Numbat, although I am a Christian I don't agree that the Bible states that all will be saved somehow ,it says that," you must be born again" you cannot inherit the Kingdom of God without this.

Jesus spoke more about hell than He did Heaven,check a concordance.
God does not send anyone to Hell,you send yourself,because you make the choice to either follow Jesus The Son of God or you don't.
His desire is that ALL would be saved (obey Him) but they just won't .

Babies and mentally ill, etc ,will go to Heaven,because they can't make a decision and don't sin wilfully.

Anyway, as for islam,buddhism,hinduism,all the isms and man made religions like these and then JW's and mormonism ,etc, all are man made religions started by one man ,because they did not want to obey The One True God ,so manufactured their own, assisted by satan .

You will find all of these began after God gave Moses the 5 first books the original Bible and laws.
Islam is the worst of all the religions as far as making trouble,change s,hatred and demands inall nations driven by crueltya nd evil power . It cannot be compared in any way with Christianity.

dobbadan: Called out Christians called/judged now. An ever burning hell where young and old are tortured forever and ever? this doesn't gell with the Mighty God's Character as depicted by Christ.
The Bible does state: "For as in Adam ALL die [physical]EVEN SO in Christ [spiritual] shall ALL [same word] be made alive.
Those who never heard about God/Christ, not their fault, lost forever again not from the God I know. Christ spoke in parables so the people would not understand so could not be called, not their fault.
Christianity - so called - or churchianity is man made. Powerful priest between people and their God, funny hats and frocks(?) worn by the p/hood, as well as carrying "burning purses" or incense. Nothing about these in the N/Testament nor are church buildings commanded. Every man-made church group have differing beliefs derived from the one Bible - strange?
Islam no worse than the early churchianity though they slaughtered each other mainly along with alleged witches and the such.I found a lot of new information on <L Ray Smith> website. cheers, numbat

Aziliz, I concede that much of what I said was rushed and poorly researched.

While many of the items described were not invented in the Middle East, several were significant improvements or refinements.

In my defence, I was perhaps too keen to dispute unfair allegations that the Islamic culture produced only ignorance and nothing of value to mankind and was trying to restore some balance to an argument that was getting off-topic and out of hand.

In retrospect it was a feeble argument at best - like saying Christianity produced the iPod.

All the items I mentioned can be referenced to what appear to be reliable sources, but apparently can also as easily be refuted - so what can you really believe out there in cyberspace?

If there is a lesson in this (for me) it's that people will believe what they want to believe (including me) and there are always agendas at work behind what we are told.

For some, this thread is just an argument over whose imaginary friend is best.

Thanks for keeping me on track.

wobbles, thank you for the honesty and courage shown in that last post. Many who would have us believe that their lives have been transformed by a relationship with their imaginary friend could learn much from that single post.

From what I have seen of christian history and muslim history invention and progress have mostly occured when the power of religious leadership was at it's weakest. Western history is full of examples of church leadership stamping on discovery and invention because of a perceived threat to notions of how things should be. We owe much to those determined individuals who risked death, torture, confinement and public villification to expand the boundaries of human knowledge and understanding.

The battle continues as we see parts of the church desperately trying to have the latest version of creationism (ID) taugh in school as science and seeking for any way possible to discredit the work of those who strive to understand how this universe came into being. Some still struggle with the idea that their imaginary friend did not build it all in six days some thousands of years ago (complete with a fossil record) and don't like what that idea says about the rest of their sacred writings.

Cheers
R0bert

Wobbles:

Do you actually know anything about mathematics?

You mention significant advances that are made in mathematics by Muslims. I think you make the mistake of conflating Muslims and Arabs. To put things in perspective, long division was a PHD problem at the time of the Greeks. To extend this to make the claim that zero was a major advancement while technically correct is also to overlook that fact that it was a case of picking the low hanging fruit.

Just as an aside, does the concept of zero really strike you as being that far out?

Formalising the notions of calculus was a major advancement (Newton, Leibniz) and it is taught to high school students the world over. Consider that by the end of a degree course in pure mathematics one is not even taught to use that which is currently passes as modern mathematics. You begin to gain an idea of how far back in terms of development you are going to make these sparkling claims of Islamic scientific wizardry.

Perhaps you might like to try and actually provide an example of one of those significant advances in geometry.

As for the claims of the Arabic numerals. It makes no difference what textual representation you use for a number. Think algebra, they are replaced by letters. Computers only count up to two and they are generally considered to be superior to humans at performing arithmetic. And to be clear, there is a meaningful difference between arithmetic and mathematics.

Muslims invented trigonometry. Pythagorus, good Muslim he. A small matter of a few centuries discrepancy in your time lines.

The libraries spiel, this one is a classic. Since when does the possession of a book allow one to claim to have come up with the knowledge within.

You have been suckered by some obvious propaganda.

I agree with Robert, you've been most gracious, Wobbles, in admitting fault and there are a lot of christians on this forum who could learn something from that.

I also agree with Robert about the historical fact that it is during times of great tolerance of a variety of viewpoints, be they political, social, scientific or religious that the world gets the greatest flowering in innovation and its during the times of greatest intolerance that innovation is stymied and suffocated. Unfortunately, society seems to stagger between periods of tolerance and periods of fundamentalist intolerant bigotry.

The fact is innovation and invention is something all humans races are capable of and all cultures that foster and encourage it (and often even if they don't there are those who will struggle against ignorance and persecution to bring enlightenment to others).

I hope readers of my previous post note the list of inventions shows the diversity across different cultures, countries and time spans and also how an invention by one people is often improved and extended by others. And yes some of them are moslems and peoples of arabic extraction but many are from a range of other religions (not just christian!) and cultural backgrounds.

It is unfortunate that both Christianity and Islam have inbuilt into them a great deal of intolerance of others that is thankfully often ignored by the adherents but unfortunately often not.