Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Islam 100, Post-Christianity 0

We all know how deals with the devil usually wind up.

Lord Scott, a former UK Supreme Court judge, has a far-from-original way to combat ‘Islamophobia’: it’s called unilateral prostration. During a debate on how relationships between the Muslim community and other religious groups in the UK might be improved, he suggested the following:
“I do just wonder that if an improvement is needed between the faith groups, one way of promoting that might be to encourage interfaith marriages.”
If you find the concept of “interfaith marriages” with Islam as one of the parties less than entirely plausible, you’ve probably been paying attention. Here’s how it worked out in Lord Scott’s family:
“Of my two sons one has become a Muslim and of my two daughters one of those has become a Muslim, and I have 12 lovely grandchildren, seven of whom are little Muslims.”
Umm ... call me a nit-picker, but that’s not “interfaith marriage”. That’s wholesale capitulation. I believe the technical term is “conversion”.

And it’s all one way.

Lord Scott’s family is far from exceptional. In the UK, Islam currently claims about 5,000 new British converts a year, most of them womenThe Daily Mail says the average convert is “a 27-year-old white woman fed up with British consumerism and immorality” and puts the current total British converts to Islam at nearly 100,000. But The Guardian suggests a variety of reasons may be in play: a “long search for a more spiritual alternative to Catholicism”; an impression of “tranquillity and stability” in Muslims that contrasts with the emptiness of an atheistic upbringing; a sense that Islam isn’t “too different from Christianity”; a perception of “generosity, dignity and readiness to sacrifice for others” within the Muslim community; or even a “symbiosis of love and intellectual ideas”.

Other than the fact that British converts to Islam are almost all female, the other features most of the interviewees seem to have in common are as follows:

·         they’re looking for something “real”;

·         they’re dissatisfied with their current faith or the absence thereof;

and, with alarming frequency

·         they’re converting in order to pair up with Muslim men, where failure to convert would trigger the end of the relationship.

Call me cynical, but in a country with more than its share of unemployed video game-playing adult children living with their parents and drinking their lives away, the appeal of confident, independent, marriage-ready young men may have considerably more to do with the increasing feminine interest in Islam than either major newspaper will admit. It seems telling that very few of these new Muslims cite intellectual conviction or persuasion as their primary reason to convert.

But whatever the reasons, it can’t come as a huge surprise that a church almost universally perceived as wishy-washy, compromising, indifferent and unable to address real needs looks flaccid and pale in comparison to a religion that projects a confident, decisive and welcoming image — no matter how much that carefully cultivated veneer winds up standing in stark contrast to the long-term experience of actually living as a Muslim.

The Lord looked at a church that claimed it was rich, prosperous and in need of nothing and called it wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked. “Because you are lukewarm,” he told them, “I will spit you out of my mouth.” 

Sounds a bit like we’re there, doesn’t it.

1 comment :

  1. Something many readers may not know about Islam is this: they don't believe in "conversion," but in what they call "reversion."

    They don't believe, as Christians or atheists or many other religions do, that people make a conscious choice to believe and to become what they are. Rather, Islam teaches that every human baby is born a Muslim, and hence if he or she becomes something else he or she has apostatized and left the faith. So they have to "revert" to what they were at birth, not "convert" to a new belief. (See http://www.islamanswering.com/subpage.php?s=article&aid=1249)

    In principle, this makes every person who is not following Islam a kind of heretic or betrayer of their "truth" even before you've entertained the idea consciously at all. And this opens up at least a potential for radical Islamists to view all non-Muslims simply as apostates, upon whom no mercy falls.

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