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With Whom Do You Want To Associate?

If you were a traditional Muslim, would you want to associate yourself with people who were constantly attacking your prophet, your holy book, your values, and your religion? ~Dinesh D’Souza Well, obviously not.  I don’t expect them to do any such thing.  It is the neocon Islamophiles who think they can “win over” part of […]

If you were a traditional Muslim, would you want to associate yourself with people who were constantly attacking your prophet, your holy book, your values, and your religion? ~Dinesh D’Souza

Well, obviously not.  I don’t expect them to do any such thing.  It is the neocon Islamophiles who think they can “win over” part of the Islamic world against the “Islamofascist” part, and they are the more foolish for it.  I don’t expect Muslims of any stripe to associate with me–I wouldn’t want them to be associationists!  (Okay, that was a bad Islamic theology joke–does D’Souza even get it?)  But, then, as a Christian, I don’t want to associate myself with people who say–indeed whose scripture requires them to say–that my Saviour and God was a mere man, who deny His Resurrection (and even His Crucifixion!), mock the Holy Trinity, desecrate and destroy the sites dedicated to His glory and His holy Name, deface the sacred images of His beloved saints and His All-Holy, Most Pure and Ever-Virgin Mother and kill my co-religionists without mercy.  The people most inclined to agree with some of the moral judgements (if not the juridical punishments) of “traditional Muslims” are the very people who have no time at all for people whose entire religion is a shoddy, warmed-over version of the worst heresies and deviations from our religion.  With Islam, significant doctrinal differences really do make all the difference, not least because these differences have dramatic, immediate real-world consequences (as, indeed, does almost every significant theological difference).  I generally tend to think that agreement on “common values” is not entirely possible with people who have a completely different doctrine of God, since in some of their most basic convictions they believe something that I regard as manifest falsehood.  If they are that wrong about God, how much less will they understand about the less important things of worldly matters?  If they are actively hostile to the Church’s teaching about God and His saving economy, how in the world can I justify taking their side in any quarrel, no matter how many superficial points of agreement D’Souza can throw out there?

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