From: "Heather"
Subject: You Are Misleading Poeple

Basic and simple: Christians are taught to go out into the world and spread the Gospel. If a home, a person, a community isn't interested, they are commanded to 'shake the dust off their sandals' and move on.

What Heather writes is technically true, but it has little to no relationship with the reality of Christianity in the world around us. When people claim that things are actually “simple,” I find that they have often merely “simplified” a complex reality — and this is certainly no exception.

When was the last time you saw any Christians “shake the dust off their sandals” and move on after failing to convert people? When was the last time you saw Christian evangelists leave a community completely because they simply haven’t had any luck spreading their brand of the gospel?

 

Muslims are commanded to subvert other cultures, laws, people - infidels. You have a choice living in a Muslim community: surrender (convert to Islam), pay higher taxes and forfeit and then live according to Muslim law (good luck with that as a freedom loving person), or die. That’s it.

Once again, what Heather writes here is technically true but reality today is also far more complex because this isn’t always the case with Muslim communities today. There are certainly Muslim communities which merit criticism or even condemnation — but the same is true of some Christian communities.

 

Love your neighbor vs. force your will upon your neighbor. Light or dark. Life or death. Truth or lies.

It is that simple.

Actually, that’s just a simplification of a complex reality. The truth is that neither Christians nor Muslims always do what Heather claims. These are little more than caricatures that create a false dilemma fallacy. Even if these depictions were accurate, it is wrong to insist that one has to choose between them — one can, instead, reject both as ridiculous.

Notice that Heather never actually explains where or how I am “misleading” people. I guess that simply would have been too much to expect — but it’s pretty common from people with such overly-simplistic perspectives on reality. Notice also how people like this never simplify things in a manner that makes them or their ideology look worse than the alternatives — reality isn’t just simplified, but simplified in a highly convenient manner. Coincidence?

 

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