that particular jack

Meanwhile, Christians position Christianity as a modular component of your life. Keep your culture, your traditions, your language and just swap out your Other Religion Module for a Christianity Module.

The end game is, in theory, a rainbow of diverse people and cultures that are all one big happy family in Christ. We're going to come back to how Christianity isn't actually modular, but for the moment, let's talk about it as if it had succeeded in that design goal. 

Even if Christianity were successfully modular, if it were something that you could just plug in to the Belief System Receptor in a culture and leave the rest of it undisturbed, the problem is most cultures don't have a modular Belief System Receptor. Spirituality has, for the entirety of human history, not been something that's modular. It's deeply interwoven with the rest of culture and society. You can't just pull it out and plug something else in and have the culture remain stable.

(And to be clear, even using the term “spirituality” here is a sop to Christianity. What cultures have are worldviews that deal with humanity’s place in the universe/reality; people’s relationships to other people; the idea of individual, societal, or human purpose; how the culture defines membership; etc. These may or may not deal with the supernatural or “spiritual.”)

And so OF COURSE attempting to pull out a culture's indigenous belief system and replace it with Christianity has almost always had destructive effects on that culture.

Not only is Christianity not representative of "religion" full stop, it's actually arguably *anomalous* in its attempt to be modular (and thus universal to all cultures) rather than inextricable from culture.

Now, of course, it hasn't actually succeeded in that--the US is a thoroughly Christian culture--but it does lead to the idea that one can somehow parse out which pieces of culture are "religious" versus which are "secular". That framing is antithetical to most cultures. E.g. you can't separate the development of a lot of cultural practices around what people eat and how they get it from elements of their worldview that Christians would probably label "religious." But that entire *framing* of religious vs. secular is a Christian one.

Is Passover a religious holiday or a secular one? The answer isn't one or the other, or neither, or both. It's that the framing of this question is wrong.

And Christianity isn’t a plugin, however much it wants to be

Moreover, Christianity isn't actually culture-neutral or modular. 

It's easy for this to get obscured by seeing Christianity as a tool of particular cultures' colonialism (e.g. the British using Christianity to spread British culture) or of whiteness in general, and not seeing how Christianity itself is colonial. This helps protect the idea that “true” Christianity is good and innocent, and if priests or missionaries are converting people at swordpoint or claiming land for European powers or destroying indigenous cultures, that must be a misuse of Christianity, a “fake” or “corrupted” Christianity.

Never mind that for every other culture, that culture is what its members do. Christianity, uniquely, must be judged on what it says its ideals are, not what it actually is. 

Mistaking the engine for the exhaust

But it’s not just an otherwise innocent tool of colonialism: it’s a driver of it. 

At the end of the day, it’s really hard to construct a version of the Great Commission that isn’t inherently colonial. The end-goal of a world in which everyone is Christian is a world without non-Christian cultures. (As is the end goal of a world in which everyone is atheist by Christian definitions.)

Yet we focus on the way Christianity came with British or Spanish culture when they colonized a place--the churches are here because the Spaniards who conquered this area were Catholic--and miss how Christianity actually has its own cultural tropes that it brings with it. It's more subtle, of course, when Christianity didn't come in explicitly as the result of military conquest.

Or put another way, those cultures didn't just shape the Christianity they brought to places they colonized--they were shaped by it. How much of the commonality between European cultures is because of Christianity?

It’s not all a competition

A lot of Christians (cultural and practicing), if you push them, will eventually paint you a picture of a very Hobbesian world in which all religions, red in tooth and claw, are trying to take over the world. It's the "natural order" to attempt to eliminate all cultures but your own. 

If you point out to them that belief and worldview are deeply personal, and proselytizing is objectifying, because you're basically telling the person you're proselytizing to that who they are is wrong, you often get some version of "that's how everyone is, though."

Like we all go through life seeing other humans as incomplete and fundamentally flawed and the only way to "fix" them is to get them to believe what we believe. And, like, that is not how everyone relates to others?

But it's definitely how both practicing Christians and Christian antitheists relate to others. If, for Christians, your lack of Jesus is a fundamental flaw in you that needs to be fixed, for New Atheists, your “religion” (that is, your non-Christian culture) is a fundamental flaw in you that needs to be fixed. Neither Christians nor New Atheists are able to relate to anyone else as fine as they are. It's all a Hobbesian zero-sum game. It's all a game of conversion with only win and loss conditions. You are, essentially, only an NPC worth points.

