ayinla2005:

To start with,who is the author/originator of "the prophet of doom"?.

@babyosisi said she is on this forum as a missioner,what is her mission?to discredit islam and give it a bad name?like others?what do you call such a person in your christianity?

To all who care to listen,The author/originator of the so-called "prophet of doom" are christians,the bad ones like babyosisi-the missioner who tend to give islam a bad name,in the name of evangelising the world.Quran and hadith are been quote out of context,just to rubbish a particular image and a particular religion.The people on this forum seems to be here for the primary purpose of rubbishing islam and its legacy.If that is what you are thought in the bible/church,may God help you.God is in control.

@ayinla2005

With all due respect my fellow Nairaland user,  you're missing the point. People should be free to inquire, question, agree and disagree. If people feel the need to argue about an issue, why shouldn't they? They may not present their arguments in a way that everyone finds agreeable but that's their perogative.

Not everyone on this forum is commenting from a Christian point of view, so what have you got to say about that? What of the people who have - if i may borrow your words, rubbished Christianity? Or those who have asked questions about Islam and have not been answered?

I would ask that before you make such sweeping statements, check first.

Cheers

@babyosisi
now you are adopting precisely the tone that would move us somewhere, because indulging in opinions and hate will not answer all our questions. we have much to learn, christians, jews as well as muslims because god did not give us all the answers. so given your tone which seems now shed of ur earlier venom i think i'll indulge u.

1. "The American GI that raped an Iraqi girl,did he do it in the name of Christ?":
 no, i dont believe he said that, but since christianity is all about peace i wonder why capt green did what he did. except if we admit that either he was not well-versed in his biblical teachings, or he interpreted "thou shalt not kill" his own way. or maybe he was just plain evil and dint give two hoots about christ. such people cut across all religions.

2."The US soldiers that killed 15 innocent Iraqi's were they commanded to do so according to the teachings of Christ,did they even claim to be Christians."
no, but even if they said christ asked them to kill we might simply say they were nutty, as in the case of the Manson family. but if it were muslims definitely we WILL say they were terrorists even if they didnt claim any quranic injunction to kill.

3. "Hitler killed Jews,was it his Christian faith(for he had none) that led him to kill his fellow humans of a different race?Whose example was he following?"  :
hitler sought to exterminate the jews precisely because they were jews, and he himself was a christian.
remember that mohammed Atah who supposedly was the mastermind of 9/11 never left any video or whatever that he was killing in the name of god; that assertion was based on the already ingrained perception of islam. at the same time though i honestly dont look upon osama as a hero, we only have the united state's words that HE was responsible for 9/11, the same US that led the world to believe that an iraqi invasion was necessitated by the "fact" that saddam was amassing WMD.  but that of course does not mean osama wasnt doing a disservice to islam. he was turned out of several muslim countries before he found refuge among his fellow mujaheddin in afghanistan, which shouldnt surprise anyone because afghanistan was and is a lawless country.

i too am a nigerian born and bred in the north. and the gravity of religious atrocity you refer to in the north is blown out of proportion when you say it like that. we have had a few crises in kaduna where both muslims and christians were killed (the proportion of muslims to christians in kaduna is almost 50-50). but the root cause of the troubles in kaduna are based on ethnicity and the clamor by the minorities (who incidentally happen to be almost all christians) for a separate state. everything else there is incidentally tied in to that delicate state of affairs, and im saying this because any attempt to clarify may lead to my appearing bias and i want to try and be objective about this.

the crises in jos i cannot fully explain because i have never been to plateau state and the at same time the whole settler-indigene matter is something new to me, the dynamics of which im yet to fully grasp. but  i still detect an aura of ethnic xenophobia in there.

kano is a hotbed. we northerners ourselves do not feel entirely safe there because next to lagos i believe kano has the largest number of touts , thugs and miscreants a large proportion of which are educated neither in islam nor western education. perhaps it is to be expected that if hausas (i say hausas, not muslims) are massacred in ketu, mile 12, oshodi etc such elements may be the first to take up arms.

surprisingly there never was a crises in zamfara, sokoto, kebbi, or other core muslim states. and equally more surprising muslims in the southwest do not engage in the rampage we see in the north whenever one of the religious flashpoints go off. the muslims in the southsouth or southeast do not incur the wrath of christianity and i say perhaps this is because it is more convenient to hide the tribalistic animosities between the hausas and the rest of nigeria under the cloak of religious persecution. and i seriously wonder, babyosisi, where in the north are christians denied their right to exixtence or religion. the masses of youths who come for NYSC mostly have their homegrown prejudices stripped from their eyes.

if justification for calling us baboons lies in the matter of having lost your family then you have my sympathy. but in your logic hausas who lost families too in the so-called reprisal attacks in the southeast should see the ibos as baboons (of course not!). if you say the hausas in the east deserve to die because thier kin killed ibos in the north then the whole concept of "innocent victims" fly out the window, and my hypothetical iraqi can consider ANY american as fair game for the crimes of marines in haditha and mahmudiyya. what moral foundation supports such reasoning?

if indeed islam hates christianity and our prophet asked us to murder christians as our duty and as a way to paradise, i daresay that 9/11 would have been targetted at rome. was the vatican ever attacked by muslims? did the suicide bombers swear a fatwah against popes, bishops, priests, churches, monasteries, nunneries, the chistian congregation? besides instances in nigeria, how many times do we see on cnn muslims or self-professed muslims continually blowing up christian communities or places of worship? are christians massacred in jordan, saudi arabia, malaysia, qatar, dubai, oman, egypt, algeria or lebanon (the population of which over 40% are christians)? did osama bin ladin declare a jihad on christianity or on american and british societies? is hamas and hizbollah on a direct quest to kill "infidels" , or are they targetting israeli and sometimes american interests?

contrary to popular assumptions, bin ladin declared his little war on america not because of palestine or israel's exixtence; his gripe was american troops in saudi arabia which oddly enough were sent there to protect saudi arabia and the rest of the muslim world against the aggressions of a muslim, saddam hussain. he did not declare his ignominous jihad on christendom just as not all the muslim world sees in him a savior of islam.

so why america and britain? i guess its a matter of geopolitics. muslim societies are being told by half-witted clerics that america is responsible for all their woes and backwardness in western education. they are told that america is out to shape the world in a mold that precludes their faith. sometimes american foreign policy as far as the middleeast is concerned is condemnable from the muslim perspective (and not just muslims, the International herald tribune of august 13 in its editorial blames the bush administration's mideast policy and the handling of the iraqi crisis on most of the upsurge in terrorism we see now, even american democrats and moderate republicans say as much. liebermann's fall reflects this disenchantment).
i am not trying to make excuses for the terrorists but a little of their rationale goes along the same sides of the road as this disenchantment with US mideast policy. but that does not render anyone the basis morally or religiously to kill, and this is why it hurts us when the rest of the world finds it convenient to denounce islam and its about 2 billion adherents as upstarts bent on a crusade for the crimes of a few thousand. islam goes beyond a few hausa illiterates and some violent arabs. just as im sure christianity has ascendancy over captain green and other monsters who kill in whatever name.

so babyosisi, if hitler had to invent another bible to add a pillar to his quest, then is it not to be seen that the terrorists invent all sorts of islamic reasonings to kill?


