Things are changing. Back in 1976 my Hebrew teacher (a polish holocaust survivor turned Messianic Christian) would have Pesach sedar every year and there were few who acknowledged it.
Since then we have had many hagadahs in many places with up to 250 mostly protestants attending. Most churches in this area have Passover every year apart from what we do. We have used the service as an object lesson concerning Mashiach for many years.
Mind you. We are not talking about morphing into the old covenant with NT overtones (although that is happening also). This is a true searching out of the roots of the faith and realizing that Mashiach Yehosuah is the king of the Yehudim and Lord of the Cosmos. The true seeker will not soon be able to gain say the roots of the faith and our being grafted into the commonwealth of Israel. Simultaneously he will not be able to adhere to the traditions of men whether they are found in Christianity, Judaism or any other spiritual path. These are exciting times of discovery for those who dare to not shrink back.

A very exciting time for those of the faith. Again when I see christians who deeply delve into the very essence of its birthing. To see someone fully recognize Judiaca as the father of the very Christianity one chooses to believe is a delight.

I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none.

Well that's all very interesting. My title for this thread which I shortened, I should have left in full. Evolution of Christianity as compared to Islam and its effects on their cultures of today. This was my mistake but on the other hand I'm glad to see your all having a wonderful time. However I would like, if anyone would care to comment that because the Arab culture that had spread across the Mediterranean and other parts had stagnated. That if it had continued to advance in knowledge and yes technology it would today be more modern and tolerant in their beliefs as other cultures have become. I have heard many Mullahs claim that Muhammad professes charity, love and peace, I believe this to be true. Yet because they do not have access to knowledge they must, in this time of turbulence, turn to those who would abuse their authority. If they want to make peace in the middle east, they must be given the knowledge they need to understand their relationship with the rest of the world. There must not be any restrictions on the knowledge they seek, censorship or bias of knowledge given. To let their culture evolve and mature.

Like a wind bag with

There's a section on that page which declares that jews are mongrels, and that having sex with a jew is therefore miscgenation and also that calling jesus a jew is blasphemy against the holy spirit.
The whole page sets Christian "Israelites" as separate from "mamzers" (whatever that is) "like the jews."


It's a whole bunch of anti-semitism.
Hopefully my pasting these words doesn't get it caught up in your city's stupid filter.

Threegremlins:

I wasn't intending to highjack your thread at all. Although to me there is no such thing as the evolution of Christianity; there is only proximity of a people group to the truth (the people group being those who profess to know Mashiach). I interpolated your statement to mean the on going ever changing usurpation of the truth as time has gone on through the ages.
Just as the history of ancient Israel was a succession of repentance and apostasy so Christianity has gone through phases of darkness and light. To me these are all only symptoms of a great spiritual war that goes on 'til this day behind the scenes.
I interjected the concept of "Messianic Christianity (a curious double wording) to show that from my perspective there is a conscious shift away from the wrong ways toward the right ways in a significant manner at this time in history. Many are breaking the bonds of tradition that have been used to misuse the name of Yeshua Mashiach and finding themselves drawn by Him to the roots of their faith.
I didn't see any mention of Islam in the posts I read so...

No one has high jacked this thread rather, it went astray. Semi colon, closing parenthesis.

The problem with Islam is neither it's intolerance nor it's aversion to learning new concepts and ideas.

On learning, one of the most famous quotes from the prophet Mohammed goes along the lines of "Seek Knowledge even if it means going to China." Of course, China was a lot further away back then. And the Quran makes repeated statements calling to believers to "think" and gain knowedge.

Also, Islam was not spread by the sword (the lands were conquered by the sword, yes, but the people living there were not forced to convert) rather, the Christians living in North Africa (and possibly the Middle East, I'm not sure of that) were Unitarians (not the same as modern day unitarians), many of whom recognized Islam, a religion in line with it's own, to be the truth, and their conversion was not instant but took place gradually over a period of a hundred years [For those of you who do not know much about Islam, it's relation to Christianity is the same as Christianity's relation to Jewdaism, claiming that the Christians and Jews, originally on the right path, had deviated from it and that God had sent the prophet Mohammed to send His true message to mankind for one last time before the apocalypse.]
For proof you can look at Spain when it was under Muslim control, Muslim, Christians and Jews all lived there peacefully, even though western text books often fail to mention that. What they will say though is that when the Christians managed to take control of it again they forced the Muslims and *Jews* to either convert, leave, or die.

The problems that plague the Muslim world now a days are not based on religion, but rather on self serving people who use the guise of religion to convince the ignorant masses to do their bidding, just like some Christian leaders did during the crusades. There are many voices that are in opposition to them, but they don't seem very interesting so media doesn't give them much attention. If they want folks to take notice they'll have to start strapping bombs to themselves (that's the lesson the Palestinians learnt, but that's a story for another time)

zhinker: I think 'Monophysite' is the term usually used, rather than 'Unitarian'.