The idea of being any other way is not only wrong, but impossible to them. If you claim to exist in any other way, you are either deluded or lying.

So, we get Christian atheists claiming that if you identify as Jewish, you can’t really be an atheist. Or sometimes they’ll make an exception for someone who’s “only ethnically Jewish.” If the only way you relate to your Jewishness is as ancestry, then you can be an atheist. Otherwise, you’re lying. 

Or, if you’re not lying, you’re deluded. You just don’t understand that there’s no need for you to keep any dietary practices or continue to engage in any form of ritual or celebrate any of those “religious” Jewish holidays, and by golly, this here “ex”-Christian atheist is here to separate out for you which parts of your culture are “religious” and which ones are “secular.”

Religious/secular is a Christian distinction

A lot of atheists from Christian backgrounds (whether or not they were raised explicitly Christian) have trouble seeing how Christian they are because they've accepted the Christian idea that “religion” is modular. (If we define “religion” the way Christians (whether practicing or cultural) define it, Christianity might be the only religion that actually exists. Maybe Islam?)

When people from non-Christian cultures talk about the hegemonically Christian and white supremacist nature of a lot of atheism, it reflects how outside of Christianity, spirituality/worldview isn't something you can just pull out of a culture.

Christian atheists tend to see the cultural practices of non-Christians as "religious" and think that they should give them up (talk to Jewish atheists who keep kosher about Christian atheist reactions to that). But because Christianity positions itself as modular, people from Christian backgrounds tend not to see how Christian the culture they imagine as "neutral" or "normal" actually is. In their minds, you just pull out the Christianity module and are left with a neutral, secular society.

So, if people from non-Christian backgrounds would just give up their superstitions, they'd look the same as Christian atheists. 

Your secularism is specifically post-Christian

Of course, that culture with the Christianity module pulled out ISN'T neutral. So the idea that that's what "secular society" should look like ends up following the same pattern as Christian colonialism throughout history: the promise that you can keep your culture and just plug in a different belief system (or, purportedly, a lack of a belief system), which has always, always been a lie. The secular, "enlightened" life that most Christian atheists envision is one that's still built on white, western Christianity, and the idea that people should conform to it is still attempting to homogenize society to a white Christian ideal. 

For people from cultures that don't see spirituality as modular, this is pretty obvious. It's obvious to a lot of people from non-white Christian cultures that have syncretized Christianity in a way that doesn't truck with the modularity illusion. 

I also think, even though they're not conceptualizing it in these terms, that it's actually obvious to a lot of evangelicals. (The difference being that white evangelical Christianity enthusiastically embraces white supremacy, so they see the destruction of non-Christian culture as good.) But I think it's invisible to a lot of mainline non-evangelical Christians, and it's definitely invisible to a lot of people who leave Christianity.

And that inability to see culture outside a Christian framing means that American secularism is still shaped like Christianity. It's basically the same text with a few sentences deleted and some terms replaced.

Which, again, is by design. The idea that you can deconvert to (Christian) atheism and not have to change much besides your opinions about God is the mirror of how easy it’s supposed to be to convert to Christianity.

Human societies don’t follow evolutionary biology

The Victorian Christian framing underlying current Western ideas of enlightened secularism, that religious practice (and human culture in general) is subject to the same sort of unilateral, simple evolution toward a superior state to which they, at the time, largely reduced biological evolution, is deeply white supremacist.

It posits religious evolution as a constantly self-refining process from "primitive" animism and polytheism to monotheism to white European/American Christianity. For Christians, that's the height of human culture. For ex-Christians, the next step is Christian-derived secularism.

Maybe you’ve seen this comic?

The thing is, animism isn’t more “primitive” than polytheism, and polytheism isn’t more “primitive” than monotheism. Older doesn’t mean less advanced/sophisticated/complex. Hinduism isn’t more “primitive” than Judaism just because it’s polytheistic and Judaism is monotheistic. 

Human cultures continue to change and adapt. (Arguably, older religions are more sophisticated than newer ones because they’ve had a lot more time to refine their practices and ideologies instead of having to define them.) Also, not all cultures are part of the same family tree. Christianity and Islam may be derived from Judaism, but Judaism and Hinduism have no real relationship to one another. 

