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Saturday, September 18, 2010

Open letter to the Christian contemplating converting to Islam

It appears to me that you were not taught about your Christian faith very well, and that you have not examined Islam very thoroughly.  Islam denies the death of Christ on the cross and his resurrection (Quran 4:157).  Without the crucifixion and resurrection, then Jesus becomes nothing more than one of many itinerant preachers claiming to be the messiah.

The key to breaking Satan's power in the world is through Christ's sacrifice on the cross. Satan's only hope of recovery is to deny and to  convince people that the crucifixion never happened.

Islam will tell you that the Christian view of God is weak because he allowed his son to die an ignominious death.  This is because Islam is a religion that deals only with immediate outward appearances, and has no depth.  The student of Jewish religious history would recognize the symbolism of Jesus’ death.  The Jewish people of that time offered blood sacrifices as sin offerings.  The animals were selected and ritually slaughtered to expiate the sins of the believers.  This traces back to Abrahamic times when livestock was the source and measure of wealth, and a sacrifice was a penance offering to atone for sin against God.  Much of the original significance had been lost, and the sacrificial lamb had been understood to accept the sins of the believer and provide atonement.  Jesus was proclaimed to be the Lamb of God, and his sacrificial death atoned for the sins of the whole human race; past, extant, and future.

The death and resurrection also indicate the closing of the circle on the Abrahamic covenant.  God ordered Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, which he was willing to do.  God stayed his hand and proclaimed his covenant.  A covenant is a contract, and a contract is meaningless if one side has no recourse against the other for failure to perform.  How can man have recourse against God if God does not fulfill the covenant?  God’s demonstration was to show that God is as fully committed to the covenant as Abraham was:  He HAD to sacrifice his son.  It would have been meaningless to have stayed his hand at the last second as he allowed Abraham to do, for it would have looked like an empty gesture. 

Islam is blind to the symbolism and deep meanings of the death and resurrection of Christ.  Allah is not a personal deity, he is remote, distant, and seems to have no sympathy for mankind, unless mankind bows down to him and acts like slaves to him.  The God of Abraham has demonstrated time and again that he does not want slaves, he wants free men who are willing and capable of thinking and acting on their own.  To follow God freely is the ultimate goal.  If such is the case, then why does Islam place a death sentence for apostasy?

If you read the quran and hadith objectively, you can easily recognize all the trappings of a cult. Islam is by, for and about Muhammad.  Anything else Islam has to offer takes second place to the benefit of Muhammad.

There seem to be many attractive things about Islam, but there is also much that is evil.  Muslims revere Muhammad, but Muhammad routinely had his critics assassinated, practiced and advocated rape and called it marriage, presided over the cold blooded massacre of hundreds of Jews, advocated polytheism when it seemed advantageous to him, financed his entire existence through banditry and looting, ordered followers to divorce their wives so he could marry them, and invented capricious legal precedent to suit his whims.  He elevated himself to be second only to Allah, who could only be accessed through Muhammad.  Since the Quran is supposed to be the literal word of Allah, straight from Allah lips, there can be no misunderstandings or refutation of validity. 

If I bake you a cake, and told you it was mostly good and wholesome, that I only used a tablespoon of dog feces in it, would you eat it?

You should study Islam very hard, and also study Christianity, and make a clear, objective decision as to whether you have really chosen the true path, or whether you have accepted a lie.