Beware of thier traps

[siam]

"i respectfully disagree with this. the Muslim should be that if islam tells you something, you should submit to it no questions asked."

---and I respectfully disagree with you. If we blindly believe---we are no better than the Christians. The Quran and the Prophet(pbuh) both encouraged us to seek knowledge. As the Quran itself says---the Pagans of Mecca also believed---but they blindly believed what their parents/tradition taught them---and this led them into error.

Faith/Trust/Iman= the use of one's intellect and reason to arrive at conviction.

It is only through questions that we can increase our knowledge---therefore, those Christians who come here with an "agenda" are actually doing a favor because they serve as catalysts for us Muslims to delve deeper into our religion and grow in both knowledge and spirituality.

 

[Perseveranze]

i respectfully disagree with this. the Muslim should be that if islam tells you something, you should submit to it no questions asked. of course its good to research it (through the help of reliable scholars) as to understand it better if need be, but we should have that iman and love Allah and his rasool sallahu alehi wa sallam so much that we reject or accept anything without (unhealthy/overally) questioning it. if it comes from allah or his rasool, there should be no final say on our part, inshallah.

Asalaamu Alaikum,

My meaning is that if an Imam says something to ask for proof or to double check on it (online or somewhere looking for proof). Blindly believing what anyone says is Haram. I remember in the Quran it mentions not blindly following your parents on the same basis(because they may be following faith in a wrong way).

ps. Proof is Quran and Hadith.

 

[Ummu Sufyaan]

wa alaykum us-Salaam
i think i may made a mistake in reading the original quoted text. i think i may have read "Islam" instead of "imam." and thats what i meant that what you shouldn't question...not the imam/scholars as what has been replied to..

but imams still shouldn't be questioned- well i guess they should be, only respectfully. a reliable imams opinion shouldn't be easily disregarded weighed up with a layman's opinion.

 

[IAmZamzam]

But how without question can you determine whether they're "reliable"?

However the vast majority of religious people who are willing to engage in these discussions have an alternative agenda. And that agenda is always finding a way to get more people to follow their line of thinking. For some reason, despite the fact that all devoutly religious people feel that they know the "truth", they are not content. They are not content until everyone else agrees with them.

Let me ask something to the people who are willing to respond:

Do you feel that someone of a different religious faith will go to Hell when they die? And if so, do you feel the need to "help them"?

D-a-m-n-a-t-i-o-n (will someone PLEASE change the board settings so that we can write out "D-A-M-N", I mean this is a religious board for crying out loud!) isn't handed out based on the luck of the draw. If someone has legitimate excuses for disbelieving something then they are not an unbeliever (kafir, meaning "one who holds the truth in his heart; rejector"). It is disheartening nonetheless to see just how often the people who disbelieve in God or Islam give even the faintest impression that it is for any sort of excusable reason. It has made for some very sad occasions for me.

You seem to place missionary sorts of all religions into some kind of "pushy pushy everybody agree with me now!" stereotype. I, for instance, am a da'i as penance for a former apostasy of my own which does not strike me as having been excusable either. God brought me back, so I in turn will bring others, if He wills, as repayment. And right from the start I set for myself two rules. The first was that I would never give anyone dawah against their will. Indeed, I always ask permission first. I don't want to be intrusive like those Jehovah's Witnesses who will repeatedly come knocking with their nonsense while I'm in the middle of a perfectly good game of Pac-Man. The second was that I would go to great pains not to keep track of the number of people that by God's grace I have converted. I am perhaps almost paranoid about leaving myself no quarter to think of it as some sort of score to rack up. Now tell me, do I sound unreasonable to you?

The main difference between Christian evangelism and Islamic dawah is that lies are not part of the usual curriculum of da'is. Indeed, the only times I can ever think of seeing a da'i lie about anything (as in Osama Abdallah's deceptive article about four thousand Jews being missing from the World Trade Center) are when it is over an issue that isn't really about Islam at all for them--and even then only rarely. Christian evangelism makes dishonesty the rule rather than the exception. It's just a natural part of the job, and you'd think that if the religion were at all likely to be true then it wouldn't be. Indeed, you'll hear a lot of Muslims mentioning in their conversion stories that they tried once to become Christian missionaries or preachers but couldn't stand all the deception involved, and this is what disillusioned them to Christianity.