@davidylan
you say:
2. It is not the norm for US soldiers to go raping and killing other innocent civilians, on the other hand your "hypothetical" bomb strapped Iraqi believes it is his sacred duty to kill all "infidels"! Please expound!
haditha and mahmudiyya are not isolated or first time cases of US army atrocities. dont lose sight of My Lai in vietnam or No Gun Rihn in the same vietnam. if you have read the Pentagon Papers you should know the whole vietnam war was a long tale of american atrocities which nixon sought to bury. the carpet bombing of rice fields and civilian settlements do qualify as atrocities, so there are precedents for mahmudiyya and haditha. and i guess the Abu ghraib incident do not qualify as atrocities in your view even though it prompted almost 24 retired generals to call for rumsfeld's resignation.
and my hypothetical bomb strapped iraqi was killing because of his indignation over the senseless murder of the girl and her family just as green claimed he was enraged by the ambush laid by iraqi dissidents that killed his friends days earlier. so rage begets rage. you see you have already betrayed your tunnel perception by playing the religious card in a hypothetical situation when you said my iraqi suicide "believes it is his sacred duty to kill all 'infidels' " when i clearly said  he was killing in retaliation for what green and co did.

and if you say he was wrong to kill, that reprisal is murder and an atrocity, then perhaps you may care to "expound" on your indignation when ibos in the southeast went on a "reprisal" killing spree? or perhaps you had no misgivings given that it is "hausa baboons" and muslims that were being killed.

those who wish to know why Prophet Muhammad married so  many wives may care to checkk www.anwary-islam.com/women/prophets-wives.htm. i dont want to hog posting space by pasting it  .

it should be borne in mind that the society of Muhammad's time was one in which polygyny was the norm, and even in the bible we find instances of it as, in the words of john esposito, "polygyny was also permitted in biblical and even postbiblical judaism. from abraham, david, and solomon down to the reformation period, polygyny was practiced." (The Straight Path, pp 19-20). david had six wives and numerous concubines (2 samuel 5:13, 1 chronicles 3:1-9, 14:3), solomon was said to have as many as 700 wives and 300 concubines  (1 kings 11:3) and his son Rehoboam had 18 wives and 60 concubines (2 chronicles 11:21). also caesar E. farah (islam:Beliefs and Observances p69) writes that "the New testament contains no specific injunction against plural marriages and it was common place for the nobility among jews and christians to contract plural marriages. lutjer spoke of it with toleration".

you spoke of racism in the quran, but you neglected the apparent denunciation of the rest of mankind when christ said  "I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel" (Matthew 15:24). so salvation is not applicable to the rest of mankind, the "gentiles"? this occured in matthew 15 and mark 7 when christ and his disciples went to sidon and tyre and entered the caananite woman's house. she pleaded with christ and what did he do? he called her a dog, the hebrew derogatory term for a gentile.

you also spoke of slavery, and i find nowhere in the bible where it is condemned. infact the old testament seems to suggest that the life of a slave is less important than the life of a bull. consider this:
Exodus 21:28 "If a bull gores a man or a woman to death, the bull must be stoned to death, and its meat must not be eaten. But the owner of the bull will not be held responsible."

Exodus 21:32 "If the bull gores a male or female slave, the owner must pay thirty shekels of silver to the master of the slave, and the bull must be stoned but not to death"

Leviticus 25:44-46 "Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can will them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly."

I have not had time to contribute on this forum for sometime.

The attempts by some of you to discredit Islam and Prophet Muhammad shows lack of wisdom. Even the Pope will tell you how wrong you are. The Almighty says Islam is His appointed religion and that Muhammad is His Messanger and you are doubting. The wise people will leave you to your doubt, afterall some people also doubted Jesus. It is the nature of man that whenever something honorable comes to him from his Lord, he will first of all doubt. Whatever may be your opinion does not count and does not reduce the fact that Muhammad came with the last testament, Quran.

Believe or don't believe, those who are given wisdom when the signs of God are rehearsed to them, they recognise it.

Lets keep the post simple and concise please,
No need to be writing epistles up in here,
Its datz gonna bore the crap outta evryone and make the thread uninteresting

neoteny there is a Muslim ideology that you and any peace loving muslim must get off your heads that is that the opposite of Islam is American.
You keep using Captain Green as an example of a Criminal Christian.Just because he is American does not make him a Christian.
You must get that mindset off your thinking.

America is a secular state that believes in freewill.
Anybody can worship whatever they want to as long as it does not infringe on the civil rights of another.
The Muslima in a hijab or burqua has exactly the same rights under the law as a filthy LovePeddler in Las Vegas.
A concept that Islam cannot grasp because its either their way or the highway.

You are the first Muslim I've seen on this forum denounce terrorism partricularly Osama Bin laden.
Others have given excuses ranging from arabs are millitants to Hausas are militants.
What type of moronic excuse is that?
One innocent soul Christian or Muslim did not need to die in Northern Nigeria in a rampage started by Muslims some came straight out of a mosque to attack,you wonder what they are being taught. One soul is too many.

are you saying we only need evidence of matyrdom tapes to differentiate muslim killers from wannabes?I beg to differ.

I denounce the Southern hoodlums that slaughtered innocent Muslims in Aba and Onitsha.They should be punished to the full extent of the law.
I for one feel that the pedophilic priests should be castrated without anaesthesia and thrown into a den of lions if that is their punishment.
We are quick to denounce any ills and not celebrate them.

All Muslims ought to do same

I

Mystique
funny how you didnt say that when before

when the pastor,priest and bishop sexually harrass young boys  , they are just white people with some sicko brain

ARE  BLACKS UNDER-ACHIEVERS?

ARE NIGERIANS NATURALLY 419ERS?

_{babyosisi ur posting stats is alarming racism,sectarishm,religious conflict}

The Real History of the Crusades
By Thomas F. Madden

With the possible exception of Umberto Eco, medieval scholars are not used to getting much media attention. We tend to be a quiet lot (except during the annual bacchanalia we call the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, of all places), poring over musty chronicles and writing dull yet meticulous studies that few will read. Imagine, then, my surprise when within days of the September 11 attacks, the Middle Ages suddenly became relevant.

