Religious Conversions

If you had claimed that one Muslim had converted to Christianity, that would indeed be sufficient evidence --- if anyone had doubted you. I did. Because they were making claims that were untrue, as I demonstrated. In 1990, there were more than 0 Christians in Uzbekistan, and more than 3 in Kazakhstan. Since (whether through design or incompetence) they publish falsehoods, it would be prudent not to believe them. I do not, of course, spend all day on line, nor do I call everyone liars.As for Joel C. Rosenberg, where is he getting his figures from? Having "lived in the Mideast for three months" would not by itself allow him to gauge the number of conversions from one religion to another. After all, I've spent a lot more than three months in the USA, but that gives me absolutely no basis for any quantitative claims about what proportion of people there are converting to what.You should think more carefully about this. If I told you that I'd lived over two years in the USA, and that more American Christians were converting to Islam than vice versa, would you really take the truth of the first statement as a guarantee or even an indication of the truth of the second?Finally, I would point out that my post was about Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, which are not in the Middle East. Even if Joel C. Rosenberg's holiday in the Middle East really has made him an expert in that region, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are not in fact part of that region.

Your turn to justify your figures.Source for the goose is source for the gander ...

A sensible answer. And you know that how? Er ... you made a lot of that up. Especially the bit about elephants. Well, I've yet to meet anyone "who clearly lived his/her whole life for the purpose and mission of Christ". So I guess they would be a bit thin on the ground. But certainly their are ex-Christian fundies who are now Muslims. I guess you'd say a lot of silly things. But this is hardly on topic. You'll have to ask Chuck that, he's the Christian who is doing so.

What research has he done?You say that he has lived in the Middle East for three months. That in itself does not constitute research on the subject on which you quoted him, namely the whole of human history.

Well, in message #11 Chuck writes: So he must be using a very narrow (re)definition of Christianity, otherwise he would count it as the biggest religion, which it is.

But no-one has said you're a liar --- that would mean that you're saying something that you know to be untrue.But also, so far as I can see, no-one has even said that you're wrong.What we have said is that you have no evidence for your claims. And you don't.

I'm sure there are plenty of other threads for you to be wrong about abiogenesis and the Big Bang on. Let's stick to the religious conversions, eh? How would you go about studying all of them? Apart from the time factor, wouldn't the sources written in Arabic pose something of a challenge? And the witnesses who live thousands of miles away, don't speak our language, and don't have internet access?If, on the other hand, we limit ourselves to the data that is easily available to us, then it is inevitably going to be a biased sample.Then of course there's the problem of weeding out the people who are just plain making stuff up, as I have shown is the case for at least one of your sources. Now, this task seems to present us with a problem. Instead of relying on an actual census of converts, you suggest that we should make an educated guess from other sources. But this is only any good if the sources are reasonably reliable. But how can we test their reliability without comparing their claims to some sort of census?