Add one more book to my Amazon wishlist – The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran. From the description:
The Complete Infidel�s Guide to the Koran reveals:
- The true meaning of celebrated and seemingly benign verses, such as ‘Strive in the way of Allah’ and ‘Persecution is worse than slaughter’
- How the Koran sanctions domestic abuse, honor killing, and murder
- How the Koran not only discourages Infidels from reading it, but mandates that they don’t even touch it
- Why President Obama is dangerously close to supporting a multiculturalism based on an ideology that aims to destroy the principles America holds dear
Stripping out the obsolete debates, Spencer focuses on the Koran’s decrees toward Jews, Christians, and other Infidels, explaining how they were viewed in Muhammad’s time, what they’ve supposedly done wrong, and most important, what the Koran has in store for them.
Robert Spencer is one of the foremost experts and critics of Islam, and his site Jihad Watch is one of the best sites of its kind today. I have no doubt this book will be very good.
The problem with his theory is that it flies in the face of the fact that technology, human rights, and science all FLOURISHED in the CHRISTIAN west, even under the Catholics.
The entire argument about faith and reason being antithetical is not borne out by the facts regarding Christianity, except in some localized incidences.
Christianity produced modern science, abolition, hospitals, and universities. Too bad these same universities turned out boobs who, with their own anti-religionist biases, like to twist history to support their ignorance.
However, I have no doubt that Islam, not to mention Hinduism and Darwinism, have all resisted science. But I will check out this book.
Religion, innovation and economic progress – Part I
Religion, innovation and economic progress – Part II
The scientific pretensions of atheism
Europe's Dark Ages and Islam's Golden Age – two historic fictions?
Part I: How Christianity changed the world by Alvin Schmidt – Introduction
Part II: How Christianity changed the world – Life, Sex, Marriage & Status of Women
Darwinism Impeding Science
The book speaks to the early church and the transition from ancient culture and religion to the new Christian view and not the later flourishing of culture and science in the late Middle Ages. There's no doubt that xianity hastened the destruction of Greco-Roman culture, philosophy, arts, and reason. The history is complex and interesting (not to mention thought-provoking). What would have happened had Christianity not existed? Who knows? But it's foolish to whitewash the faults and failures of xianity and overemphasize those of Islam which you continually do (for partisan and sectarian reasons). Can you ever even try to be fair? Answer: no.