Missionary Mishap: $50,000 Bet Lost

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Many missionaries offer money as a means of demonstrating that their beliefs or arguments are true. One such person made a challenge and I duly responded. You can see the notifications of his responses to me here:

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Unfortunately, asking for the rules and conditions of his challenge, caused him to suddenly block me.

In the above photo you can see that only my comments are available, despite him having commented and replied to me as indicated by my notifications. I suppose blocking real challengers to your challenge is one way of keeping the money…

And God knows best.

Missionary Mishap: Doubting the Bible Makes Me an Atheist

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During a conversation on Facebook on a post by our esteemed Br. Yusuf Ismail on the presevation of the New Testament, a missionary decided to mention the Quran. I indicated to him quite kindly that this was the tu quoque argument, to which his response was negative:


Apparently, he does not understand how dialogue works and that not everyone who rejects his scripture is an atheist:

  1. And God Knows Best!

 

Drugging Muslims Because They’re Not Christian

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I was recently made aware of an extremely disturbing post on Yahoo Answers where an apparently Christian user  was angry at one of their family members converting to Islam and marrying a Muslim. Upset at the conversion and at their presence at dinner, the Christian intended to spike their drinks with the sleep aid melatonin:

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Foregoing the finer details (such as the Christian assuming the Muslims would drink alcohol), it’s the ethical and moral problems that are strikingly worrisome about this post. While melatonin itself can be harmless, its interactions and side effects are not. WebMD lists the following interactions:

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Without knowing the medical history of a person, administering drugs without their consent, even if you believe the drug to be harmful is wrong. The consequences of spiking anyone’s drinks for any reason, can never be justified and should not be encouraged. While I am deeply disturbed by the posting and the hatred in the heart of the person willing to put a family member’s life at risk (driving home while on melatonin can lead to an accident, as it falls under operating heavy machinery), we hope that users can flag and report the posting.

We all have differences in beliefs, but even if we harbour some form of enmity or dislike for a people, just as the Qur’an says, do not let your personal inclinations prevent you from being just and upright in your interactions:

“O you who believe! Stand out firmly for Allah and be just witnesses and let not the enmity and hatred of others make you avoid justice. Be just: that is nearer to piety, and fear Allah. Verily, Allah is Well ­Acquainted with what you do.” – Qur’an 5:8.

and God knows best.

Missionary Mishap: Made Up Sources

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This Missionary Mishap is quite hilarious. A polemicist became quite angry at one of my posts on Facebook regarding New Testament Textual Criticism. In my dialogue with Dr. White (1, 2, 3) I mentioned several sources for my research and arguments regarding the variant units of John 9:38 and John 20:28. One polemicist, a Kelly Melissa Mullen however, found me on Facebook and for some reason or the other, felt the need to tell me what sources I used, that I had copied my arguments from Dr. Ehrman and from some obscure book written more than a decade ago:

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After having made it clear over 20 times that neither Dr. Ehrman nor the aforementioned author in her comment were my sources, she continued to insist that they must have been. Why is that? Well she explains herself as follows:

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She thinks because my argument is similar and found elsewhere, despite earlier claiming it was an argument no other textual critic had used, she insisted that it must have come from Dr. Ehrman who is a textual critic. So in her mind, her logic flows as follows:

  • Ijaz has made claims that no other textual critic has made.
  • Dr. Ehrman who is a textual critic made a similar claim.
  • Therefore Ijaz made a claim that no other textual critic made, even though she argues my source was a textual critic, that of Dr. Ehrman.

The cognitive dissonance is palpable to the point that the Chinese government would warn you from going stepping into her home. To her, I made a claim no other textual critic would make, but my alleged source is a textual critic. Quite brilliant. She then had the audacity to tell me over 13 times that Dr. Ehrman must have been my source. Must have. I simply told her to watch my videos on the topic, I named several sources, none of which were Dr. Ehrman. So why did she claim him to be the source? Oh, because he may have said something similar to what I said. Unfortunately for her she was not familiar with the concept that correlation does not imply causation. I actually pointed this out to her:

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I ended the conversation with her, because she continued to insist that she knows better than I do, what sources I did use. A dialogue by definition involves two or more people (that’s what the di in dialogue implies), but to her, my own words about my own sources did not matter. What she assumed my sources to have been, must necessarily have been my sources. She was in effect having a soliloquy, something I mentioned to her.

