Why the Muslim World Can't Think Straight

You've all seen it on the news. A Danish newspaper prints cartoons featuring the Prophet Muhammad in a negative light, and Muslims take to the streets denouncing George Bush.The Pope criticizes the Muslim tendency to defend their faith through violcen, and Muslims take to the street calling for his death. That'll show how wrong the old guy is, eh?

We see things like this over and over again, and it seems like there just must be something wrong with the logical thinking process in our radical Muslim friends, doesn't it? That's because there is. I'm going to try to explain why it is that Muslim logic does not resemble actual logic.

We go back to about 150 years or so before the rise of Muhammad. Rome has fallen to barbarian invaders. It has become virtually desolate. Political leadership over the remnant the Empire is located in Constantinople (ancient Byzantium, modern Istanbul) in Turkey.Ultimate leadership in the Church remains centered in the dilapidated Rome, as the pope, the Vicar of Christ, continues to minister from that city. For all practical concern, however, real leadership in the Church and missionary activity is coming from the second-in-command, the Patriarch of Constantinople, as well as the third and fourth major centers of Christianity, the Patriarchates of Alexandria, Egypt and Antioch, Syria.

A man named Nestorius (306-451) becomes the Patriarch of Constantinople, technically number-two man in the Church and, due to the politcal situation of his time, the de facto most influential man in Christianity. Nestorius teaches a peculiar doctrine: He teaches that Jesus Christ was not God from all eternity, but rather was a human person to whom the separate Person of God united himself in a symbiotic relationship upon his death, resulting in his resurrection. This teaching spread throughout the Church, and was especially influential among Christians of the Syrian tradition.The pope was quick to condemn this idea--if Jesus Christ is not perfectly human and perfectly divine, it makes him unqualified to offer sacrificial attonement by his death and restore union between God and man.

Both the Western Church and the Church of Constantinople accepted the pope's judgment. Much of the Syrian Church, however, clung to Nestorianism, and broke from the rest of the Church--the first major break from the Catholic Church. To this day, a small remnant of Nestorian Christians, tracing their origin all the way back to this time, continue to function under the title "the Ancient Assyrian Apostolic Church of the East," led, by a man called himself "Catholicos-Patriarch of the East." Very tragically, the Church of Alexandria, who rightly condemned Nestorianism, went too far and seemed, in their rebutal of Nestorius, to deny that Christ had a truly human nature. In hindsight, the bulk of the problem was due to a misunderstanding of language, and today the Alexandrian Church and Rome have come to a mutual understanding of the nature of Christ. However, the Egyptian Church too broke from Rome and Constantinople, and continue this day under the Patriarch of Alexandria as the Coptic, Ethiopian, and British Orthodox Churches.

Fast forward to the Middle East at the time of Muhammad (570-632). A very large portion of the Arab world has long been Christian, though the Christians, unlike their European counterparts of the time, are divided between the true Orthodox Catholic Church, the Assyrian Church, and the Coptic Church. There are also large communities of Jewish people, as well as a strong population of traditional Arab pagans. What is important to note, however, is that, by and large, the Christians, Jews, and pagans co-exist relatively peacefully.

In Muhammad's own territory, the majority of people are traditional pagans. There are small groups of Jews, and a fairly strong representation of Nestorian Christians. Muhammad, himself raised a pagan, is rightly turned off by corruptions he sees amongst his fellow pagans, and by persecution of his own class of people.Muhammad was impressed by certain aspects of the Judeo-Christian tradition as it was filtered through the Nestorian Church. With the Jews and Christians, Muhammad rejected the worship of many gods in favor of worshipping the one true God. (To this day, Muslims worship the one true God. "Allah" is simply the Arabic word for God. Arabic speaking Jews and Christians also invoke God as "Allah.) He was also impressed by the idea of God's revelation in hisotry through the Hebrew prophets from Abraham to Jesus, and with the Judeo-Christian connection between ethical behavior and service to God, something largely absent from pagan thought.

Sadly, Muhammad also inherited some characteristic of Christianity which were unique to the Nestorians, and took them to their logical ends. To the Nestorian, Jesus was not God the Son, but a man adopted as a Son by God at his death. To Muhammad, Jesus was a holy man, a prophet of God, even the Messiah (Muslims still consider Jesus the Messiah), but not at all the Son of God. The Nestorians paid lip-service to man being freed from his sin by the death of Jesus. However, their denial of his true divinity makes it impossible for his death to be salvific. Muhammad realized this and, falling back on his pagan roots, asserted that man is not saved from his sins by the grace of God through Jesus Christ, but instead each individual must work to accomplish his own salvation through faithfully submitting to the divine law. Whereas Christianity is all about being made free by God through Jesus Christ, Muhammad preached a message of slavery--in fact Islam is the Arab word for servitude.

With his message of bastardized Nestorianism mixed with paganism--albeit monotheistic paganism--Muhammad proclaimed himself a prophet of God and set up an army to conquer land and force people to embrace his rule and his new religion, Islam. Any time an oppressed people overthrows their oppressors, they are faced with a choice: work for justice, or work for vengeance. Muhammad and his terrorist hordes chose vengeance, and death was the penalty for all who would not accept his thoughts as the revelation of God. In short order, he converted or wiped out most of the Christian Middle East. To this day, in a land that was once the heart and soul of the gospel, Christians are a small and oppressed minority.

Muhammad was a do-er, not a thinker. This should be obvious to anyone who's had opportunity to his Koran, in which every time he changed his mind about something, he seems to have had a new revelation. (For my part, I studied the Koran in high school, for the very noble reason that I had the hots for a Pakistani girl.) But there were men of thought involved in Muhammad's terrorist movement. As Islam grew, it developed its own philosophy, in which is the ultimate key to understanding the Islamic thought process.

In the Western philosophy both of anicent Greece and of the Church, we believe in things called primary causality and secondary causality. Even if we've never studied philosphy or never heard of these terms, they are fundamental building blocks of our culture, and we have inherited--whether we notice it or not--their results.

Primary causality means that God is the First Cause of everything that is or happens. Secondary causality means that the free actions of human beings, made in the image and likeness of God, share in that causality. We are genuine causes of our actions.To illustrate: If I become a priest, the primary reason that will happen is because God wills it to be so. However, my own free decision to embrace that lifestyle are also true causes. It will be true to say that I became a priest because I chose to do so.Or, if in stretching, I knock a coffee mug off of my desk, the primary reason is because God (who established the laws of physics) willed it to be so, but it is also true to say that the mug fell because I hit it.

Islam philosphy specifically and purposefully rejects secondary causality. There is no cause for anything except for God who, in their monotheistic paganism, is as capricious and unpredictable as Zeus or Odin. A mug falls to the floor not because I hit it, but only because God willed it.Without being true causes of the effect of our actions, man loses his dignity as the image of God, and human life loses its sanctity. If it is God's will that all men become Muslims, then to kill those who refuse is simply to do God's will. And the killer does not sin, for even though he holds the knife that cuts off the head, the head does not fall because of his cutting, but simply because it is God's will.

In rejecting secondary causality, the Muslim rejects the very basis of human logic and--even though the average Muslim has proably never heard of primary and secondary causality any more than most Westerners have--therefore, the Muslim has been rendered by the ideology he has inherited as incapable of logic.

And that, my friends, is why the Muslim world can't think straight.