Pakistan: Muslims beat evangelist into unconsciousness, set him on fire

Abu Lahab wrote:

I have no sympathy for anyone breaking a very clear, albeit draconian, rule.

DON'T GO TO PAKISTAN, DON'T PROSELYTIZE!
.............................

Abu Lahab, with the possible exception of the victim himself, all the Christians mentioned—Aamir Masih, Rustam Masih, Austin Masihm, and Nadeem Samuel—are *clearly Pakistanis themselves*.

Since the Rev. Wilson Augustine was ordained in a small local village Presbyterian church, I think it is likely that he is Pakistani, as well.

I don't think these are "outsiders" coming in. In addition, they were not proselytizing Muslims, but were merely handing out pamphlets to *Christian villagers*.

Also, when the Muslim thugs told the reverend to leave the village, *he complied*. They followed him to the bus stop and assaulted him.

The fact is that no infidel can possibly "lay low" enough to be completely safe in a place like Pakistan, where anyone—even small sect Muslims—are likely to be accused of blasphemy, or simply subject to Muslim mob attacks, as was this poor man.

I read somehwere...an Asian newspaper...an article by a Pakistani saying quite a few Pakistanis he knows are leaving Islam - converting to Christianity or becoming atheists. I wish I knew where I read it, but evidently there is enough of it happening for this poor man to think the coast was relatively clear. It seems he picked the wrong village; or maybe only in cities is can apostasy be contemplated.

This man was a native Pakistani Christian, and so far as one can tell from the story, he was dealing with other Pakistani Christians. He was working *among Christian families*.

Would you prefer that he was a Muslim?

Would you prefer that Bangladeshis (overwhelmingly Muslim) and Pakistanis (overwhelmingly Muslim) remained Muslim? If they all became Christian - which is very unlikely - they would abandon polygamy, forced child marriage, 'honor' murders, and all sorts of other evil stuff that Islam permits and prescribes, and they would stop waging jihad terror raids against India. Wouldn't that be preferable to the present state of affairs?

Or do you seriously believe that accident of geography and birth must determine, permanently, lifelong, for every person on the planet, what ideas they should have inside their head? That is, for example, that if someone is born to a Buddhist family in Sri Lanka that person MUST NOT BE PERMITTED to entertain any belief or practice other than Buddhism; and if he or she does have the temerity to investigate and even embrace an alternative belief system, of any kind whatsoever, they must be PUNISHED?

"Followers of both these religions did not allow peaceful growth of any other religion..."
Huh? The West is allowing Muslim populations to grow all over the West.

However, Islam does not allow growth of any other religion. Islam makes it a death-penalty crime to choose to leave Islam.

In Muslim-majority countries, the Christian populations have been decimated in the last 100 years, but in the West, Muslim populations are allowed to immigrate and grow.
Very one-sided. As is the tolerance and freedom of religion very one-sided.

As you're Indian, the Christian British brought to India the railway and the rule of law. Muslims brought you Mumbai and countless other atrocities, including the mass murder of 80 million Hindus over a few centuries. The British wiped out the Thugee cult that killed millions of Indians. As you think Christianity is as bad as Islam, go and live in Pakistan.

She has not right to be uninformed.

Christianity did NOT originate "in the deserts of Arabia".

Neither did Judaism.

Talking about either Judaism or its daughter Christianity as if they are *nothing different from* Islam, is insane and only reveals your ignorance of what they teach and how they originated.

The Law was given in Sinai, yes, but the land of Canaan, the land of Israel, where much of the action of Genesis and then of the history of the people of Israel takes place, and where (during a period of Roman Imperial Occupation, that is, as a member of a *colonised and oppressed* not a *colonising and oppressing* people) Jesus was born and lived and taught and died and, according to the astonished and delighted testimony of his closest friends, raised from the dead, is described repeatedly as "a land flowing with milk and honey"; it only *became* desert after it was conquered and pillaged and ruined by the Muslims from AD 700 onwards. Jesus lived in a world of small townspeople, farmers, gardeners and fishermen. If you think that the western shore of the Mediterranean, the plain of Sharon, Mount Carmel, the Kinnereth and even the terraced olive-planted hills of Judea are the same kind of thing as, or form part of, 'the deserts of Arabia' you are simply nuts.