She argued that she wanted to continue the “dialogue” with me, but the question begs itself, if you reject what the other person says, with your imagined conclusions, then where is the di in dialogue?

and God knows best.

Christmas: A Unique Birth?

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During the Christmas season, many celebrate the birth of Christ, the incarnation of God as something unique and unprecedented. It’s an incarnation of God that brought about the new covenant, allowing Christ to die for our sins and grant us eternal life. Or so that is what is said. There is however, nothing unique about God becoming incarnate from a Christian perspective, theophanies or the appearance of God in various forms throughout the Old Testament is a common and well-known theme, therefore it begs the question as to why any Christian should consider the incarnation to be a unique, once in a lifetime event.

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As already established in an earlier article, the date of Christmas itself is not Biblically based1. Those who hold to the December 25th date are merely doing so out of tradition and culture, as opposed to Christian beliefs or rites. While some may believe that there is some religious, Biblical basis for the celebration of the birth of whom they consider to be God, at no point in the New Testament (or early Christian documents) do any of the authors ever indicate that the disciples, apostles, presbyters, or patristics ever commemorated the birth of Christ himself.

Perhaps though what is more confusing is that according to Christian beliefs the incarnation was not unique. It was not unique in the sense that Christ had come to earth in an incarnate form previously, and it was also not unique for in the same incarnate form he also bore no sin. One Christian author argues:

Divine manifestations and revelatory experiences of the latter sort are commonly called theophanies (i.e., appearances of God). One of the most important forms that theophanies take in the OT is that of the Malak Yahweh, commonly translated as “the Angel of the LORD” or “the Angel of Yahweh”. According to the Old Testament Scriptures, this figure is an appearance of Yahweh in human form.2

The author identifies this Angel of Yahweh as being Jesus in no uncertain terms:

The earliest Christians, as well as many other Christian worthies throughout the centuries, have also viewed the Malak Yahweh as a distinct divine person within the Godhead, further explicating it as a Christophany, that is, an appearance of the pre-incarnate Logos or Word of God – the Lord Jesus Christ.3

In the Book of Genesis, it records the myth of Abraham’s meeting with three men who were the God (the Lord) in human form:

The Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent during the hottest time of the day. Abraham looked up and saw three men standing across from him. When he saw them he ran from the entrance of the tent to meet them and bowed low to the ground. He said, “My lord, if I have found favor in your sight, do not pass by and leave your servant. – Genesis 18:1-3.4

In conclusion, as it pertains to Christmas, the celebration of a unique incarnation of God is unremarkable. According to Christian beliefs, Christ was already incarnate in an earlier time and so the advent of the birth of Christ is not and should not be considered unique or something worthy of celebration unless one were Muslim. In the Islamic case, we do have reason to believe that Jesus’s birth was unique, that his birth manifested itself through the will of God, a birth without a father. While we do not celebrate Christmas under false pretenses, we do however have more of a reason to consider his birth unique and miraculous than our Christian brothers and sisters.

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and Allah knows best.

Sources:

  1. Three Reasons Why Christians Should Not Celebrate Christmas.
  2. The Malak Yahweh: Jesus, the Divine Messenger of the Old Testament.
  3. Ibid.
  4. NET Genesis 18:1-3.

Missionary Mishap: Muslim Funeral Rites?

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This is a tough one to explain. I thought I’d heard all the bad, ridiculous and inventive lies told about Muslims, but this one was funny, until I realised the guy was seriously taught these things. It would seem that spending too much time watching David Wood or Jonathan McLatchie videos would incline someone to think this way…

Note: Please click image to uncensor it. The image contains bad language. (NSFW)

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Please Click Image to Uncensor (NSFW)

and God knows best…

Cairo Church Bombing in Perspective

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Indeed, it is a tragedy whenever lives are lost. We all grieve when the lives of the innocent are taken. Unfortunately, there are people among us who thrive off of the deaths of others, who use the blood of the innocent as a means for their political, theological and financial motives. The loss of life in Cairo to a Church bombing is awful, as is the loss of life in Istanbul from the twin bombings in that city. Yet, we must keep perspective. Inasmuch as some people enjoy and thrive off of a persecution complex, the world of Christianity had a greater disaster with many more lives lost this week. However, those lives did not matter. The deaths of some Christians matter more than the deaths of others. In Nigeria, a Church collapsed killing as much as 160 people. Yet, since it was not a bomb, and because no Muslims were involved, the deaths of 160 Christians did not matter.

