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Monday, 3 February 2020

Muslim-Christian interfaith dialogue





Instead of being surrounded in paradise by the 72 virgins he believed he was promised in the Quran the latest Islamic 'martyr' will have found himself disappointed along with all the Islamic 'martyrs' who did not know Christ.

Reporting on Interfaith Relations in 2013 the Pew Research Centre stated: "Muslims around the world agree that Islam is the one true faith that leads to salvation. Many Muslims also say it is their religious duty to convert others to Islam."


By contrast the Anglican Church shows no appetite for converting others to Christianity despite the Great Commission. Instead they provide space in churches and cathedrals for inappropriate interfaith meetings, the implication being that many senior Anglicans simply do not understand what they are doing.


If they watch edition 570 of Anglican Unscripted (starting at position 10.40) they should be left in no doubt that Islam is incompatible with Christianity and that Muslims along with other non-Christians need to be saved.

Postscript [05.02.2020]

Lord Pearson of Rannoch: "My Question in the House of Lords yesterday asking the government whether they will go to the root of the problem and encourage our Muslim leaders to reform their religion to stop it being used to carry out attacks like in Streatham on Sunday. Their answer shows they will not." 

The answer given: "My Lords, it is a matter of regret that these outrageous attacks are not limited to any one section of the community and are not to be attributed to religious belief but to a corruption of that belief", indicating that some serious reading is required.

From Christian Concern: "What is Islam? Is it a religion of peace? Read this article by @TDieppe
https://christianconcern.com/resource/is-islam-a-religion-of-peace/

17 comments:

  1. I have never been able to work out in my mind a valid reason for Christian/Muslim interfaith meetings.
    The aim of such meetings should be to find some common ground in the meeting of minds.There is a point in various Christian denominations seeking a common goal and purpose,but there is no progress to be made in priests inviting Muslims into their consecrated buildings, when there is no chance of there being any agreement on the “chairman”. We worship a Trinitarian God ,who is Love,and whose Son was born of Mary.
    The Qur’an, revealed by the Muslim God’s messenger- Mohammad, advocates killing of non- believers.
    The agenda for meetings is not agreed.

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    1. I'm instinctively inclined to favour dialogues on the Churchillian principle that 'jaw-jaw is preferable to war-war'.

      Having said that, my one single experience of a dialogue with Muslims wasn't especially encouraging. Some years ago a friend of mine who at that time chaired a branch of the British Humanist Association invited me to one of their meetings, to which they'd invited a local imam and some of his flock.

      I didn't think the meeting a success. The imam was quite a master of the courteous-aggressive technique not infrequently adopted by fundamentalists, regardless of creed! Most of the humanists - a few National Secular Society types were a little, but only a little, more pointed - exhibited the deferent anxiety not to offend which characterizes the liberal left in dealing with 'people of colour', as the latest fashionable term has it.

      Neither approach being conducive to genuine dialogue, dialogue it was not.

      Delete
  2. Simple soul so rightly named. Where does your bible say that God is love outside St Johns first epistle? Jesus says much more about the wrath and judgement of God than the love of God. Every single Syrah of the Quran apart from the ninth identifies God as the merciful and compassionate. Even just our book of psalms has more material exhorting violence and war than the entire Quran.

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    1. That must be the explanation for hordes of Jews and Christians invading the middle East, throwing gays off rooftops, suicide bombing markets, embassies & barracks, taking hostages and filming their behadings with a knife, running amok in High Streets stabbing multiple bystanders and driving HGVs through crowds of pedestrian shoppers.
      Correct?
      Or is it just that the vast majority of "Westerners" in the 21st century have turned their backs on religious texts as superstitious baloney only preached nowadays by eccentrics?

      Delete
    2. Ms Lash: I fear your tendentious response displays colossal ignorance of the New Testament's picture of Jesus and manifests a warped view of Christianity. Do your homework and present a balanced viewpoint, please.
      Rob

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  3. Perhaps, “Exodus”, you might more critically examine the history of your own religion. Even consider recently the actions of Orthodox and Catholic Christians in the former Yugoslavia.

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    1. How presumptions of you, I don't have a religion Maureen. I decided a millennium ago that all religions are superstitious baloney.

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  4. Dear Mr Anonymous, please employ your clear expertise in the New Testament and try to answer my first question.

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    1. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, THE LOVE OF GOD, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit... 2 Corinthians 13. 14
      Anyone who loves me will heed what I say; then my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him. John 14: 23
      Nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8: 39
      Why does the NT speak so much of the love of God? Because God is love. Jesus refers to the close bond between himself and the Father, even telling us that if we have seen him we have seen the Father. The NT is keen to stress the loving nature of Christ, but it is not a wishy-washy, over-sentimentalised love, but a sacrificial love. The Father suffers as he watches his son die on the cross; but in order to redeem the world, he makes himself powerless.
      Seymour

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  5. A no-hoper, I fear if you can't see what's on virtually every page of the NT!
    Rob

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  6. As I previously stated, and Seymour has shown, Ms Lash, an Islamic sympathiser, has displayed a colossal ignorance of the content of the NT.
    Rob

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    1. She will make an ideal candidate for the next vacancy on the bench of the Church in Wales.

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    2. She could be symbolically offered a bible at her enthronement

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    3. To what end?
      The current crop of berks on the bench probably only use them as paperweights or door wedges.

      Delete
  7. PP. I agree with the points raised. Christian can by all means dialogue with other faiths, but that is wsrw it should mutually stop.

    Having read my Church Times today I cannot believe how far this multi faith concept has gone.

    The Anglican Chapel of St Hikdas College Oxford, is to be lost to Anglican only worship. A decision by the authorities regardless of the chapels Anglican chaplain has decided to turn the Chapel over to a multi faith centre. The 125 year old Chapel was demolished and a temporary Chapel in an adjacent building became its home. Now as the Chapel can be rebuilt, it has been decided that a multi-faith centre to support a wider faith community in the undergraduate body.

    As the current chaplain has said "the decision was taken independent of me... When it comes to decoration and iconography, a multi faith room inevitably tends to be... blaned".

    The article is on page 8 of CT.

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    1. A few weeks back I listened to a Radio 4 interview with a guy who's apparently Westminster Abbey's official historian, appointed by the Dean and Chapter. He nattered away blithely about the changing functions of the Abbey across the centuriee.

      It began, he opined, because the last of the Anglo-Saxon kings wanted to have a community of monks offering Mass and generally praying for the monarch both in life and after death. A purpose which the Norman dynasty, sharing the same worldview, were happy to endorse and perpetuate when they seized the English throne.

      A state of affairs which continued uninterrupted until Henry VIII, coveting the wealth of the monasteries, decided that it'd be expedient to dissolve them and dole out their lands to his barons and bigwigs to cement their loyalty to him. Thereinafter the Abbey was preserved as a secularized royal peculiar to continue to pray for monarchs and to provide a religious rationale for their authority. So it morphed into a Christian shrine of Englishness and the cult of monarchy.

      Then, as the British Empire gradually came into existence from the seventeenth century onwards, it further developed into a sort of central shrine for our glorious Empire, reaching its apogee in the decades before the First World War.

      And now, in a post-imperial era when Britain has become a multi-cultural and multi-faith society, his cheerful prediction was that its next reinvention would be to become a national temple for all the multiplicity of faiths and beliefs which now exist in England.

      The Kingdom of God, the teaching of Jesus and the notion of the Church as a divine society and the extension of the Incarnation didn't appear to figure in his thinking in the slightest. It was all about England, and only peripherally about God.

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  8. And, I'll expect they shall say that St David's day will be on the first of March this year 😀

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