From Spain all the way over to Indonesia.
In both cases, conflicts are simmering between Christians and Muslims. Notice a difference between the reactions of Christians and Muslims in the two places?
Which is the genuine religion of peace?
Author: Jimmy Akin
Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."
View all posts by Jimmy Akin
Jimmy,
If you’d permit my posting several quotes from Belloc, I think you might find his foresight many years ago to be quite interesting:
“Now that we have understood why Islam, the most formidable of the heresies, achieved its strength and astounding success we must try to understand why, alone of all the heresies, it has survived in full strength and even continues (after a fashion) to expand to this day. This is a point of decisive importance to the understanding not only of our subject but of the history of the world in general. Yet it is one which is, unfortunately, left almost entirely undiscussed in the modern world. Millions of modern people of the white civilization – that is, the civilization of Europe and America – have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take it for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which does not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past…”
“…It has always seemed to me possible, and even probable, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that remendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent…”
“…anyone with a knowledge of history is bound to ask himself whether we shall not see in the future a revival of Mohammedan political power, and the renewal of the old pressure of Islam upon Christendom…”
“…the recrudescence of Islam, the possibility of that terror under which we lived for centuries reappearing, and of our civilization again fighting for its life against what was its chief enemy for a thousand years, seems fantastic. Who in the Mohammedan world today can manufacture and maintain the complicated instruments of modern war? Where is the political machinery whereby the religion of Islam can play an equal part in the modern world? I say the suggestion that Islam may re-arise sounds fantastic – but this is only because men are always powerfully affected by the immediate past: – one might say that they are blinded by it. Cultures spring from religions; ultimately the vital force which maintains any culture is its philosophy, its attitude towards the universe; the decay of a religion involves the decay of the culture corresponding to it – we see that most clearly in the breakdown of Christendom today…In place of the Old Christian enthusiasms of Europe there came, for a time, the enthusiasm for nationality, the religion of patriotism. But self-worship is not enough, and the forces which are making for the destruction of our culture…have a likelier future before them than our old-fashioned patriotisms…”
“…The final fruit of this tenacity, the second period of Islamic power, may be delayed: – but I doubt whether it can be permanently postponed.”
April 24 is observed as the day for commemorating the 20th century’s first genocide: Muslim Turkey slaughtered 1.5 million Armenian Christians.
With California having the world’s largest concentration of Armenians, last week Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared April 23-29 “Days of Remembrance of the Armenian Genocide.”
Furniture fair.
Ashley furniture. Furniture. Star furniture.