The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Christians Destroy Churches in BetNahrain

Christians Destroy Churches in BetNahrain

Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Saturday, June 28 2008, 20:00:25 (CEST)
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The Roman Catholic missionaries and the Protestant Evangelicals after them were literally forcing the Nestorian and Jacobite people and clergy to renounce their own, ancient, forms of Christianity; something the Arabs never did. Since the Arabs conquered Mesopotamia they guaranteed freedom of religion to every Christian sect and made no distinctions between them. Since, to the Muslim, all of them were equally mistaken and ”lost”, it didn’t matter which was which, or if there were twenty or a hundred different ones. But the important thing is that they let them alone…demanding only that they leave each other in peace...and allowed them to go their ways, confident that, eventually, they’d see their errors. In fact later sultans ruled that any Christian leaving the faith of his fathers for a new sect would be punished by death…whatever else you may think of this, it at least had the effect of keeping people within their congregations, allowing those ancient faiths to survive...keeping the revenues coming in on which the church administration depended.

Through all manner of devious ploys, temptations and coercion of the people and sultans, European missionaries, and their governments, applied pressure on Eastern Christians to abandon their “false”, near-heathen, faiths and come over to them…splitting the community into jealous and hostile factions. It was the CHRISTIANS who shattered the cohesion and unity of the Eastern Christians, not the Muslims. It was the foreign Christians who “attacked” and impoverished the indigenous churches, not the Muslims. Muslims afforded Nestorians, Jacobites, Armenians and Greeks equal toleration and security for centuries until the Europeans came.

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