As a Crusade historian, I found the tranquil solitude of the ivory tower shattered by journalists, editors, and talk-show hosts on tight deadlines eager to get the real scoop. What were the Crusades?, they asked. When were they? Just how insensitive was President George W. Bush for using the word "crusade" in his remarks? With a few of my callers I had the distinct impression that they already knew the answers to their questions, or at least thought they did. What they really wanted was an expert to say it all back to them. For example, I was frequently asked to comment on the fact that the Islamic world has a just grievance against the West. Doesn’t the present violence, they persisted, have its roots in the Crusades’ brutal and unprovoked attacks against a sophisticated and tolerant Muslim world? In other words, aren’t the Crusades really to blame?

Osama bin Laden certainly thinks so. In his various video performances, he never fails to describe the American war against terrorism as a new Crusade against Islam. Ex-president Bill Clinton has also fingered the Crusades as the root cause of the present conflict. In a speech at Georgetown University, he recounted (and embellished) a massacre of Jews after the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 and informed his audience that the episode was still bitterly remembered in the Middle East. (Why Islamist terrorists should be upset about the killing of Jews was not explained.) Clinton took a beating on the nation’s editorial pages for wanting so much to blame the United States that he was willing to reach back to the Middle Ages. Yet no one disputed the ex-president’s fundamental premise.

Well, almost no one. Many historians had been trying to set the record straight on the Crusades long before Clinton discovered them. They are not revisionists, like the American historians who manufactured the Enola Gay exhibit, but mainstream scholars offering the fruit of several decades of very careful, very serious scholarship. For them, this is a "teaching moment," an opportunity to explain the Crusades while people are actually listening. It won’t last long, so here goes.

Misconceptions about the Crusades are all too common. The Crusades are generally portrayed as a series of holy wars against Islam led by power-mad popes and fought by religious fanatics. They are supposed to have been the epitome of self-righteousness and intolerance, a black stain on the history of the Catholic Church in particular and Western civilization in general. A breed of proto-imperialists, the Crusaders introduced Western aggression to the peaceful Middle East and then deformed the enlightened Muslim culture, leaving it in ruins. For variations on this theme, one need not look far. See, for example, Steven Runciman’s famous three-volume epic, History of the Crusades, or the BBC/A&E documentary, The Crusades, hosted by Terry Jones. Both are terrible history yet wonderfully entertaining.

So what is the truth about the Crusades? Scholars are still working some of that out. But much can already be said with certainty. For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression—an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity—and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion—has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily Christian areas in the world—quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.

That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.

Pope Urban II called upon the knights of Christendom to push back the conquests of Islam at the Council of Clermont in 1095. The response was tremendous. Many thousands of warriors took the vow of the cross and prepared for war. Why did they do it? The answer to that question has been badly misunderstood. In the wake of the Enlightenment, it was usually asserted that Crusaders were merely lacklands and ne’er-do-wells who took advantage of an opportunity to rob and pillage in a faraway land. The Crusaders’ expressed sentiments of piety, self-sacrifice, and love for God were obviously not to be taken seriously. They were only a front for darker designs.

During the past two decades, computer-assisted charter studies have demolished that contrivance. Scholars have discovered that crusading knights were generally wealthy men with plenty of their own land in Europe. Nevertheless, they willingly gave up everything to undertake the holy mission. Crusading was not cheap. Even wealthy lords could easily impoverish themselves and their families by joining a Crusade. They did so not because they expected material wealth (which many of them had already) but because they hoped to store up treasure where rust and moth could not corrupt. They were keenly aware of their sinfulness and eager to undertake the hardships of the Crusade as a penitential act of charity and love. Europe is littered with thousands of medieval charters attesting to these sentiments, charters in which these men still speak to us today if we will listen. Of course, they were not opposed to capturing booty if it could be had. But the truth is that the Crusades were notoriously bad for plunder. A few people got rich, but the vast majority returned with nothing.

* * *

Urban II gave the Crusaders two goals, both of which would remain central to the eastern Crusades for centuries. The first was to rescue the Christians of the East. As his successor, Pope Innocent III, later wrote:

How does a man love according to divine precept his neighbor as himself when, knowing that his Christian brothers in faith and in name are held by the perfidious Muslims in strict confinement and weighed down by the yoke of heaviest servitude, he does not devote himself to the task of freeing them? , Is it by chance that you do not know that many thousands of Christians are bound in slavery and imprisoned by the Muslims, tortured with innumerable torments?

"Crusading," Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith has rightly argued, was understood as an "an act of love"—in this case, the love of one’s neighbor. The Crusade was seen as an errand of mercy to right a terrible wrong. As Pope Innocent III wrote to the Knights Templar, "You carry out in deeds the words of the Gospel, ‘Greater love than this hath no man, that he lay down his life for his friends.’"

The second goal was the liberation of Jerusalem and the other places made holy by the life of Christ. The word crusade is modern. Medieval Crusaders saw themselves as pilgrims, performing acts of righteousness on their way to the Holy Sepulcher. The Crusade indulgence they received was canonically related to the pilgrimage indulgence. This goal was frequently described in feudal terms. When calling the Fifth Crusade in 1215, Innocent III wrote:

Consider most dear sons, consider carefully that if any temporal king was thrown out of his domain and perhaps captured, would he not, when he was restored to his pristine liberty and the time had come for dispensing justice look on his vassals as unfaithful and traitors, unless they had committed not only their property but also their persons to the task of freeing him? , And similarly will not Jesus Christ, the king of kings and lord of lords, whose servant you cannot deny being, who joined your soul to your body, who redeemed you with the Precious Blood, condemn you for the vice of ingratitude and the crime of infidelity if you neglect to help Him?

The reconquest of Jerusalem, therefore, was not colonialism but an act of restoration and an open declaration of one’s love of God. Medieval men knew, of course, that God had the power to restore Jerusalem Himself—indeed, He had the power to restore the whole world to His rule. Yet as St. Bernard of Clairvaux preached, His refusal to do so was a blessing to His people:

Again I say, consider the Almighty’s goodness and pay heed to His plans of mercy. He puts Himself under obligation to you, or rather feigns to do so, that He can help you to satisfy your obligations toward Himself,  I call blessed the generation that can seize an opportunity of such rich indulgence as this.

It is often assumed that the central goal of the Crusades was forced conversion of the Muslim world. Nothing could be further from the truth. From the perspective of medieval Christians, Muslims were the enemies of Christ and His Church. It was the Crusaders’ task to defeat and defend against them. That was all. Muslims who lived in Crusader-won territories were generally allowed to retain their property and livelihood, and always their religion. Indeed, throughout the history of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, Muslim inhabitants far outnumbered the Catholics. It was not until the 13th century that the Franciscans began conversion efforts among Muslims. But these were mostly unsuccessful and finally abandoned. In any case, such efforts were by peaceful persuasion, not the threat of violence.

