Sunday, February 14, 2016

He Warned Us About Islam Over 750 Years Ago… It’s Time To Listen

Conservative Tribune ^ 

He Warned Us About Islam Over 750 Years Ago It's Time To Listen.

St. Thomas Aquinas is considered one of the most revered philosophers and theologians of any era. A 13th-century Dominican friar, his works include the “Summa Theologica” and several groundbreaking commentaries on the works of Aristotle.
Over 750 years ago, he also had some prescient words about the spread of Islam, shared via Breitbart. In his work “Summa Contra Gentiles” — in which he argued for the truth of Christianity against other religions — he blasted Islam as a carnal, brutal religion which seemed to place earthly pleasures above spiritual awakening.
Christianity, Aquinas pointed out, spread through the miracles of Jesus Christ and his followers. Islam, on the other hand, spread through more worldly means, such as a fulfillment of the flesh.
Lessons”
Muhammad “seduced the people by promises of carnal pleasure to which the concupiscence of the flesh goads us,” Aquinas wrote. “His teaching also contained precepts that were in conformity with his promises, and he gave free rein to carnal pleasure.”
Needless to say, that didn’t lead to the most pious sort of converts.
“In all this, as is not unexpected, he was obeyed by carnal men,” Aquinas wrote. “As for proofs of the truth of his doctrine, he brought forward only such as could be grasped by the natural ability of anyone with a very modest wisdom. Indeed, the truths that he taught he mingled with many fables and with doctrines of the greatest falsity.”
That’s why, according to Thomas Aquinas, “no wise men, men trained in things divine and human, believed in him from the beginning.”
The Prophet Muhammad.
Who, then, spread the word of Islam? This may sound familiar to you.
“Mohammad said that he was sent in the power of his arms,” Aquinas wrote, “which are signs not lacking even to robbers and tyrants.”
Muslims “were brutal men and desert wanderers, utterly ignorant of all divine teaching, through whose numbers Muhammad forced others to become his followers by the violence of his arms,” Aquinas wrote.
Aquinas also pointed out that very little of Islam was new or particular to the religion; the majority of the Quran was borrowed from Christianity and the world of mythology, with just enough added to make it an attractive faith for the worldly and greedy, Aquinas wrote. However, to Christians, Muhammad’s work “perverts almost all the testimonies of the Old and New Testaments by making them into fabrications of his own, as can be seen by anyone who examines his law,” Aquinas wrote.
Aquinas also engaged in a little bit of dry, 13th-century humor about Muhammad, saying that it was “a shrewd decision on his part to forbid his followers to read the Old and New Testaments, lest these books convict him of falsity.”
“It is thus clear that those who place any faith in his words believe foolishly,” he concluded.
Keep in mind that Thomas Aquinas lived closer to Muhammad’s time in the seventh century than to our time, yet all of what he said about Islam still rings true.

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