Islam certainly spread by the sword, but it was not (and in many ways, still isn't) a proselytizing religion, especially not compared to Christianity, which has always been very aggressive in this area. That's why you get 'Crusades' in the Baltics later on: They weren't freeing any 'Holy Land', they were combating pagans, getting them to convert or killing them (wiping out Prussian in the process). And also the Albigensian Crusade (which has an interesting link with the aforementioned Monophysites, but that's for another time). Islam conquered an area to make sure it was ruled justly, not to convert the people on the ground. Toss out the Christian rulers, yes, but they generally didn't care much about what the peasants did, so long as it was reasonably monotheistic.

The hardest thing for the initial two or three generations of Islam to deal with was conversions. Because it had initially seen itself as an 'Arab' religion, and that their duty was to bring order and peace to a corrupt world (which makes sense when you consider Persia and the East Roman Empire had just completely destroyed each other in a vicious, centuries long conflict). When people started to convert, especially in the Persian Empire, no one was sure what to do. The fact that they did allow conversion is why Islam became such a strong religion.

One of the reasons the early Islamic expansion was so successful was that the Monophysite Christians were often at odds with the government in Constantinople, who adhered to orthodox (later to be Orthodox) Christianity. They had all sorts of trouble with Alexandria and Antioch and various frontier areas. Now, the reason why what were essentially political disputes took the form of religious conflict, is that there was no such thing as a 'political party' in those days. The closest I can think of is the 'Blues' and the 'Greens': chariot race hooligans who divided on the basis of political and economic interests.

(Interesting fact: The Emperor Hadrian forbade the creation of a public fire brigade in Ephesus (I think--my books are thousands of miles away at the moment), because he said it gave a people to gather and 'to complain'. In other words, any chance for people to come together had a tendency to develop into a political organization. Something that Emperors tend not to like.)

So in the modern world, the great majority of Islamic countries are pretty horrible places to live. They have everything from dictators to actual, oh-my-god-isn't-this-the-twenty-first-century kings. Seriously. What the heck is up with that? Anyway, religion turns out to be the one social area that these rulers are simply not able to put an end to. They try to use it to control the population, or distract them ("Hey, I know I'm a horrible ruler, and I'm making your life bad, but look! Danish cartoons!").

In Turkey, which is a modern, democratic state (excepting the que for a visa at the airport, which can feel almost Ottoman), the social reformers have been almost always Islamic. And if I was the U.S. govt, I'd be throwing all my weight behind them, rather than the nationalists, who're kinda creepy, and pretty damn corrupt.

Iran is another good example. You want democracy in Iran? Leave it alone for another twenty years. They've got a really young and literate population, and eventually they'll just change things. Period. Even East Germany fell apart, and they had the Stasi. Eventually, people just get fed up. They see what's going on in the world, and they talk about it. Oh, you know what the third most used language on the Internet is? Farsi.

So the point is that it's a mistake to talk about 'Islam' changing. Islam has been and will be multiple things: a way of expressing something about politics, even a form of government, a religion that is relatively apolitical, even private (I'm thinking of some of the more heterodox versions, like the Alevi).

I mean, seriously. I've heard Ahmadinejad, and I've heard Bush. can you really tell me how they're all that different? And no one is talking about what's wrong with 'American Christianity', and how it's opposed to Western Civilization. No one confuses the crazy white-supremacist Christian in Idaho with an Episcopalian. So why do essentially the same thing to Islam? Yes, the Islamic world tends to be more violent: But that's because of economics and politics, not religion (or ethnicity, since so many people assume 'Islam=Arab'.)

"mamzers" means 'bastards' in Hebrew

I agree with most of what you said tippit78. For the most part the current 'Islamic' governments are certainly corrupt and oppressive to varying degrees. The only thing I object to is you saying "Islam was certainly spread by the sword." I have no complaint about your explanation of that statement, but according to your own words Islam wasn't spread by the sword (which implies the religion was forced onto others), the Islamic government was spread by the sword, which is kinda like how Bush used bombs to spread 'democracy' to Iraq (except for the making things worse part).

Apart from that, great analysis and I especially agree with what you said about the future of democracy in that region. These things can not be forced on people, you have to let time take it's course and let democracy develop independently. Yes those people will make some mistakes in the process but
having them creating their own unique flavor of democracy that suits their culture is the only thing that can ensure that it will stay and be accepted.

A friend of mine Stewart, reminded me that education and knowledge in itself is not enough. Interaction with other cultures is necessary to learn ways of sharing ideas and using the knowledge they have gained. It also gives the vantage of how others see their culture from the outside and to learn from the mistakes these other cultures made.

