Iv’e researched much of the Koran and I read up on a couple of intersting facts.
The Koran states that once a man is dead, the after life is preceded with rivers flowing with honey and alchohol (because alchohol is prohibited to be intaken on Earth) and 40 or so virgins for every man. The funny thing is that the being a Roman Catholic, the Islamic religion is basically setting you up with strict guidelines to follow in your “earthly” life, while the Catholic belief prepares you for the afterlife. Also, as Catholics, we beleive that the Crusades were wrong, but Muslims still think that the Crusades were done for the right cause…seems that the quote “All Muslims are war mongers” isn’t that steriotypical afterall…
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You’ve put this in Comments on Cecil’s Columns, but I’m not aware of one of Cecil’s columns dealing with this issue (at least, not directly) and you don’t seem to be quoting or commenting on any tangential issues. Hence, I’m moving this to Great Debates, the place for discussions on religions. No big deal, you’re new and we’re forgiving.
Um, this is not the impression I get from certain Catholics. Faithful Catholics - those who are wholeheartedly devoted to the Vatican and what the Holy See teaches - believe that the Crusades were faught to liberate the Holy Land from Muslim occupation. As modernism has caught up with Catholicism, it has become almost necessary to assert that the Crusades were nothing but immoral, unjust Christian aggression. (As in most issues, the truth is somewhere in the middle.)
Muslims always have and always will consider the Crusades to be evil, immoral, unjust, and uncalled for. (This has to do with the fact that Muslims were obeying the mandates of Islam, which command Muslims to expand the political realm of Islam where the values and standards of Islam might rule the people, regardless of their religion. The expansion of the religious borders of Islam came after the expansion of Islam’s political borders. An important distinction: the wars of conquest were not wars to convert people to Islam but rather to bring Islamic rule over them.) Many Muslims, to this day, harbor some level of distrust and opposition and anger towards Christians - particularly Catholics - because of the Crusades.
Now, if you are talking about crusading, as in waging holy war, that’s another issue. Today, Muslims are divided as to how appropriate warfare is, especially in the absence of a caliph.
