Western Europe - Xtian conversions and Muslim demographics (koenraad.elst@pandora.be) From: koenraad_elst koenraad.elst@pandora.be

Western Europe funds huge missionary programs worldwide. But consider it does not bother to do large-scale conversions on internal Muslims because it is mostly a fruitless endeavor.

It is true that the mainstream Churches have shamefully and shamelessly sold out to the dominant ideology and hence accept the Muslim presence as a matter of multiculturalism. There are fringe Protestant groups making an effort, but even they are more active in regions where conversion is easier because people are poor/buyable and Communism has eroded the communal backbone of local Islam, e.g. in Albania. They could have been successful with the first generation of Muslim immigrants, who were few and nervous and lacking in self-confidence, but now that big islands of Islamic culture have formed within our societies, Muslims find all the security they want among fellow Muslims.

However, you imply that mass (re)conversion has been proven a hopeless entreprise. I disagree, for the fact is that in Europe, conversion of Muslim immigrants simply hasn't been tried on any substantial scale.

And Western Europe is worried about Islamic reproduction. I surf western European websites and I don’t see anyone offering missionary conversion of Muslims as a realistic option. What I see discussed more often is making more babies or getting in non-Muslim immigrants to dilute the Muslim %

True, but this is mainly because the people most concerned about Muslim immigration are not very religious or don't identify politically with their religion. Now that the Catholic Church is at long last starting to face the problem, we may expect that it will propose not only stimulation of procreation and importation of Latin- Americans, but will even take up the conversion of Muslim immigrants in principle. In practice, however, the Catholic Church is now so weakened and so lacking in able personnel that it won't be able to make any difference.

As for New-Agers, neo-Pagans, Buddhists, etc., I have never heard them make an issue of converting Muslims, though once in a while an individual Muslim may feel attracted to their scene. We have not yet reached the point where such a Muslim in Europe should feel constrained from taking up his new religion by physical threats, the surrounding society still guarantees freedom to convert, but this may not last much longer.

That is why I believe the only practical solution is to expose Muslims, like native Christians before them, to the findings of scholarship and the scientific mode of thought, to undermine and sweep away their belief in the dogmas of their religion. After that, it is up to them, as it is to ex-Christians, to find their own way to Liberatio

-- Kal Penney (genera@hotmail.com), December 02, 2004

Answers

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-- Kal Penney (genera@hotmail.com), December 02, 2004.

Koenraad Elst on Christianity:

hristianity, a mistake

 The essence of Christianity is a belief, a particular truth claim: that Jesus was the sole son of God and that he redeemed mankind from sin by his crucifixion and resurrection. Modern Bible scholarship has made that belief untenable. Jesus was a troubled personality whose beliefs were entirely within the Jewish tradition, at least within its extremist fringe of people who expected Judgment Day to arrive within their own lifetime. He never founded a new religion, Saint Paul being the real inventor of Christianity as a sect separate from Judaism. The Gospels are highly doctored texts, rewritten to suit the theological developments and political needs of the budding Church. Thus, the injunction to pay taxes to the Romans ("give unto Caesar...”) and the depiction of Roman governor Pilate as innocent of Jesus’ crucifixion were included to mollify the Romans after the defeat of the Jewish revolt in AD 70. Most importantly, Jesus never rose from the dead. The decisive difference between the dead and the living is that the living are someplace in this world, while Jesus, like all dead men, is nowhere to be found in this world. He was spirited away in the “Ascension to Heaven”, which amounts to dying: he left this world. Of course you could say that “his spirit lives on”, but that is equally true of other inspiring characters, both historical and fictional.

The reason why Christians are a shrinking minority in Europe is that an educated population, which applies its mind to religious questions, cannot keep on managing the contradiction between this faith and reason forever. This is not for want of trying: generations of Christian intellectuals have tried to harmonize faith and reason. The Saint Thomas institute (Leuven, Belgium) where I studied philosophy was founded in 1889 as an instrument to prove the basic unity between Aquinas’s Christian philosophy and modern science. But to no avail: most professors teaching there now are no longer practising Catholics themselves. Many moderns including myself have discovered that religion is still relevant, that the religious urge has survived the interiorization of the scientific worldview, that “the 21st century will either be religious or not be at all” (André Malraux); but the Christian belief cannot satisfy that religious need, because we cannot base our lives on fairy-tales anymore.

-- __ (__@__.__), December 05, 2004.

If your "religion" accepts only that which reason can access, you might as well call it science. The reason why Christians are a shrinking minority in Europe is that a population which attempts to approach religious questions from a strictly rational viewpoint resigns itself to spiritual ignorance. There is no contradiction between faith and reason. They are simply distinct entities which are applicable to different kinds of questions. Trying to understand the Resurrection of Christ from the viewpoint of reason alone will get you just about as far as trying to understand quadratic equations from the viewpoint of faith alone.

-- Paul M. (PaulCyp@cox.net), December 05, 2004.

islam has no contadiction between faith & reason. koranic texts conform to new scientific discoveries, such as big bang, expanding universe, the quantum physical nature of matter.

theer are no genuine muslim conversions to christianity

-- sb (sajid6969@hotmail.com), December 23, 2004.

“theer are no genuine muslim conversions to christianity”

What gives you that idea sb? I personally know a lady who converted from islam to Christianity and she seems VERY genuine about it to me. In fact she was so committed to her convesrion that she persited with it oin spite of a good deal of ostracism and abuse from her family and some (not all) other muslims.

-- Steve (55555@aol.com), December 23, 2004.