The Crusades were wars, so it would be a mistake to characterize them as nothing but piety and good intentions. Like all warfare, the violence was brutal (although not as brutal as modern wars). There were mishaps, blunders, and crimes. These are usually well-remembered today. During the early days of the First Crusade in 1095, a ragtag band of Crusaders led by Count Emicho of Leiningen made its way down the Rhine, robbing and murdering all the Jews they could find. Without success, the local bishops attempted to stop the carnage. In the eyes of these warriors, the Jews, like the Muslims, were the enemies of Christ. Plundering and killing them, then, was no vice. Indeed, they believed it was a righteous deed, since the Jews’ money could be used to fund the Crusade to Jerusalem. But they were wrong, and the Church strongly condemned the anti-Jewish attacks.

Fifty years later, when the Second Crusade was gearing up, St. Bernard frequently preached that the Jews were not to be persecuted:

Ask anyone who knows the Sacred Scriptures what he finds foretold of the Jews in the Psalm. "Not for their destruction do I pray," it says. The Jews are for us the living words of Scripture, for they remind us always of what our Lord suffered,  Under Christian princes they endure a hard captivity, but "they only wait for the time of their deliverance."

Nevertheless, a fellow Cistercian monk named Radulf stirred up people against the Rhineland Jews, despite numerous letters from Bernard demanding that he stop. At last Bernard was forced to travel to Germany himself, where he caught up with Radulf, sent him back to his convent, and ended the massacres.

It is often said that the roots of the Holocaust can be seen in these medieval pogroms. That may be. But if so, those roots are far deeper and more widespread than the Crusades. Jews perished during the Crusades, but the purpose of the Crusades was not to kill Jews. Quite the contrary: Popes, bishops, and preachers made it clear that the Jews of Europe were to be left unmolested. In a modern war, we call tragic deaths like these "collateral damage." Even with smart technologies, the United States has killed far more innocents in our wars than the Crusaders ever could. But no one would seriously argue that the purpose of American wars is to kill women and children.

By any reckoning, the First Crusade was a long shot. There was no leader, no chain of command, no supply lines, no detailed strategy. It was simply thousands of warriors marching deep into enemy territory, committed to a common cause. Many of them died, either in battle or through disease or starvation. It was a rough campaign, one that seemed always on the brink of disaster. Yet it was miraculously successful. By 1098, the Crusaders had restored Nicaea and Antioch to Christian rule. In July 1099, they conquered Jerusalem and began to build a Christian state in Palestine. The joy in Europe was unbridled. It seemed that the tide of history, which had lifted the Muslims to such heights, was now turning.

* * *

But it was not. When we think about the Middle Ages, it is easy to view Europe in light of what it became rather than what it was. The colossus of the medieval world was Islam, not Christendom. The Crusades are interesting largely because they were an attempt to counter that trend. But in five centuries of crusading, it was only the First Crusade that significantly rolled back the military progress of Islam. It was downhill from there.

When the Crusader County of Edessa fell to the Turks and Kurds in 1144, there was an enormous groundswell of support for a new Crusade in Europe. It was led by two kings, Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany, and preached by St. Bernard himself. It failed miserably. Most of the Crusaders were killed along the way. Those who made it to Jerusalem only made things worse by attacking Muslim Damascus, which formerly had been a strong ally of the Christians. In the wake of such a disaster, Christians across Europe were forced to accept not only the continued growth of Muslim power but the certainty that God was punishing the West for its sins. Lay piety movements sprouted up throughout Europe, all rooted in the desire to purify Christian society so that it might be worthy of victory in the East.

Crusading in the late twelfth century, therefore, became a total war effort. Every person, no matter how weak or poor, was called to help. Warriors were asked to sacrifice their wealth and, if need be, their lives for the defense of the Christian East. On the home front, all Christians were called to support the Crusades through prayer, fasting, and alms. Yet still the Muslims grew in strength. Saladin, the great unifier, had forged the Muslim Near East into a single entity, all the while preaching jihad against the Christians. In 1187 at the Battle of Hattin, his forces wiped out the combined armies of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem and captured the precious relic of the True Cross. Defenseless, the Christian cities began surrendering one by one, culminating in the surrender of Jerusalem on October 2. Only a tiny handful of ports held out.

The response was the Third Crusade. It was led by Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa of the German Empire, King Philip II Augustus of France, and King Richard I Lionheart of England. By any measure it was a grand affair, although not quite as grand as the Christians had hoped. The aged Frederick drowned while crossing a river on horseback, so his army returned home before reaching the Holy Land. Philip and Richard came by boat, but their incessant bickering only added to an already divisive situation on the ground in Palestine. After recapturing Acre, the king of France went home, where he busied himself carving up Richard’s French holdings. The Crusade, therefore, fell into Richard’s lap. A skilled warrior, gifted leader, and superb tactician, Richard led the Christian forces to victory after victory, eventually reconquering the entire coast. But Jerusalem was not on the coast, and after two abortive attempts to secure supply lines to the Holy City, Richard at last gave up. Promising to return one day, he struck a truce with Saladin that ensured peace in the region and free access to Jerusalem for unarmed pilgrims. But it was a bitter pill to swallow. The desire to restore Jerusalem to Christian rule and regain the True Cross remained intense throughout Europe.

The Crusades of the 13th century were larger, better funded, and better organized. But they too failed. The Fourth Crusade (1201-1204) ran aground when it was seduced into a web of Byzantine politics, which the Westerners never fully understood. They had made a detour to Constantinople to support an imperial claimant who promised great rewards and support for the Holy Land. Yet once he was on the throne of the Caesars, their benefactor found that he could not pay what he had promised. Thus betrayed by their Greek friends, in 1204 the Crusaders attacked, captured, and brutally sacked Constantinople, the greatest Christian city in the world. Pope Innocent III, who had previously excommunicated the entire Crusade, strongly denounced the Crusaders. But there was little else he could do. The tragic events of 1204 closed an iron door between Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox, a door that even today Pope John Paul II has been unable to reopen. It is a terrible irony that the Crusades, which were a direct result of the Catholic desire to rescue the Orthodox people, drove the two further—and perhaps irrevocably—apart.

The remainder of the 13th century’s Crusades did little better. The Fifth Crusade (1217-1221) managed briefly to capture Damietta in Egypt, but the Muslims eventually defeated the army and reoccupied the city. St. Louis IX of France led two Crusades in his life. The first also captured Damietta, but Louis was quickly outwitted by the Egyptians and forced to abandon the city. Although Louis was in the Holy Land for several years, spending freely on defensive works, he never achieved his fondest wish: to free Jerusalem. He was a much older man in 1270 when he led another Crusade to Tunis, where he died of a disease that ravaged the camp. After St. Louis’s death, the ruthless Muslim leaders, Baybars and Kalavun, waged a brutal jihad against the Christians in Palestine. By 1291, the Muslim forces had succeeded in killing or ejecting the last of the Crusaders, thus erasing the Crusader kingdom from the map. Despite numerous attempts and many more plans, Christian forces were never again able to gain a foothold in the region until the 19th century.

