From God to Allah - Turning Muslim

Negative opinions towards God and Christianity are in abundance these days. As a Christian who sometimes does not like other Christians very much, I understand this negativity even though my ingrained American identity does not condone it. On the one hand, there are the liberal Christians who in the name of tolerance are closing their eyes to the destruction sin is causing this nation; and way on the other hand, fundamentalist Christians have forgotten that Love is the very center of Christian ideology. Many Christians are not helping to better the image of God or of themselves and other Christians are jumping ship entirely.

On MySpace one of the top blogs this July 2008 is by a vitriolic anti-Christian who claims to be a voice of reason. The author of the blog equates believing in God to believing in Santa Claus and quotes Deuteronomy to show how horrible the Judeo-Christian God actually is. My question for that blogger is: if you do not believe that there is a God, then why do you hate Him so much? Why do you expend so much effort in trying to convince people that God does not exist?

Maybe the answer to this question is that the blogger believes that someone like me who uses words like "sin" is convinced that non-believers are going to a place called 'Hell'. In fact, I do not think there is any place like Dante's Inferno, but there is an abyss where God is not present. I wonder what this world would look like if it were an abyss. I challenge the blogger to describe it for me. Would it be Thomas More's Utopia? Would it be Stalin's Soviet Union? Does a world where God does not exist allow some of its inhabitants to believe in God?

Before I started writing this article I googled "Death of Christianity" and on a website which was defending being Christian, I found a link to a very interesting video titled "Turning Muslim in Texas". Apparently, there is a trend with young Christians from very conservative Christian backgrounds to convert to Islam. One new Muslim convert interviewed in the video stated that "Islam is everything I wanted Christianity to be."

What these Muslim converts like about Islam is that it has law. Turning Muslim gives them a way to live their lives properly. They are tired of how sins like adultery, fornication, drug trafficking, murder, and rape are ignored and sometimes outright condoned in this country. Maybe they feel that the Christian religion they were raised with is ineffectual in putting a stop to these things. They want to live in a community where people conduct themselves with restraint.

I think that secularists and Christians both may want to make note of this conversion to Muslim trend. While those on the extreme side of secularism try to eradicate the name and law of the Judeo-Christian God from all public places, documents, and pledges, Allah is moving in. One might say that religious Christian conservatives who are turning Muslim are just trading one naïve, irrational belief for another. There is more to it than that. Christians are under attack so much that they spend more time defending themselves than they do practicing their religion. As put succinctly by the apostle Paul, Christians are commanded to "Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus." Prayer is the practice.

The MySpace blogger denounces prayer and tries to show proof that prayer does not work, but the blogger's idea of prayer is that the one praying is always asking for something. And that is not the essence of prayer. The first and foremost function of prayer is worship. Of course, if God does not exist, there is no point to prayer whatsoever. The converts in the video think differently. Turning Muslim has given them what they want.