I wrote the following to Raymond Arroyo, news director of Eternal Word Television Network and author of a best-selling Mother Angelica biography, today:
I'm just wondering if you would consider bringing up some of the points I raised below the next time you talk to a Church leader who teaches that Muslims and Catholics believe in the same God and share the same Scriptures?
Looking at what Muslims actually believe and applying common sense make me think that they aren't following the same God. They believe in one God, sure, but they think we don’t because we believe in the Trinity.
For example, here are some things I learned when I recently met some Muslim evangelists (believe it or not) at the Santa Clara County Fair. I was there to help out at the Pro-Life booth for a few hours, and during a break I wandered over to the Muslim booth, where I got a free Qu'ran and a booklet about the Blessed Virgin Mary. Two young Muslim women and a man came to the Pro-life booth later. I asked one woman if Muslims believe in the Scriptures, and she said that they believe that they were rewritten. If they believe the Scriptures were rewritten, that would necessarily mean that they believe the Old and New Testaments are not true, wouldn’t it?
It is ridiculous to claim that we have a lot in common with Muslims because they are a people of "the book," because if they are a people of the book, that book is not the Bible, it is the Qu'ran. The Qu'ran stories from the Old Testament are in extremely altered form. For example, the Qu'ranic version of Abraham's sacrifice and the story of Ishmael and Isaac are vastly different in the Qu'ran.
If Muslims believed in the Jewish and Catholic Scriptures they would know that the Jews were the Chosen People and that Christ is God's only son.
They instead believe that they are descended from Abraham's son, Ishmael, and that the Hebrew Bible is wrong about God's intention to give salvation to Abraham's descendants through Isaac.
The common canard is that Muslims venerate the Virgin Mary, but they certainly don't believe the child miraculously conceived in her womb was God's Son. I found out from quotes from their Qu'ran that were included in one of their booklets that Mohammed taught that it is a abominable sacrilege to teach that God had a Son. The Qu’ran also teaches that Jesus picked one of His apostles to be transformed to look like Him, so that when Christ was crucified, it was actually the apostle who stood in for Him. So they believe that Jesus wasn’t crucified.
It seems obvious that Mohammedenism is a man-made religion. Luther made up his tenets of faith by accepting and rejecting revelation as it had been taught by the Catholic Church, and Mohammed with a similar kind of hubris did something quite similar. (The Catholic Encyclopedia quotes others who see simliarities between Mohammed and Luther also.) This is just a tip of the iceberg on the disagreements between Muslims and Catholics. It is misleading to state that we are similar, because what they believe is not the truth and what we believe is the truth.
Muslims believe in a religion that was revealed to one man, the prophet Mohammed, and the belief system that he taught contradicts the beliefs of Jews and Catholics. He claims to be a prophet of Allah, who could not be the same God we worship, because the God that we worship did not send salvation through the children of Ishmael and did not send Muhammed as his prophet. The life of this "prophet" is evidence that he was not a holy man. His heaven is an abomination to Christians who see heaven as eternal bliss in the presence of God .. ... Just a few thoughts. From your sister in Christ in San Jose, Roseanne
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Man made? I agree. Wrong scriptures? Absolutely. But I can't agree that the fact that they believe very wrong things about God means they worship a different God. Imagine a father who has three children. One is close to the dad and knows him intimately. The second knows and understands parts of his father's personality, but doesn't have a lively a close relationship with him. The third loves his father, but has some serious misconceptions about his father's personality and his history. He is constantly misunderstanding or even guessing completely wrongly what will please his father. When this third child grows up and shares family stories with his kids, he gets the stories all wrong and misrepresents his dad to the kids. Still, this third son and his own kids love Dad/Grandpa, even though they don't know him nearly as well as they think they do.
ReplyDeleteIs it a different father they love, or do the love the right father with, but with a lot of wrong ideas about him?
What you wrote is very interesting. The third child in your parable seems to stand for M0hammed. M0hammed claims to be God's prophet. If you believe the religion he founded contradicts the True religion, wouldn't you have to conclude that he would have to be either insane or a charlatan or that his revelations came from the Evil One? How would you explain otherwise how he got the stories all wrong? What you wrote is a sweet explanation but I don't buy it. How did he get paradise so wrong, for example? A heaven where unflawed multitudes of women offer eternal sexual pleasure to a good Muslim is not the same heaven where the Judeado Christian God resides.
ReplyDeleteC.S. Lewis wrote in the Chronicles of Narni about a good worshipper of a demonic deity who was worshipping the true God in the purity of his heart. Similarly I think a Muslim's zeal to worship God is taken by God as true worship. The problem arises if the Muslim hears the Truth and reject it.
That's all I have time for, thanks for your comment.