* * *

One might think that three centuries of Christian defeats would have soured Europeans on the idea of Crusade. Not at all. In one sense, they had little alternative. Muslim kingdoms were becoming more, not less, powerful in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. The Ottoman Turks conquered not only their fellow Muslims, thus further unifying Islam, but also continued to press westward, capturing Constantinople and plunging deep into Europe itself. By the 15th century, the Crusades were no longer errands of mercy for a distant people but desperate attempts of one of the last remnants of Christendom to survive. Europeans began to ponder the real possibility that Islam would finally achieve its aim of conquering the entire Christian world. One of the great best-sellers of the time, Sebastian Brant’s The Ship of Fools, gave voice to this sentiment in a chapter titled "Of the Decline of the Faith":

Our faith was strong in th’ Orient,

It ruled in all of Asia,

In Moorish lands and Africa.

But now for us these lands are gone

’Twould even grieve the hardest stone,

Four sisters of our Church you find,

They’re of the patriarchic kind:

Constantinople, Alexandria,

Jerusalem, Antiochia.

But they’ve been forfeited and sacked

And soon the head will be attacked.

Of course, that is not what happened. But it very nearly did. In 1480, Sultan Mehmed II captured Otranto as a beachhead for his invasion of Italy. Rome was evacuated. Yet the sultan died shortly thereafter, and his plan died with him. In 1529, Suleiman the Magnificent laid siege to Vienna. If not for a run of freak rainstorms that delayed his progress and forced him to leave behind much of his artillery, it is virtually certain that the Turks would have taken the city. Germany, then, would have been at their mercy.

Yet, even while these close shaves were taking place, something else was brewing in Europe—something unprecedented in human history. The Renaissance, born from a strange mixture of Roman values, medieval piety, and a unique respect for commerce and entrepreneurialism, had led to other movements like humanism, the Scientific Revolution, and the Age of Exploration. Even while fighting for its life, Europe was preparing to expand on a global scale. The Protestant Reformation, which rejected the papacy and the doctrine of indulgence, made Crusades unthinkable for many Europeans, thus leaving the fighting to the Catholics. In 1571, a Holy League, which was itself a Crusade, defeated the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto. Yet military victories like that remained rare. The Muslim threat was neutralized economically. As Europe grew in wealth and power, the once awesome and sophisticated Turks began to seem backward and pathetic—no longer worth a Crusade. The "Sick Man of Europe" limped along until the 20th century, when he finally expired, leaving behind the present mess of the modern Middle East.

From the safe distance of many centuries, it is easy enough to scowl in disgust at the Crusades. Religion, after all, is nothing to fight wars over. But we should be mindful that our medieval ancestors would have been equally disgusted by our infinitely more destructive wars fought in the name of political ideologies. And yet, both the medieval and the modern soldier fight ultimately for their own world and all that makes it up. Both are willing to suffer enormous sacrifice, provided that it is in the service of something they hold dear, something greater than themselves. Whether we admire the Crusaders or not, it is a fact that the world we know today would not exist without their efforts. The ancient faith of Christianity, with its respect for women and antipathy toward slavery, not only survived but flourished. Without the Crusades, it might well have followed Zoroastrianism, another of Islam’s rivals, into extinction.

Thomas F. Madden is associate professor and chair of the Department of History at Saint Louis University. He is the author of numerous works, including A Concise History of the Crusades, and co-author, with Donald Queller, of The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople.







Copyright Crisis Magazine © 2001 Washington DC, USA
********************************************
in my opinion,  no one is better than the other 

LoverBwoy:

when the pastor,priest and bishop sexually harrass young boys  , they are just white people with some sicko brain

ARE  BLACKS UNDER-ACHIEVERS?

ARE NIGERIANS NATURALLY 419ERS?

that is precisely the quirky mentality that christian fundamentalists employ to defend the crimes of people who are christians even if they didnt declare it. they find excuses through silence and say: did capt green say he was a christian?- well he certainly wasnt muslim either. a crime is a crime irrespective of what justification the perpetrator draws and once we start conceding such statements we may actually move somewhere.

@babyosisi
"neoteny there is a Muslim ideology that you and any peace loving muslim must get off your heads that is that the opposite of Islam is American."
there you go again, making it appear that ALL islam is supported of global terrorism. and you have no shred of evidence to back up your claims besides wild and careless accusations that actually betray your irascible attitude. ok, just because capt green is american does not make him christian. interesting, but according to his biography he was born into a christian household, and in any case he was not muslim.

"America is a secular state that believes in freewill." according to the World CIA Factbook 56% of americans are protestant, 28% are catholic giving a total percentage of christianity as 85% , so it stands to reason green and the other marines are christians. and it debunks your claim of "secularity" except if you mean in the separation of church and state.  i do agree on the freewill bit because muslims there are not openly as insulted as they are here (thanks to you!) because americans are mature enough to appreciate even what they dont understand.  after 9/11 not one muslim was killed neither was any mosque burnt, so perhaps lack of respect for each other's religion is a nigerian thing.

"One innocent soul Christian or Muslim did not need to die in Northern Nigeria, "
you have hit the nail in the head; but not northern nigeria, even the west and east. the sanctity of life is (or should be) universal.


", in a rampage started by Muslims some came straight out of a mosque to attack,you wonder what they are being taught. One soul is too many."
saying "in a rampage started by muslims" is ambiguous so at the risk of sparking a divergent argument it may help if you give an explicit example of the occuirence what you assert. im guessing your experience of the north is little, if any, and im equally guessing most of your info is 2nd hand from fellow christians. well, you will not believe the tales we hear too sometimes about the south, but to believe all you hear without research is to prime yourself for prejudice.
if what you assert is true, that muslims are being taught to rush outta friday prayers and kill off christians, we then should have seen far greater incidences of these acts occuring globally. indeed, the yoruba muslims would since have turned the southwest into a killing field.

"are you saying we only need evidence of matyrdom tapes to differentiate muslim killers from wannabes?I beg to differ."

yes, babyosisi, we DO need tapes or whatever evidence to back up your claims that every murderous two-bit suicide killer from the arab world is doing precisely what his faith requires of him. we do need evidence in their own words for the justification for their acts. in the absence of any evidence, the rest is just conjecture.

***Ignores all other posts as they exceed 200 words***

Whats up lover boy? hw u doing?

this thread, i think, should be made into a textbook titled 'HOW NOT TO GET ALONG'.

