I really want to be a strong Catholic, but then I get these thoughts. Anyway, for whatever reason, I thought about Islam last night, I dont know why, but it bothered me… I just want reassurance from this group, and I want to know why we should not believe in Islam.
Hello, Phil.
I think if one wants a strong faith, one should focus more on what is right, on what one can come to see as undeniably right, about Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, than on what is “wrong” with other religions.
Why do I remain Christian and not convert to Islam?
Because Christianity, as I understand it, is far more demanding than Islam. Because what Christ taught goes so much against what we humans are inclined to learn, so much so that God, and not a mere man, must be its source.
I mean no offence to Muslims, but it does appear to me that Islam is a more user-friendly form of monotheism than Nicene Christianity. It does not offer us the mysteries and conundra of a Triune God. It does not offer us the idea that in the Incarnation a transcendant God condescends to
become one of us. It moreover does not offer us a God who submits himself to human death and human death of the most humiliating kind.
Islam offers us on the other hand a prophet who enjoys a worldly triumph, who dies in his bed surrounded by family and friends, not one who cries out from a cross, “My Lord, my Lord, why have you abandoned me?”
Is it not easier to believe that the Word of God comes to us in the form of a Book than in the form of a Person, a Person who moreover gives Himself to us in the form of mere bread and wine?
Let us look at this question from the angle of a third religion: Buddhism. Buddhism, as I understand it, teaches us that the self is not real and that detachment from the self (or, better, the concept of the self) is the way to free ourselves from suffering. Ironically, it has often been observed, especially by the wisest Buddhists, that one sure way to reinforce the sense of one’s having a self is to fixate on ways to think the self away.
Christianity, as I understand it, teaches us that the self, including our physical being, is very real, and that suffering can be converted into a good if it is united with the suffering of Christ. We truly free ourselves from slavery to our selves not by thinking away the self but by attaching our selves to God, and to God through attaching ourselves to others, sharing in their suffering and loving and serving them.
Many Buddhists and Muslims and others do show by their lives of compassion for their neighbor that they (we would say, by God’s grace) understand the same things Christians do.
