Earlier this year, the Turkish Islamic scholar Mustafa Akyol came out with the book The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims. The book is interesting, I’ll say that much. I had meant to read it earlier but other things got in the way. I picked it up yesterday and finished it today and am now going to share some of my thoughts on the book.
St. John of Damascus
Church history is my speciality. I’ve been studying it in depth for eight years. One of the greatest rules of doing history is enemy attestation. We don’t have the surviving writings of many heretical groups but we have Catholic polemics against them and can therefore determine many of their beliefs.
Above is one of the most one sided debates that I’ve ever seen. It’s between Robert Spencer and Adnan Rashid about the existence of Muhammad. I’ve written about this topic before so I won’t elaborate on it here but I want to touch on the terrible tactic used by Rashid. Although I believe Muhammad existed and am not a fan of the Spencer brand of apologetics to Muslims, I think that Spencer easily won this debate.
What I found on my old bookshelf back home
I used to be a huge Dennis Prager fan. I subscribed to his podcast, owned his first five books and listened to any talk of his on YouTube that I could find. When I became a Traditional Catholic, I looked to only Scripture and Tradition for my guidance and my trust in Prager started to wane. However, I still regarded him as a “voice of reason” even though he wasn’t as influential toward my worldview as he once was.
To this day, 1984 is one of my favorite works of fiction. George Orwell certainly knocked it out of the park on this one. It’s because of having read books like this and studied logic that I know how to see past slippery language.
The Sacred Scriptures
In recent decades, Muslims have begun using the Bible against Christians. In my view, this is an unwise move. It’ll only work providing the Christian does not know their own Bible, especially the NT. Christians and Muslims do share theology in common such as Jesus being the Messiah and born of a virgin. Muslims will see this in the Bible and take it as confirmation. However, on the points that we disagree, some Muslims will take quotes out of the context of the book they’re quoting from and try to prove Islam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=18&v=tAng1TUtgxE
This post is a follow up from my last post. Read it to get up to speed on my refutation of Dr. Brown’s critique of my post.
Pope Gregory VII – The greatest Pope in the last 1,000 years
When I was in University I always used to hear the following phrase from Protestants: “Why do you guys make such a big deal about the Pope? He’s just a man.” No Catholic would object to the statement that the Pope is just a man. He certainly plays an important role but in the end, he’s just a man.
Theodore Herzl – A Secular Leftist
I think that our culture has become intellectually lazy. It’s easy to listen to Mark Steyn, Douglas Murray, or Lauren Southern and conclude that Muslims are invading our precious Western culture and it will be destroyed if this problem is not dealt with. Of course, a minority believe that the cause of our woes is secular leftism(or just leftism as the secular is redundant). As a Christian, I don’t have much interest in preserving the modern Western world. I am only concerned with the spreading of the Christian faith; the one true religion, outside of which there is no salvation.
Luther and the true reformers
Today Protestants and some self-hating Catholics across the globe are celebrating the career of the renegade and apostate monk named Martin Luther. Being Catholic, I oppose his theology and his career as a “reformer”. Regardless, many articles have been popping up on the anti-Semitism of Martin Luther. They say that he paved the way for the holocaust. Of course when people say this, they often take a shot at the Catholic Church as well saying they were no better.