@ neoteny, even though i believe u are quite capable of giving insightful answers and thus clearing up a lot of doubts, u rather have this annoying habit of spouting instances from the bible of "those living in glass houses shouldn't throw stones", in order to justify any question asked about the qur'an. u would have saved us all a lot of vitriol if u could have stuck to the basics of answering the original questions directly and simply.

as for the likes of babyosisi, in the bid to "educate" the forumites, all u have succeeded in doing is to generate strife and bad-blood. i wonder, could u say all this in a public gathering?

i am christian, and i wonder, if Jesus were around here on this thread and we could all 'see' Him, would he approve of all the work u have done to enlighten us? that is d question the non-muslims on this forum need to answer; and the opening "xtian" arguments were based on the fact that our God does not need us to fight for him, so what in d world have y'all been doing?!

Mystique:

***Ignores all other posts as they exceed 200 words***

Whats up lover boy? hw u doing?

im doing good thanx
*puts on an italian accent* How u doing, mystique

@trix

whats with the y'all abeg shine ur eye wella

@ loverbwoy,
abeg no vex oh!

no shaking

i envy ur location na so u dey drink tea with Q Elizabeth

na so so tea we just dey drink for here oh. how gambia now?

@ neoteny since you insist on captain Green let me put it to you this way.

Can Capt Green the rapist soldier base his action on the teachings of Christ or his example.
The answer is no.

Can a muslim rapist in Sudan who rapes a captured southern girl in war base that in the teachings of Mohammed or his example ?
The answer is yes because Mohammed did the same thing.

@ trix and anyone else I have NEVER written anything about Mohammed without quoting from his own words.
He is being examined by his own words and his own actions and I only brought them to light.
I bet you did not know some of the things he said and did.

I still maintain that the teachings of Mohammed and his lifestyle are not synonymous with one who had a holy calling and I'm yet to be proven wrong.
They are written in their holy books.I neither wrote them nor caused them to be written.
If those areas in the Koran and hadiths calling for the heads of 'infidels' and lifestyle of Mohammed and his followers should be overlooked by Christians and Muslims,neoteny and co are yet to say so.

Salman Rusdie went into hiding after Satanic verses (which by the way you can get from amazon.com) not because he was lying but because he dared expose Islam and it's teachings.

Read this but most importantly click on the video at the bottom to see the interview.

http://www.michnews.com/artman/publish/article_12189.shtml

another good article.

http://www.michnews.com/artman/publish/article_13430.shtml

yet another.
The things that are offensive to Muslims.

http://www.michnews.com/artman/publish/article_9650.shtml

trix:

na so so tea we just dey drink for here oh. how gambia now?

make u join biscuit put oh

Gambia dey, i just dey try jah go europe small small , help us beg the queen na

@ayinla2005 if

it makes you feel any better,this site below is that of a former Muslim exposing Islam.

http://www.faithfreedom.org/testimonials.htm

trix:

this thread, i think, should be made into a textbook titled 'HOW NOT TO GET ALONG'.

@ neoteny, even though i believe u are quite capable of giving insightful answers and thus clearing up a lot of doubts, u rather have this annoying habit of spouting instances from the bible of "those living in glass houses shouldn't throw stones", in order to justify any question asked about the qur'an. u would have saved us all a lot of vitriol if u could have stuck to the basics of answering the original questions directly and simply.

excuse me, but im baffled. babyosisi and others can quote but its ANNOYING WHEN I DO?!!!

what is this here, Neoteny on a stake?

when they  claim  Islam says this-and- that about bloodshed, i point out that its in the bible; when they say the prophet of islam is polygamous, i point out other biblical prophets who wallowed in same- so how does that qualify as "annoying"? if its wrong for Muhammad to have many wives then we have to say the same judgment must apply for the biblical prophets. remember the core word is "marriage", not whoredom.
in any case it was perfectly normal for couples in christianity to live together prenuptially and it wasnt  until lord Hardwycke's Act of 1753 in britain that public service of holy matrimony was established in the book of common prayer as the sole legitimization of marriage.

also, trix, i dont recall anybody besides enugu asking questions, all ive seen are accusations of the most base kind hurled at us. baboons, and whatnot. they've scoured prophetofdoom.com and i believ they think they have their answers from all they have said. so im not even trying to set the record straight given babyosisi's reply to your question. they say they have found all the answers so im actually posting for the benefit of those who have an open mind about this, those who sincerely want to understand islam.
you can how their mind works: babyosisi says that because capn green did not claim he was killing in the name of christ we should perhaps overlook his being a christian and think of him rather as an *american*. but mohammed atah is  DEFINITELY killing for allah because he was a muslim even though he as well did not say so.
what we see here is a naked example of selective judgment, hate, ignorance, insensitivity, arrogance, falsehood.

for the benefit of those not in the know:
1. Muhammad (SAW) never claimed he was god.
2. Muhammad (SAW) never claimed he was the son of god
3. Muhammad (SAW) never asked us to worship him
4. Muhammad (SAW) is not worshipped by us muslims
5. Muhammad (SAW) died a natural death and did not resurrect, because he was a man, a mortal

this without question is my last word in this thread, for i have nedured a smear campaign the like of which i never personally saw even in the US. but i will not get mad again because i have realized, and painfully so, that non-muslims can never understand our reverence of Muhammad, just as some non-christians can never fathom the christian devotion to Jesus (Peace Be upon him).  because hatred and ignorance will never allow either to understand if not appreciate the sensitivities of the other.

arrogance is easy; humility requires greatness. some people lack that greatness.

peace and salam alaikum.

if you call being poisoned a natural death.

something for neoteny to read as he goes off the thread.

neoteny,if I offended you in quoting the portions of the hadiths and the Koran that were not too pretty.
The truth is always bitter my dear but has to be told




http://bibleprobe.com/muhammed.htm

Muhammad was poisoned by the widow of a man he murdered. Unlike Jesus Christ, who gave his live to take aways the sins of the world, and whose tomb is empty, Muhammad died due to his own sin on June 8, 632 and his remains are still entombed.

The crusades that took place centuries ago as the basis for the recent rise in millitant islamist jihadists? Tell that to the marines Neoteny! Why have the jews not bombed the Vatican and Germany to smithereens since then?

As regards the Capt Green and his band of criminals who raped and murdered the Iraqi girl, Babyosisi has given you an excellent answer. What is not Islam is not automatically equal to christianity. That they are Americans does not make them Christian, get that misconception straight first! Capt. Green did not tell us he was a christian neither did he predicate his attrocities on defending his faith! He is not likely to have shouted the christian version of Allahu Akbar before murdering the innocent child!

Get another fact straight! Hitler was NO CHRISTIAN! Have you read about Nazism? Please read the story of the man who was heavily involved in astrology, it has nothing to do with the christian faith!

