This is the band I'm listening to these days:

(couldn't decide between the two songs)

Today I wanted to put down two particular arguments against Islam. My understanding of Islam is not as strong as I wish it were, but I've had a few conversations with Muslims where I listened and asked questions without arguing back, and a few where I argued, and I'm nonetheless presently satisfied with these arguments. I do want to point out, though, that I'm open to hearing out Islamic responses to these arguments; I just haven't heard any yet.

First argument: Justice

Allah forgives people who admit that Islam is right, and who practice it. It's a works-based religion, but nobody is perfect, so Allah issues forgiveness based on your best effort. There's an Islamic story I heard a while ago. I'm retelling it from memory. It's about a murderer who wanted forgiveness, so he asked someone for help. The help he received was unsatisfactory, so he killed that man, and proceeded to ask someone else for help. The second man pointed him in the direction of a town where there lived someone who would teach him about Islam. The murderer died on the way to the town. An angel and a demon appeared to make their case before Allah, desiring that the man be sent to heaven or hell respectively. After some argument, Allah decided that if the man made it at least half-way to the town, then he would be forgiven.

Muslims don't believe in the crucifixion, and they don't believe in the deity of Christ. So they have no perfect sacrifice to take away the sins of the world. The issue here from a Christian perspective is that Allah forgives without doing justice. For lack of a sacrifice, the judicial process is capricious, and ultimately doesn't live up to the judicial standards reflected in Allah's statements about himself and about his law.


Next argument: The Prophet and the Book

Muhammad taught quite clearly that Jesus was a prophet of God, and Muhammad said about an unnamed authoritative book about Jesus' teachings, "judge [the validity of Muhammad's teachings] by what is written in the book". It's my understanding that the majority of Muslim scholars believe that book to have been John, with the next group believing that it is any one of the NT books, and the next group believing that it is not a book that made it into the Bible. In any case, nearly every Muslim I've spoken to believed that the books written by the apostles accurately described the teachings of Jesus in the day when they were written, but that those texts were corrupted by evil men sometime after Muhammad lived. I say "nearly" because one of them told me that  the books were penned by men and were therefore inherently flawed and couldn't be trusted on any account (the irony being that Muhammad himself was illiterate and asked other men to write his words down for him. Muslims say that the book was protected by God, which is exactly what Christians say. Here's where I emphasize the importance of even scales).

In any case, it is apparent that Muhammad, who lived from about 570-630AD, had access to a book about Jesus which he believed to be accurate in its description of Jesus's teachings. As it happens, St. Augustine, who lived around 350-430AD seems to have believed that the canon of the Bible was closed, and included all the books we have today (afaict). It's very unlikely that Muhammad had a book about Jesus which was unknown to Christians at that time. Furthermore, since we have literally hundreds of copies of the Bible which were penned prior to Muhammad's birth, we are able to look at those and see that the contents of the Bible were not corrupted after Muhammad's statements.

If the book Muhammad spoke about was John, then the case is closed. John makes the gospel quite clear, deifying Jesus while calling Jesus the Son of God, describing the Crucifixion, resurrection, and its role in salvation with no uncertain terms, depicting Jesus advocating the Old Testament as being an authoritative account of the Law of God, and describing its fulfillment in Jesus. These are things that Islam does not agree with, so to judge Islam by what is written in John leaves Islam decidedly invalid.

Muhammad advocated (at least the textual) Christianity of his day, and that Christianity is so thoroughly documented that a careful investigation leaves no mistakes to be made about what they believed; it is the same as what Christians believe today (and, if there is any confusion about what Christians believe today, it is unanimously different from what Muslims believe, or else there wouldn't be two names "Christian" and "Muslim").

The point I'm making here is that Muhammad does not seem to have known what the teachings of Jesus were, so by calling Jesus a prophet of God and then speaking against Jesus's teachings, Muhammad invalidates himself.


That's it!

Again, to be clear, I don't bear any hostility towards Muslims, and I'm open to listening to the Islamic rebuttal to this, but I wanted to put this out there, first because I said I would in a previous post, and second because I think it's a good argument.

"Come home quickly"