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Originally Posted by Fozzie_DeBear
David Koresh, his posse and others of his ilk say "Hey"...I think that there are plenty more people waving a Bible and a gun working on how to accelerate the 'End of Days'.
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Touché.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fozzie_DeBear
In a perverted way they are allies of ISIS. As they have the same end goal...God help us if they ever get aligned with a ISIS narrative. Not saying there would be beheadings etc. but violent 'holy war' to kick start Jeebus' return...that I can see fairly easily happening in the US with some Christian doomsday sects.
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I get what you are saying, but I have to disagree about the viability of such things on a larger scale than what we see within the fringes of American religion. Furthermore, those of the same ilk as the Branch Davidians derive these sorts of ideologies in large part by way of direct "revelation" by God, and not from scriptures, which in large part do not promote this brand of actively aggressive apocalypticism.
My point here is that, while it is very possible to dramatically misconstrue biblical concepts on the subject, the text as a source is not like the Quran in this regard. I will repeat: the end of days in the Quran is an actual war amongst actual human armies. The end of days in the Bible is a battle between the angelic army of God and a mixture of demonic and human adversaries. The audience in these texts is always relegated to the position of passive bystanders, and it is left to God to defend them.
I should further add that a direct correspondence between Islam and modern fundamentalist Christianity also tends to fail on the differences that exist between conceptualisations of their scriptures. For even the most literalistically minded Christians, the Bible remains
conceptually the Word of God that is wrought through fairly restrictive interpretative models. However, in all streams of Islam (as far as I know), the text of the Quran is
actually the Word of God. The difference here being that the Quran is in its standard Arabic form functions as the very words of Allah, while the Bible is representative of what God intends to say. It's a fine difference, but a very important one. "Biblicism" in Islam is extreme by way of comparison to all branches of Christianity, and this is something that is often construed as highly problematic in friendly dialogue that I have had with Muslims. Christian concepts of divine "inspiration" or "infallibility" are dismissed by all Muslims that I know as petty half measures.