"We wouldn't do that for money..."

"The first bishop to accept a government grant was Bishop Judas Iscariot." (starting about 1:38)

Kreeft and Spencer discuss Islam.

The video is almost two hours long, which is odd for Youtube, and it takes an age to download, but it's worth the wait.

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...I've listened to about half of it so far, and I think I am coming to the same conclusion that I have come to before. If Dr. Kreeft were right in one of his major premises, that the god of Islam and the God of Abraham are one and the same, then his arguments would be correct. He says that the Muslims worship the same God, but they understand Him imperfectly, and therefore worship Him imperfectly, but that this imperfection is merely a lack of understanding of the true nature of God.

This would support the theory that Mohammedans who behave badly, by Christian standards of morality, are being "bad" Muslims, in that they understand the nature of God even less perfectly than their slightly more enlightened co-religionists who do not behave badly. Dr. Kreeft then goes even further and says that in the areas where the Mohammedans are correct about God, they are better "Christians" than most Christians because they are more "pious" in their behaviour towards the things about God that are true. In these areas, he posits (and bizarrely, he presents their sexual morality as an example) that we lapsed and modernist Christians have "much to learn" from our Mohammedan friends.

But the entire argument rests on the assumption that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of Mary and John the Baptist and Jesus, is the same as the one the Mohammedans call "Allah".

But Dr. Kreeft has failed to establish the truth of his greater premise.

If we say that our pet is a mammal because it is a cat and all cats are mammals, we have started the syllogism from the bottom and worked up. In the case of Winnie's species and phylum we would be correct. But starting the syllogism upside down in the case of Islam is dangerous.

He says that the basic premise of Islam, the total submission to God is the same as that of the saints. The Catholic Church knows that total submission to the God of Abraham turns a person into a saint. The greater the submission, the greater the saint.

What we have seen from the evidence of the last 1300 years, however, is that total submission to Allah turns men into monsters. And the greater the submission the greater the monster.

How then, can this be the same god?

Islam is a heresy. One of the things it is doing for our times is re-teaching the Church just how dangerous heresy really is. It is only too easy to chastise the nasty old imperialist medieval Church for the violent opposition to heresy. But if we look back into that history with the eyes newly cleared by our contact with Islam, we will come to understand why it became necessary to stop the spread of Catharism with force of arms. If we look at the videos of men and women being beheaded, of buildings being blown up, we come to understand just how deadly a thing heresy truly is.



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