What makes Christianity more reasonable. Why is Islam wrong? What are the best arguments against Islam?
What I would say to begin with is that Islam is more “do-able” than either Christianity or Judaism.
The Law in Judaism is a rather severe burden to carry around in your day to day life. Likewise, few have been able to follow the world-denying asceticism of the Christian Way down to a tee. There are some who say that Christianity has never really been tried yet, and are in many ways correct, because even as it has dropped the requirements that the Law places on Jews, the ‘taking up your cross and following me’ bit, the ‘hating your life in order to gain it’, has people sitting up on poles for twenty years, and still feeling like they are not doing enough.
In contrast, Islam is very doable. You can live a very normal secular life under its restriction, pray and eat, and carry on pretty much like before without feeling a lot of guilt or shame about sinning. Sin and redemption just do not play that big of a role in the religion.
So in a lot of ways, Christianity is not the more ‘reasonable’ of the two.
On the other hand, given the pervasive, insidious nature of evil, how it encompasses a world that can be rightly compared to Satan’s domain, understanding the extent to which the stain of sin and evil pervades our every thought and word and deed, how much the world is in need of a Redeemer, calls out the need not just for reasonable measures, but extraordinary measures.
This is Christianity’s strength,arguably even more than Judaism, and exponentially more so than Islam. We are indeed the people of Israel, those who struggle against God and man, and may even rise to victory. We are not just the children of faith, like all the children of Abraham,. but the children who struggle, against ourselves, and agaisnt others and even against God himself. We do not just submit and accept, but are ever-vigilant, ever critical against the insidious tentacles of evil slipping through the shadows and taking hold of our lives. We are the people who have crucified God himself, and must therefore forever doubt, forever strive against our ignorance and the motives which we hide even from ourselves. We must forever make the effort to differentiate between BarAbbas, the illusionary son of God, and Jesus, the self-described Son of man.
Islam is a very do-able religion. In its pre-modern, pre-Wahabbi, pre-Islamist, forms at least, there is nothing severe about it. The society it created in the Golden age of the Caliphates was a tolerant one, open to the ideas of the Greek Christians, and the Persians and the Indians, as the wisdom of the East and West became merged to form a very liveable society. It is a very moderate religion, in its historically pre-dominant forms at least, and does not place such great demands on its adherents. Ergo, all but the most fervent eventually convert when it is the dominant religion in the House, for life is easier in so many ways when they do.
Christianity is not easy. A reasonable mode of life that it not what it offers those who follow it.
But what Christianity does offer is a true picture of the nature of mankind and the nature of the world. What it ultimately offers is not the peace of being a people who submit, but the freedom to be all that we can be.
Freedom is not an easy road to take.