Muslims attempt to justify their hate by trying to accuse non-muslims of the same evil deeds and hangiing it all on christianity!

i was alittle too hasty to depart liuke that but i have gone to the site you gave as "confessions" by former muslims but when i saw that the author of the site said the "confessors"'s identity is hidden (for whatever reason) i just shrugged.

also, your beloved craig winn of prophetofdoom infamy has appeared to to me to be one whose complete rants you echo here, but a little delving further led me to see it was a work of self-service.

craig's claim was that islam came from paganism and twisted bible stories. well the so-called biblical stories stemmed from pre-newtestament judaism AND paganism. your concept of trinity was based on the heliocentric paganism of egypt where  horus, osiris and serapis were the trinity, and isis the "mother of god" whose son was known as "the savior of man".  horus was the holy father, osiris the son who died as a sacrifice to save mankind and later returned as serapis the savior. and this cult predated christianity by centuries.  for more clarification please refer to HG well's outline of History.

Trinity doctrine doesn't have basis in either New testament  nor in OT. They depend on human interpretation to form up this doctrine. It is totally pagan. In the preface to Edward Gibbon's History of Christianity, we read: "If Paganism was conquered by Christianity, it is equally true that Christianity was corrupted by Paganism."

The Encyclopedia Americana under TRINITY comments: "Fourth century Trinitarianism did not reflect accurately early Christian teaching regarding the nature of God; it was, on the contrary, a deviation from this teaching."



also, craig said muhammad didnt have a witness to prove he was truthfull. well i suppose david did even though he slept with his neighbor's wife. or maybe moses did. or maybe paul, the true founder of christianity, did even though he never saw christ. even though he gave 3 different accounts of his experience on the road to damascus where he supposedly encountered christ/god.

the so-called sources craig used, which babyosisi quotes copiously, are  Al-Tabari and Ibn-Ishaq which were written a century after muhammad (SAW), and even in islam the legitimacy of such works are very doubtful even to us muslims.
bukhari (sahih al bukhari) hadith of course is itself not exempt from errors. craig used the translated version but arabic like chinese is demanding and exact when it comes to translation. in arabic one single punction can mean the difference between a man's name and an insult. many of the hadith narrations were written by sometimes as much as ten people sometimes centuries after Muhammad and many if not all were handed orally. the Al-tabari and ishaq were written 300 years after muhammad and are more like history books of very doubtful veracity. (ask your friendly neighborhood Mallam  )

Also, there is no proof what so ever that all of the accepted hadiths of today were all written during the Prophet's time.  Some or even many of them were probably written down from individuals for personal use, but the thousands of hadiths (close to 2 million hadiths!!) that exist today were not possibly all written during the Prophet's time.
indeed, the only unanimous source of legitimacy in islam is the Quran, and it is preserved in its original language of arabic in such a pattern that to omit or alter ONE LETTER will alter it's authenticity. (please read Ahmad Deedat's Al Quran, The Ultimate Miracle for the proof of the mathemical wonder of the locking system based on the number 19, proven with the aid of computers).  the english translation of the quran craig winn used is the one by yusuf ali, and craig conveniently omitted the footnote at the back that yusuf ali inserted to say that his work was not perfected because the quran is best read in arabic, and that is why muslims are required to study arabic first.
im not saying tha all the hadiths are false; far from it. all im asserting is that not all of it is certifiably true and none was wrtitten by the prophet himself. therefore the veracity of some aspects are doubtful.

you wonder at this? well the bible itself is not exempt from human interpolation and tampering.

this is what jeremiah said: How can you say, 'We are wise, and the law of the LORD is with us'? But, behold, the false pen of the scribes has made it into a lie.  (From the RSV Bible, Jeremiah 8:"

and thjis is what bible scholars had to say: "Serious doubts exists as to whether these verses belong to the Gospel of Mark.  They are absent from important early manuscripts and display certain peculiarities of vocabulary, style and theological content that are unlike the rest of Mark.  His Gospel probably ended at 16:8, or its original ending has been lost.  (From the NIV Bible Foot Notes, page 1528)"

to further furnish you with proof of tampering, consider this:

", And as Jesus passed forth thence, HE (Jesus) saw a man, named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom: and HE (Jesus) saith unto HIM (Matthew), follow ME (Jesus) and HE (Matthew) arose, and followed HIM (Jesus). (Matthew 9:9)"

supposedly matthew wrote this gospel, but i wonder why he didnt write it thus: , and as jesus passed forth thence he saw me, and my name is matthew.

Similarly, we read in the books of Moses things such as "And the LORD said to Moses, ", or "Moses went to that place, ", etc,  We also read in the Old Testament about Moses' burial.  Now if Moses alone supposedly wrote his books, then how is it possible for him to write about his own burial when he is already dead??!!

also the long list of contradictions in the bible confirms human errors:

1. II Samuel 10:18 talks about how David slew the men of 700 chariots of the Syrians and 40,000 HORSEMEN and Shobach the commander.
I Chronicles 1:18 says that David slew the men of 7000 chariots and 40,000 FOOTMEN

2. How did Judas die?
"And he cast down the pieces of silver into the temple and departed, and went out and hanged himself." (Matthew 27:5)
"And falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all of his bowels gushed out." (Acts 1:18)

3. How old was Ahaziah when he began to reign?
22  in 2 Kings 8:26
42  in 2 Chronicle 22:2

regarding the books and the gospels:
"It seems safe to conclude that the book, at least in its early form, dates from the beginning of the monarchy. Some think that Samuel may have had a hand in shaping or compiling the materials of the book, but in fact we are unsure who the final author or editor was.  (From the NIV Bible Commentary, page 286)"

so errors in human works are to be expected. it is not exactly certain whether priests can stand behind the pulpit and claim they are reading THE WORDS OF GOD, or whether they should say they are reading the WORKS OF MAN INSPIRED BY GOD.

Dr. W Graham Scroggie of the Moody Bible Institute, Chicago, a prestigious Christian evangelical mission, says:

", Yes, the Bible is human, although some out of zeal which is not according to knowledge, have denied this. Those books have passed through the minds of men, are written in the language of men, were penned by the hands of men and bear in their style the characteristics of men, "

"It is Human, Yet Divine," W Graham Scroggie, p. 17


a Christian scholar, Kenneth Cragg, the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, says:

", Not so the New testament, There is condensation and editing; there is choice reproduction and witness. The Gospels have come through the mind of the church behind the authors. They represent experience and history, "

"The Call of the Minaret," Kenneth Cragg, p 277

 The lie of 1 John 5:7 verse.  It was later discovered to be a man made corruption inserted into the Bible: the only verses in the whole Bible that explicitly ties God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit in one "Triune" being is the verse of 1 John 5:7-

"For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one."

this verse is now universally recognized as being a later "insertion" of the Church and all recent versions of the Bible, such as the Revised Standard Version the New Revised Standard Version, the New American Standard Bible, the New English Bible, the Phillips Modern English Bible , etc. have all unceremoniously expunged this verse from their pages. Why is this? The scripture translator Benjamin Wilson gives the following explanation for this action in his "Emphatic Diaglott." Mr. Wilson says:

"This text concerning the heavenly witness is not contained in any Greek manuscript which was written earlier than the fifteenth century. It is not cited by any of the ecclesiastical writers; not by any of early Latin fathers even when the subjects upon which they treated would naturally have lead them to appeal to it's authority. It is therefore evidently spurious."