Christians did NOT invade the Roman Empire as aliens riding in from outside with armies and colonise and force people to convert. They were *citizens* of the Empire already, right there in situ, who chose - of their own accord, based on nothing but the personal testimony of the first followers of Jesus, who were themselves residents within that Empire - to change their allegiance from the gods of Rome, to Messiah Jesus.

Those Christians who went outside the boundaries of the Empire - to Ireland, Armenia, Ethiopia, the Goths - did so as unarmed travellers, *without* the protection or assistance of the Empire's armies. When St Thomas came to India he did not come with armed men to force conversion, but as an unarmed bearer of a new and different story about man, and god, and the world. That was *all* he had. Nothing but himself and his testimony. People could accept or reject it as they chose.

Here is a simple account of the difference between the first four centuries of Christianity and the first four centuries of Islam.

Are they the same? NO.

http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_direct_link.cfm/blog_id/20827
Wednesday, 6 May 2009

'Prof. Hans Jansen On Stopping The Advance Of Islam'

Part of that article:

"In less than four centuries Christianity was able to win the Roman Empire over to itself.

"**This happened from the bottom up, without force or violence, without government intervention or support.** {my emphasis - dda}.

"On the contrary, the government of the Roman Empire, by persecuting Christians from time to time, hindered Christianization with force and violence.

"During the period the Roman Empire was being Christianized, the process occurred more or less in what is now known as the Middle East, plus in Europe up to the Danube and the Rhine.

"That doesn’t mean to say that there were no Christians outside that area.

"By about 300-350, to the east of the Roman Empire in Persia, a fair number of Christians could be found (later known as the Nestorians).

"Also just outside the borders of the Roman Empire there lived the Armenians and Georgians, who by about 300 were not only majority Christian, but had adopted Christianity as a state religion.

"In the Roman Empire that happened shortly thereafter.

"The Muslims managed to conquer roughly the same area as that of the ancient Roman Empire in about a century, with the exception of Western Europe, where they were stopped in France by Charles Martel (732), and with the exception of Turkey and the current Balkans, where the Muslims were stopped by the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantines, until the middle of the fifteenth century."

"Nevertheless it was a tremendous military achievement for the Muslims to conquer in such a short time a territory that stretched from Toledo to Gibraltar, Tunis, Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, Mecca, and beyond.

"According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad, who was the beginning of this wave of violence, died in 632.

"Exactly a century later, a temporary end came to the military expansion of Islam because of the defeat of the Muslims at Poitiers in central France.

"There is not a single Muslim who is unaware of this century of conquests.

"The military successes of that time are generally perceived by Islamic theologians as proof of the truth of Islam and the correctness of the statements made by Muhammad about himself and his mission."...

"Europeans who are not used to employing this kind of reasoning in a debate are sometimes left mute when they are for the first time confronted with this assertion.

"At some of the meetings that purportedly contributed to the dialogue between Christianity and Islam, this argument was used. Perhaps that is, after all, a good thing, because what is the use of having a quarrel?

"But it is a ridiculous Islamic fallacy.

"When Christianity was able to win the Middle East and Europe over, it was without using violence.

"Should the Christians then be impressed that others, namely the Muslims, have managed to conquer such an area using brute military violence?

"No, of course not. On the contrary.

"We should not enter into silly contests of miracles, but may establish that a religion like this needed to make use of the force of arms to achieve approximately the same thing that Christianity managed to achieve without violence. "

Thank you for an informative post.
Good point, that Islam "needed to make use of the force of arms to achieve approximately the same thing that Christianity managed to achieve without violence."