Reformation not possible, without abandoning roots

Submitted by Karl W. Randolph. (United States), Aug 15, 2002 at 02:55

In Christianity, the attempt to return to the roots started by Luther modernized the religion from the straitjacket imposed on it by the likes of Aquinus and the scholastics. The teachings of the Bible are consistant with the good things that bless us in this modern age, hence the Reformation had a major role in the advancement of human rights, science and technology. It is the gradual abandonment over the last couple of centuries of those founding principles that is leading us back to a new dark ages.

Not so with Islam. It is a religion whose roots are not only contradictory, but demand blind obedience. Where ever there was a flowering of culture under Islam, it was destroyed by reformers attempting to return to the purity of the original religion. Bin Ladin is merely the latest.

In calling for a modernization of Islam, you are really calling for a new religion and an abondonment of Islam's roots. It may still have the same name, many of the same practices and even many of the same teachings, but it will be a radically different religion.

Whereas the conscious efforts to maintain the purity of Christianity's founding principles is consistant with the good things in modernism, it is an abandonment of Islam's founding principles that will bring the suffering populations under Islam to enjoy the fruits of modernism.

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