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160 or more Nigerian Christians are Dead from Church Collapse

Acts17/ David Wood? Silent about Nigeria, but loud about Cairo.

Answering Muslims’ Tony Costa? Silent about Nigeria.

McLatchie? Silent about Nigeria.

Nabeel Qureishi? Silent about Nigeria. Why the silence?

Do they only care about Christians if they’re not African? Do they care only if a Muslim is involved? They can’t get donation money or fame out of truly caring about their Christian brethren. Then again, they probably have short memories and while quick to put the blame of the Cairo bombing on Muslims and Islam (without evidence), a little bit of history goes a long way:

Egypt’s general prosecutor on Monday opened probe on former Interior Minister Habib el-Adly’s reported role in the New Year’s Eve bombing of al-Qiddissin Church in Alexandria in which 24 people were killed, an Egyptian lawyer told Al Arabiya.

Laywer Ramzi Mamdouh said he had presented a proclamation to Egyptian prosecutor Abd al-Majid Mahmud to investigate news media reports suggesting that the former interior ministry had masterminded the deadly church attack with the intent to blame it on Islamists, escalate government crackdown on them, and gain increased western support for the regime.

Then again, if they can’t be bothered to care about Nigerian Christians, why should we expect them to care about anything other than themselves?

and God knows best.

The Rise of Modern Christian Extremism

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The following are quotes from Christian author and journalist, Chris Hedges’ book “Wages of Rebellion”:

The breakdown of American society will trigger a popular backlash, which we glimpsed in the Occupy movement, but it will also energize the traditional armed vigilante groups that embrace a version of American fascism that fuses Christian and national symbols.

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Gabrielle Giffords, a member of the US House of Representatives, was shot in the head in January 2011 as she held a meeting in a supermarket parking lot in Arizona. Eighteen other people were wounded. Six of them died. Sarah Palin’s political action committee had previously targeted Giffords and other Democrats with crosshairs on an electoral map. When someone like Palin posts a map with crosshairs, saying, “Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!” there are desperate, enraged people with weapons who act. When Christian fascists stand in the pulpits of megachurches and denounce Barack Obama as the Antichrist, there are messianic believers who believe it. When a Republican lawmaker shouts “Baby killer!” at Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak, there are violent extremists who see the mission of saving the unborn as a sacred duty. They have little left to lose.

The kind of extremism that Hedges refers to, can be seen in the vitriol of Christian extremists such as Robert Spencer and Jonathan McLatchie. The next quote more accurately refers to these two missionaries:

Left unchecked, the hatred for radical Islam will transform itself into a hatred for Muslims. The hatred for undocumented workers will become a hatred for Mexicans and Central Americans.

More specifically, their self-delusion in referring to groups they dislike, as in the case of Jonathan McLatchie referring to Muslims as a cancer in European civilization speaks to their extremism. Hedges further says:

The ethnic groups, worshiping their own mythic virtues and courage and wallowing in historical examples of their own victimhood, vomited up demagogues and murderers such as Radovan Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic. To restore this mythological past they sought to remove, through exclusion and finally violence, competing ethnicities. The embrace of non-reality-based belief systems made communication among ethnic groups impossible. They no longer spoke the same cultural or historical language. They believed in their private fantasy. And because they believed in fantasy, they had no common historical narrative built around verifiable truth and no way finally to communicate with anyone who did not share their self-delusion.

In conclusion about these extremists, he says:

Those who retreat into fantasy cannot be engaged in rational discussion, for fantasy is all that is left of their tattered self-esteem. Attacks on their myths as untrue trigger not a discussion of facts and evidence but a ferocious emotional backlash.

That last quote reminds me solely of Sam Shamoun. Rather than engage in intellectual dialogue, he copy pastes articles, and insults those he disagrees with. Thus, the rise of Christian fascism, and its role in spreading hatred and violence towards Muslims is a growing pattern among polemicists such as Robert Spencer, David Wood, Sam Shamoun and now recently Jonathan McLatchie. The result of this hate can only be expressed as follows:

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and God knows best.

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