But in this worldview, Christianity is "normal" religion, which is still more primitive than enlightened secularism, but more advanced than all those other primitive, superstitious, irrational beliefs.

Just like Christians, when Christian atheists do try to make room for cultures that aren't white and European-derived, the tacit demand is "okay, but you have to separate out the parts of your culture that the Christian sacred-secular divide would deem 'religious.'"

Either way, people from non-Christian cultures, if they’re to be equals, are supposed to get with the program and assimilate.

You’re not qualified to be a universal arbiter of what culture is good

Christian atheists usually want everyone to unplug that Religion module!

So, for example, you have ex-Christian atheists who are down with pluralism trying to get ex-Christian atheists who aren't to leave Jews alone by pointing out that you can be atheist and Jewish.

But some of us aren’t atheist. (I’m agnostic by Christian standards.) And the idea that Jews shouldn’t be targets for harassment because they can be atheists and therefore possibly have some common sense is still demanding that people from other cultures conform to one culture’s standard of what being “rational” is.  

Which, like, is kind of galling when y’all don’t even understand what “belief in G-d” means to Jews, and people from a culture that took until the 1800s to figure out that washing their hands was good are setting themselves up as the Universal Arbiters of Rationality.

(BTW, most of this also holds true for non-white Christianity, too. I guarantee you most white Christian atheists don’t have a good sense of what role church plays in the lives of Black communities, so maybe shut up about it.)

In any case, reducing Christianity--a massive, ambient phenomenon inextricable from Western culture--to the specific manifestation of Christian practice that you grew up with is, frankly, absurd. 

And you can’t be any help in deconstructing hegemony when you refuse to perceive it and understand that it isn’t something you can take off like a garment, and you probably won’t ever recognize and uproot all the ways in which it affects you, especially when you are continuing to live within it. 

What hegemony doesn’t want you to know

One of the ways hegemony sustains and perpetuates itself is by reinforcing the idea not so much that other ways of being and knowing are evil (although that’s usually a stage in an ideology becoming hegemonic), but that they’re impossible. That they don’t actually exist. 

See, again, the idea that anyone claiming to live differently is either lying or deluded.

There are few clearer examples of how pervasive Christian hegemony is than Christian atheists being certain every religion works like Christianity. Hegemonic Christianity wants you to think that all cultures work like Christianity because it wants their belief systems to be modular so you can just ...swap them. And it wants to pretend that culture/worldview is a free market where it can just outcompete other cultures.

But that’s... not how anything works. 

And the truth of the matter is that white nationalist Christians shoot at synagogues and Sikh temples and mosques because those other ways of being can’t be allowed to exist. 

They don’t shoot at atheist conventions because there’s room in hegemonic Christianity for Christian atheists precisely because Christian atheists are still culturally Christian. Their atheism is Christian-shaped.

They may not like you. They’re definitely going to try to convert you. They may not want you to be able to hold public office or teach their kids.

But the only challenge you’re providing is that of The Existence of Disbelief. And that’s fine. That makes you a really safe Other to have around. You can See The Light and not have to change much.

What you’re not doing is providing an example of a whole other way of being and knowing that (often) predates Christianity and is completely separate from it and has managed to survive it and continue to live and thrive (there’s a reason Christians like to speak of Jews and Judaism in the past tense, and it’s similar to the reason white people like to speak of indigenous peoples of the Americas in the past tense). 

That’s not a criticism--it’s fine to just... be post-Christian. There’s not actually anything wrong with being culturally Christian. The problems come in when you start denying that it’s a thing, or insisting that you, unique among humankind, are above Having A Culture.

But it does mean that you don’t pose the same sort of threat to Christianity that other cultures do, and hence, less violence. 

[sporadicarbiterearthquake-blog]

Did Pro-Hamas Demo Organizers Have Prior Knowledge of October 7th?

Call me crazy but didn't the absolutely stunning speed with which the pro-Hamas demonstrations appeared following the October 7th attacks suggest that the organizers may well but have had prior knowledge of the attacks?  As one who has organized civil demonstrations in the past I know that it takes time to put one together.  You have to make signs, print leaflets, invite speakers and get the word out.  All that takes time.  Turns out that the 9/11 attacks were an open secret at a number of US mosques and Islamist organizations.  It would not surprise me if the same was not true of October 7th.  

Another open secret is that the Muslim Brotherhood and their affiliates are currently talking about and planning something they call "Zero Hour."