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THE GOOD AND THE BAD
I am R. E. Landis, 49 years. No theory or creed destroyed people's lives more than Christianity did. Jesus is the Lamb. Believe in him, and hold that he died to save you and you are saved. You are not required to do anything good. Just take Jesus as your savior and you are saved. Your deeds do not save you. If so, why was Jesus crucified? You are saved by Jesus, blood, not by your good deeds. These are some of the Christian clichés which we often hear in church sermons.
This strange creed puts the good guys and the bad guys on equal footing. No matter what you do, you are saved, provided that you take Jesus as your savior.
I could not accept a naive creed such as Christianity, which makes good persons equal to bad persons. In contrast, Islam makes everyone responsible to God for whatever he does or says. You bear your own sins; no one will bear them for you. I think that Islam establishes individual responsibility very obviously, and this makes more sense to me rather than being saved by the Lamb, in my modest opinion.
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UNBELIEVABLE!
I am C. I. Hunt, 24 years. I was attending a Sunday sermon when the pastor said, "I am not asking you to give the poor in charity or do good deeds in order to guarantee Paradise. You don't need good deeds to send you there. Just believe in Jesus and that he died for you."
When I heard what I heard, I could not believe my ears. How could a pastor discourage people from doing good deeds? It was both frustrating and unbelievable, indeed.
In Islamic Friday sermons, the main focus of the speaker is to urge people to do good deeds and to abstain from bad deeds. I compared the two speakers, and I came to the clear conclusion that the church preacher simply destroys the community's ethics, whereas the mosque preacher obviously builds them. That is why I have chosen the mosque, rather than the church.
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WOMEN'S APPEARANCE
I am B. H. Johnson, 25 years. Women in my country, USA, feel free to wear whatever they wish the way they wish. The Bible says nothing about how women should appear; nor does the church say anything, or it may have nothing to say. The woman in the Christian West exposes almost all her nude body, and sometimes exactly all her body, on streets, beaches, and parties. I don't like the almost-nude woman in my country. In fact, the sexual instinct is strong enough in men, and it certainly does not need any further external stimulation. The semi-nudeness of women ignites the sexual motive of men. The result is in fornication, adultery, or sexual suppression. This repeated suppression and deprivation may end up in crimes with sexual motives or create grudge and hatred between a lot of people from both sexes.
I have lived in the Middle East for seven years. I saw Muslim women dressed decently covering all their bodies, walking decently, looking down on the road, not gazing here and there. I admire the Muslim women’s decency, resulting from the clear regulations of Islam related to women’s clothes and appearance. If you are looking for women's decency, nothing but Islam can create it. This is just one of the great aspects that have attracted me to Islam.
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SELFISHNESS
I am D. L. Kelley, 27 years. The church holds that Jesus bore and bears all our sins so as to save all humans and us. I thought that this belief represents the acme of selfishness. The holders of this belief want all that is good for them selves only and all that is bad for others only. They want pleasure, money, success, and life enjoyments for themselves. However, when it comes to sin, the pain of sin, and the cost of sin, they simply transfer all of that to Jesus, and they want him to bear not one sin, not two, not one million, not one billion sins, but an infinite number of sins: all sins committed by all people through all times. What selfishness this is! How unfair they are!
Is it not better that each one bears his own sin? Is it not fair and square this way? I do not like the idea that I sin and somebody else bears my sin. The one who does it should be the one who bears it. I do it, and I bear it. This teaches everybody to be ethically responsible for what he does before people and before God. I prefer the principle of ethical responsibility as adopted by Islam.
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IF HE
I am K. J. Lavater, 31 years. The church pastor, night and day, refers to Jesus as God, the Lord, or God's son. I thought that it would be impossible that Jesus is God or God's son, as the pastor likes to assume.
Let us imagine a person in our time coming to say to us, "Listen to me. I am God. Look at me. I am God." What would be our reaction? We will call him mad immediately, and he will be taken to rest at the nearest lunatic asylum within a few minutes. Previous prophets were rejected by their peoples, harmed, or tortured for saying very much less than being God or God's son. They merely said that they are God's messengers, yet they were not easily believed in.
I would strongly argue that had Jesus said that he was God or God's son, he would have been killed immediately. Had Jesus been here with us and heard what the pastor says about his being God or God's son, he would have silenced the pastor instantly, might have killed him out of uncontrollable rage, or suffered an immediate heart attack.
I can’t see how a man like Jesus is considered a god by the church. Christianity always chooses the most complicated and most illogical explanation or doctrine, whereas Islam always gives the easiest and most logical explanation. In Islam, Jesus is a man. He is a messenger sent by God to the people of Israel only. God gave him some miracles, as he did give to all other prophets before or after him.
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