How is it that people do not realize that Islam itself produces such a spirit of violence? Here they are fleeing to Europe because they cannot endure the consequences of their mentality, they humiliate themselves seeking for salvation in Christian culture, and do not link the cause to the consequence, as well as they do not realize that Islam is the source of their unenlightenedness, powerlessness to conquer their weaknesses of character and propensity for violence. How can Islam be blamed for the spirit of violence in Muslims, if it itself is not advocating violence?, you will ask. By fear of punishment Muslims restrain themselves from manifesting their sin, which makes them hypocrites, because they have a desire in their hearts, but they have to behave differently. When then they meet someone who is openly doing the same thing they are longing for in their own hearts, but are forbidden to, then they have a need to use violence to compel them to the same hypocrisy. 1
As such believers have guilt and fear as a motive of religious zeal, their fear naturally developed from guilty conscience forms a conspiracy theory and a tendency to suspect and condemn the others. Muslims are burdened by mutual suspicions, because their guilty conscience due to unconquered sins makes them see in everything a shadow of the judgment that awaits them. Then, if someone says to someone else by which words, in which way and how often should they pray to God, and defines minutely how they should live, he thus gets into a personal responsibility of another man, and performs attack of violence against personality, as if a man would command his wife when, how often, in what way and by which words to show her love for him. Naturally, the person whose personality was killed in such a way is not able to respect the personality of another human being. Then, in Islam there is no moral law (the Ten Commandments), which denounces the sinful motives of the human heart (inner motives), so that a Muslim does not know how to repent for the sins - he simply is not aware of them. He will repent when he told someone a bad word, but not for the motives in the heart, because 2
he is not aware of actuating motive which made him said the bad word. He regrets he was a bad hypocrite but not for the sinful motives of pride and selfishness he often does not even considers as a sin. If, for example, he covers his promiscuous desires with a veil of marriage and polygamy, he believes that his desires are no longer sinful; or if he cherishes the feelings of hatred and revenge due to insulted religion, then hatred and revenge are not considered a sin. Instead of reforming the motives of the heart, the Islamic rules lead the believers to deal with outward look and formal behavior. That is why to an average Muslim, it is greater sin to eat pork, than to grow hate and revenge in his heart. While such believers try very hard to conscientiously keep to ther religious rules, in the same time, they surrender to everyday s temptations and sins, until they become slaves of them, and thus soon they become 3
incapable to fulfil those Islamic rules that formalistically restrain evil. Traditional Christianity has a lot of similarities with Islam, with its superficial rules, and while that form of Christianity entirely ruled the Europe, we had dark Midle ages, with same kind of violence incidents over conscience and religious persecutions. Nowadays traditional Christians are more oriented to hedonism, than to hypocrisy. But a small number of believers who stick to their formalistic rules, show same propensity towards violence, as muslims who keep to their Islamic rules - tendency to by force make the state aparatus and others keep to those rules which they keep themselves,out of out of guilty conscience. We can see that through attempts of traditional Christians to impose to others forcefully Sunday worship law and ban act on abortion. Christians Protestants stood up against such hypocritical piety, by raising authority of Holy Scriptures above corrupted Christian tradition, which resulted in ending of Dark ages in Western civilization, and establishing of a spirit of tolerance and respect of human personality. Only when trough moral law person becomes aware of his sinfulness and a fact that he is his own biggest enemy, only then he can sincelery accept other people as sinful, and respect their personality, as he is aware that God respects him as a sinner. 4
Unlike Islam, the Holy Scriptures does not define human conduct by formal and petty rules, but puts it in the sphere of personal responsibilities, while at the same time it very strictly defines the motives of man's heart: "Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer." "And that you seek not after your own heart and your own eyes, after which you use to go a whoring." (1 John 3:15; Numbers 15:39) "It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person." (Mark 7:20-23) And if the motives of the heart have been reformed, man will out of love, and relieved from sin, know by which words to pray and how to behave with others. 5
Besides, the experience of reformed motives of the heart and righteous living comes as the consequence of man's encounter with God: "The Spirit of the Lord will come powerfully upon you, and you will prophesy with them; and you will be changed into a different person." (1 Samuel 10:6) "And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them." (Ezekiel 36:27) Every Protestant European nation experienced such a reform of mentality in the period from sixteenth to nineteenth century, and that s why the Islamic immigrants find refuge in the almost exclusively Protestant countries, because the enlightened mentality of these peoples is detained as a tradition of high cultural values of respect of man and his rights. 6
By the authority of the Bible, Protestantism reformed the mentality of protestant nations, and from reformed human hearts came out the blessings of democracy, freedom of thought and speech, moral life, respect for the human personality, the absence of authoritarianism and cult of personality, a high awareness of our own responsibilities, complete mutual trust among people, the highest level of maturity of personality, a minimum level of crime, the termination of superstition, a high labor productivity, successful marriage relationships, victory over depression and blessings of very mature reaction to stress. But, during the nineteenth century principle "Sola Scriptura" in the Protestant world was soon replaced with the principle of "Sola Feeling" and so it experienced the same kind of apostasy previously experienced by the Catholic Church. More about this on address: https://youtu.be/tfo3bwhmsfu Milos Bogdanovic, milos@enlite.org 7