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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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I'm just going to go out on a limb and say that this is a foolish reason to convert from Christianity to Islam.

Is Jesus Christ the Son of God, begotten not created, coeternal with the Father, who died for the forgiveness of sins and will return in glory to bring life to the world?

If the answer is yes, then you stay within Christianity, and no amount of church heresy about sexuality can change that.

Likewise: is Muhammad the final prophet of God, and the Qur'an the true word of God, directly dictated to the prophet by the archangel Gabriel?

If the answer is yes, then you should become a Muslim, no matter how good or bad Christians or Muslims might be on the subject of sexuality.

Christianity and Islam both contain core, substantive claims that go far beyond sexuality. If the churches are all wrong on sexuality, but nonetheless Jesus is Lord, then you stay a Christian and you continue to practice that faith, alone if need be, or even fight to repair the church. If Islam is all wrong on sexuality or anything else, but there is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet, then you should be a Muslim, and make your daily prayers, and stay faithful to what God has said, and if the ummah has gone astray, try to repair it as best you can.

But the core claims matter.

Is Jesus Christ the Son of God, begotten not created, coeternal with the Father, who died for the forgiveness of sins and will return in glory to bring life to the world?

If the answer is yes, then you stay within Christianity, and no amount of church heresy about sexuality can change that.

Likewise: is Muhammad the final prophet of God, and the Qur'an the true word of God, directly dictated to the prophet by the archangel Gabriel?

If the answer is yes, then you should become a Muslim, no matter how good or bad Christians or Muslims might be on the subject of sexuality.

......

But the core claims matter.

This perspective always strikes as odd from an outsider's perspective. To me, the divinity of Jesus or the prophethood of Muhammad are clearly the legitimization methods, not the essence, of their respective religions. "You should believe X because Y." Imagine an alternate universe where Muhammad taught Catholic doctrine on grace and God's kingdom, preached radical forgiveness and against material wealth; while Jesus related the Quran to his disciples, who subsequently waged Ghazwah against polytheists to protect the faith and bring fellow monotheists under a protection/patronage system. I would still pattern match the first as Christianity and the second as Islam despite the "core claims" being reversed.

Of course, the moment one becomes cynical enough to meta-reason past these legitimization claims and choose a belief set on its own merits, one has ceased to be religious in any appreciable way, and might as well just make up one's own beliefs.

I would still pattern match the first as Christianity and the second as Islam despite the "core claims" being reversed.

And if a pig was a dog he'd be a dog?

I don't see how this pertains to if someone should convert to Islam from Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy.

I'm making more of a normative claim here than a descriptive one, though? I'm certainly making a claim about how people should believe, but I think that's a reasonable thing to do in any discussion of changing belief systems? If someone is considering converting to a different religion, it seems reasonable to me to ask the question of on what basis they should do that.

In practice conversions often have to do with everything from just connecting with a community to finding the aesthetics of a tradition appealing, and I'm not going to deny the attractive force of such things - but at some point I'd argue that any sincere person ought to ask the question, "Is this true?"

And I'm happy to claim that the answer to that question should matter.