----The only thing I object to is you saying "Islam was certainly spread by the sword."----

My bad: I meant that the Islamic kingdoms were spread by the sword, not the religion itself. Which is kind of a pain to try to pin down, since early Islam is very clearly a religion and a system of government, and today the relationship is still there, but it's gotten a lot more ambiguous over the centuries.

I would have to take your word for Islams early history of the religion and government. So what is different today, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seems to have autonomy in governing the country?

Threegremlins, if you'd like me to start a new topic about this, I will, but you're way off-base regarding the Shah and Iran. Let's not forget that in the 1950s the democratically-elected leader of Iran, Mossadeg, was deposed by forces orchestrated by the CIA. European/American manipulation of Iran goes back even farther, to the early 20th century, when the Brits grabbed up rights to a lot of their oil...the Shah was a puppet installed by the US, nothing more. The Revolution in Iran was inevitable.

Unfortunately, like many revolutions (not all, not even most), it got out of control. Radicals committed barbaric acts (embassy hostage situation) and the leaders of the Islamic Revolution refused to end the situation because they thought the people supported the acts of the radicals.

As pathetic as it is, Iran has the most vibrant democracy in the Middle East today (with the possible exception of Israel, but I'm leaving them out of this because the focus should be on Arabs and Persians here).

But I'll happy to point you to some more sources if you're interested in the development of imperialist/colonialist policy toward Iran through the 20th and 21st centuries. Iran is not the problem today and never really was.

Your right I am off base, relying on memories of news of events that were probably enhanced for western recipients. I had thought Khomeini was supporting the kidnappers and directing them. I can remember a news reporter claiming the Iranian government was sending undercover provocateurs to incite anti-Americanism. There was also lots of talk of all the great things the Shah had done in main steam western news and in underground newspapers like the Georgia Straight who claimed numerous atrocities and fiscal irresponsibility. I knew the truth lay somewhere in the middle, but sure of none of it. I do think that some good things were done by the Shah as I said before like schools and universities and the Iranians benifitted from it. I never implied Iran was a problem, I think they are an excellent example of a modern state and a lot can be learned from them. Many countries who have interferred in their government and economy before should reconsider attempting to try again.

I've never had the opportunity before to speak with people who do know. This gives me the chance to learn what is or was censored from western media.

And also, Ahmadinejad isn't exactly autonomous. There's the council, there's the religious establishment, and the democratic forces that swept him into power.

While there are scary things about the government of Iran, and I wouldn't want to downplay them, they are also a country where decision making is diluted and not centered on one person. Even the religious establishment is made up of Islamic scholars, who have to argue to reach a consensus.*

What this means is that they're pretty unlikely to do something rash and stupid, because there are enough individuals and groups who can say no along the way. And to be honest, everything Iran has done and said makes me think they're telling the truth about not wanting nuclear weapons. Nuclear power, yeah, which I'm against because I think it's a terrible way to power the world, but not weapons. Frankly, I'm a lot more scared of Pakistan having nukes. Pakistan is about as stable as Saudia Arabia, which means not really.

As far as the Shah goes...well, he was a typical bloody tyrant. He may have tried to do some good things, but they were for his glory, not for his people (note that he considered them his people--emphasis on the possessive). And he did it really stupidly. There are stories about parts power plants arriving in ports, on order of the Shah, and then sitting and rusting because they didn't have the transportation infrastructure to actually get the parts to where they were supposed to go.

And actually a topic on Iran and it's history would be really fun: I always want to know more! When I can't wait to get home after my time here in the Czech Republic, which has been fun, but I was also halfway through a history of the Achaemenids when I left for a one month trip that turned into a year long stay.

*A common misconception of the west is to refer to Islamic clerics--they aren't priests in the way we think of them in Christianity. They are very respected and learned men, but they have no real role as intermediary between God and the people. Frex: A Catholic has to go to the priest to give confession, while in Islam, the relationship is purely between God and the individual, and the individual with his community, the community of the other faithful. The mosque isn't quite so much for the worshiping of God, but for the gathering of the community.

While almost all of what you said is correct, but about the Mosque:
It is Makruh(hated) for the individual to pray in his house. He gets more rewarded for making his prayers at a Mosque. He gets rewarded in both situations, but more at the Mosque.

Extreme Coder

Extreme Coder: Thanks for the clarification!

tippit78, I work with a woman who's son is an engineer who's company has a contract to work on Iran's electrical power something or other. He says he hasn't come across or heard about facilities for or being built for nuclear bomb production. I think there is a lot of propaganda taking place of nonexistent hype re WMD's, the goal to make Iran appear threatening.

That's basically what Sadaam had been doing as well