Many Muslims on my Twitter feed have been retweeting a man named Dr. Craig Considine. This man is a self proclaimed Catholic and he constantly obsesses over Islam, particularly the person of Muhammad. In the above tweet from a couple of days ago he talks about how Muslims say that they love Jesus but Christians never say that they love Muhammad. It’s also ironic that this tweet was the only tweet on August 15 which was the feast of the Assumption of Our Lady. He didn’t wish his fellow Catholics a happy feast of the Assumption. He told us to love Muhammad instead.
Outside of the generic commands in the NT to love everyone, there is no special affection for Muhammad in the Christian religion. I can understand if Church leaders don’t go out of their way to criticize Muhammad. After all, that would put Christian minorities in the Middle East in danger like when Pope Benedict made his Regensburg speech in 2006.
Now, there is nothing wrong for a Christian to admire a certain statement or action that Muhammad did. What is wrong is for us to say that we love Muhammad like a Muslim loves Jesus. If it weren’t for Muhammad, the Middle East would be majority Christian. If it weren’t for Muhammad, North Africa would be majority Christian. If it weren’t for Muhammad, there would be a lot less erroneous views of Jesus floating around out there.
A good analogy would be to ask Muslims why they don’t love St. Paul, or why they don’t love the church fathers or the popes. These Muslims would say that St. Paul and these theologians corrupted the message of Jesus Christ and replaced it with something else. Also, Muslims don’t love the Jesus found in the four Gospels. They love the Jesus of the Quran where he’s stripped of 90% of his theological relevance. He becomes an argument for Muhammad and the blasphemous doctrine of Tawheed.
I recently reviewed the conversion stories of two Muslims to Christianity. They were Derya Little and Joseph Fadelle. Both of them denounced Islam after studying the life of Muhammad. They then both suffered at the hands of the followers of Muhammad’s religion. Little suffered socially while Fadelle suffered physically. Both of these people studied Muhammad’s life and realized that he was anything but impressive.
Another reason why we don’t love Muhammad is because he wasn’t too great as an individual; certainly not when you compare him to Jesus Christ. I think educated Muslims know this. When a professional dawah practitioner tries to convert a Christian in the West, they don’t start with Muhammad. They always talk about Tawheed vs. Trinity and the perfect Quran vs. the corrupted Bible. The only time they mention Muhammad is when they try to say that he’s mentioned in the Bible. It’s a bit ironic that the only things Muslims say about the Bible is that it’s corrupted and that Muhammad’s in it. The fact that they don’t lead with Muhammad is obvious. The man had worse sexual morals than King Henry VIII.
I hope that Dr. Considine will take these factors into account. He can fawn over Muhammad all he wants. I just hope he realizes that knowledgeable Christians have darn good reasons not to do so.
At one time there was an automatic respect of, and deference towards, the professional classes, in particular academics. Such respect has declined over time and things like Twitter have accelerated it. That’s a good thing as time and again people like him expose themselves as fools.
Dr Considine could have kept his own counsel and only his colleagues in Academia or his close friends would have been likely to have detected his flaws of character and intellect. The rest of us would have been none the wiser.
Unfortunately thanks to Twitter he is also liable to mislead people who know even less of Islam than he does. Dr Considine spouts this nonsense time after time, I suppose it’s a kind of virtue-signalling. I just hope he doesn’t mess up his students.
“I just hope he doesn’t mess up his students.”
Yeah, don’t count on it.
One wonders how he feels about Muhammad boasting that he’ll be repeatedly entering ‘the sealed gate of the temple’ once he gets to heaven and is given the mother of Isa in marriage.
https://answering-islam.org/Shamoun/mary.htm
I think if more Christians and especially Catholics knew what disreputable things Islam actually says about Mary, their view of Islam (and the conversion rate to Islam) would be much lower.
Perhaps a post on this, Allan? As the de facto Catholic apologist defending against Dawagandists, and possibly the only Catholic who even knows anything about the depraved perversion that is hidden in the Islamic texts.
Allan forgive me…
I just realized that Muhammad may have had a horrifically twisted understanding of the meaning of ‘perpetual virgin’.