Christianity and Islam: Day and Night

Glenn Fairman has an article today over at the American Thinker  today entitled The Jihadi's Dilemma that effectively shows the difference between fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Christianity. While most people's idea of fundamentalist Christianity is the "hand wavers" and the snake handlers, I contend that it is Orthodox Christians. The article is somewhat long, and the style is decidedly literary, but it is worth the read. Fairman:

It is in the curious paradox of fundamentalism that the twin monotheistic religions of the planet Earth distance themselves. For the humanity that embraces each, their spiritual and temporal fates mimic their founders’ first principles. The more like Jesus a man is, the better sort of man he becomes, while the emulator of Mohammad’s deeds is heir to the burdens of: pride, savagery, discrimination, injustice, and fatalism -- fundamental Islam’s quintet of anxious alienation. Conversely, men whose spiritual arc travels away from Christ’s virtues find themselves materialistic, hedonistic, self-absorbed, and bound to the cares of a world that is even now passing away.

Too many people, put off by the radical morality of the one religion, and by the deliberate misunderstanding of the other, draw a moral equivalence between the two. But make no mistake, the moral equivalence is an illusion. Christ offers the radical interpretation of moral precepts to show us that in our natural state, we have already been convicted. But then if offers a way out: Follow Him, become His disciple. Pick up your cross and follow Him. Turn over your life and your will to Him, and your life will be amazing,  What does Muhammad offer? Myriad rules which the devotee must follow, and can never know if he has been saved. The follower of Islam must submit to his cold, angry moon god, and hope to be taken to his heavenly reward of endless virgins. We are left to guess what heaven is like for the virgins, or the wives for that matter, who, like Stockholm victims are often the ones who instill this nonsense into little boys.

Fairman starts his essay with a question:

I wonder if in the cool and quiet of the evening, long after the muezzin’s final call to prayer, the jihadi mulls over the actions he either perpetrates or gives assent to in the name of his cold and distant deity? Does he pray as I do? Does he attempt to strip off the veneer of self-righteousness that whitewashes the ego and feeds that most loathsome core of sinful pride? Does he really believe that the acts of immolating an iron cage filled with Yazidi girls or smashing the skulls of children in their mothers’ arms renders him as a shining pearl -- a holy offering to his god? Is the immersion of perceived apostates in a fountain of acid or the crucifixion of Christians in the town square – in full view of their own young children -- proof of some iron semblance of moral superiority? Does he ever get beyond the rote babble to a place where he wonders – far beyond the wary eyes of his dead-eyed brethren: "Am I a good man, or am I a bad man?" "And if I am the latter, then what manner of hellish Master do I serve?"

What sort of hellish master indeed? But the devotee of Islam dare not ask, for if he does, he risks hellfire from his inscrutable boss.  Contrast that with the patience of the Creator of the Universe, who even before man came into existence, had already prepared His plan of Salvation to reconcile fallen man to Himself.  Fairman makes the differences clear for those who want to see.