The great luminary of Western literature, Mr. Edward Gibbon, explains the reason for the discardal of this verse from the pages of the Bible with the following words:

"Of all the manuscripts now extant, above fourscore in number, some of which are more than 1200 years old, the orthodox copies of the Vatican, of the Complutensian editors, of Robert Stephens are becoming invisible; and the two manuscripts of Dublin and Berlin are unworthy to form an exception, In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Bibles were corrected by LanFrank, Archbishop of Canterbury, and by Nicholas, a cardinal and librarian of the Roman church, secundum Ortodoxam fidem. Notwithstanding these corrections, the passage is still wanting in twenty-five Latin manuscripts, the oldest and fairest; two qualities seldom united, except in manuscripts, The three witnesses have been established in our Greek Testaments by the prudence of Erasmus; the honest bigotry of the Complutensian editors; the typographical fraud, or error, of Robert Stephens in the placing of a crotchet and the deliberate falsehood, or strange misapprehension, of Theodore Beza."

"Decline and fall of the Roman Empire," IV, Gibbon, p. 418.

Edward Gibbon was defended in his findings by his contemporary, the brilliant British scholar Richard Porson who also proceeded to publish devastatingly conclusive proof that the verse of 1 John 5:7 was only first inserted by the Church into the Bible in the year 400C.E.(Secrets of Mount Sinai, James Bentley, pp. 30-33).
To which Mr. Bentley responds:

"In fact, they are not. No modern Bible now contains the interpolation."

Mr. Bentley, however, is mistaken. Indeed, just as Mr. Gibbon had predicted, the simple fact that the most learned scholars of Christianity now unanimously recognize this verse to be a later interpolation of the Church has not prevented the preservation of this fabricated text in our modern Bibles. To this day, the Bible in the hands of the majority of Christians, the "King James" Bible, still unhesitantly includes this verse as the "inspired" word of God without so much as a footnote to inform the reader that all scholars of Christianity of note unanimously recognize it as a later fabrication.

Peake's Commentary on the Bible says

"The famous interpolation after 'three witnesses' is not printed even in RSVn, and rightly. It cites the heavenly testimony of the Father, the logos, and the Holy Spirit, but is never used in the early Trinitarian controversies. No respectable Greek MS contains it. Appearing first in a late 4th-century Latin text, it entered the Vulgate and finally the NT of Erasmus."

For all of the above reasons, we find that when thirty two biblical scholars backed by fifty cooperating Christian denominations got together to compile the Revised Standard Version of the Bible based upon the most ancient Biblical manuscripts available to them today, they made some very extensive changes. Among these changes was the unceremonious discardal of the verse of 1 John 5:7 as the fabricated insertion that it is. For more on the compilation of the RSV Bible, please read the preface of any modern copy of that Bible.


even the christian scholars with all their research dont know who the true authors of the gospels are. thats's probabaly why every gospel opening is prefaced by "the gospel according to, ".

the whole point of this is to show you how common errors of man can be used to twist religion out of context and serve the needs of those interlopers.
so prophet of doom's craig winn used sources he knew have discrepancies, which even we muslims doubt to assert the bold claims that babyosisi herein spams us with

for the rest of you reasonable christians i have respect for your religion and my earlier rant should be taken in the context of anger.

as salam alaikum. peace be upon us all.

@neoteny now that you have returned,promise not to run away when it gets hot because it will.

@ neoteny,
Don't come telling me what "biblical scholars" have said and have not said and which verses they told you have been ripped off the bible.
We have heard that from many of your types and we know your agenda.

The Koran you talk about has been refined and several pages thrown away that were not too holy even though you fail to admit it.

We talk of Mohammeds lifestyle and suddenly he becomes a mere man subject to raping women,murders,looting and womanising and some other time he becomes a holy prophet far above all others.

If you dismiss the hadiths because they were written after Mohammeds death,so was the Koran so burn that up too by your arguments.
Islam is Paganism sprinkled with some religiousity.

Allah was the name of a pagan god during Mohammeds time,am I wrong.
The Islamic symbol of moon and star was pagan also,am I wrong?

The more you speak the more I am willing to expose the ills in Islam.

For your information apostates keep their identity unknown because the likes of you are willing to kill them for speaking out so that should not suprise you.
I was about to call it a day but since you will not dissappear as promised,be man enough to take them in.

This may be shocking to some but the Ayatollah was a true Muslim and well respected.
Hear what he had to say.


Khomeini's Teachings on sex with infants and animals
Islamic Teachings on sex with infants:

"A man can have sexual pleasure from a child as young as a baby. However, he should not penetrate. If he penetrates and the child is harmed then he should be responsible for her subsistence all her life. This girl, however would not count as one of his four permanent wives. The man will not be eligible to marry the girl's sister."

The complete Persian text of this saying can be found in "Ayatollah Khomeini in Tahrirolvasyleh, Fourth Edition, Darol Elm, Qom"

with animals.
You may never look at goats and rams or even suya the same way again.
It would have been easier to say "Don't do it"


Islamic Teachings on sex with animals:

"The meat of horses, mules, or donkeys is not recommended. It is strictly forbidden if the animal was sodomized while alive by a man. In that case, the animal must be taken outside the city and sold."Editor's notes: I wonder if it is OK to sodomize a dead animal? What happens if the buyer brings the poor animal back into the city?

"If one commits an act of sodomy with a cow, a ewe, or a camel, their urine and their excrements become impure, and even their milk may no longer be consumed. The animal must then be killed as quickly as possible and burned, and the price of it paid to its owner by him who sodomized it."
Editor's note: The poor animal first is sodomized and then killed and burned. What an Islamic justice towards animals? Where are the animal
rights group?

"It is forbidden to consume the excrement of animals or their nasal secretions. But if such are mixed in minute proportions into other foods their consumption is not forbidden."

"If a man (God protect him from it!) fornicates with an animal and ejaculates, ablution is necessary."Editor's note: It does not say who should have ablution: the animal or the man?

@ neoteny,

stop going to quote from "bible scholars" whose identities and faiths leave much to be desired. Christianity is a way of life that is not subject to the interpretations of a few unscrupulous "scholars" who are only attempting to justify their disbelief in the bible

The question this topic was meant to raise was not what "bible scholars" thot of the bible but why muslims act the way they do! You would do well to hang in and try to explain that instead of chronicling the events that happened centuries ago that have no bearing to modern day life.

And by the way, forget that nonsense about the crusades!