Religious Conversions

What you have claimed I posted so far on this thread is innacurate.So far here it is:http://www.answering-islam.org/Testimonies/algharib.htmlthats from Message 4It's a testimony of a Muslim convert. And this is the actualy site I got it from if you would have bothered to click the link it will take you to the home page at the bottom, take a look:http://www.answering-islam.org/Testimonies/index.htmlAlso, yeah I screwed that link up. Here is the correct one. Thanks.Islam Watch - "Millions of Muslims Converting to Christianity" by Salem VoiceAt the bottom of the article on that site it says: If you check at the bottom of that link it says:svm news117 which takes you to his blog instead of the website. My bad.And all this from Message 11:Author of the New York Times best selling political thrillers, THE LAST JIHAD (2002), THE LAST DAYS (2003), THE EZEKIEL OPTION (2005), and THE COPPER SCROLL (2006), more than one million copies in print, writes: "More Muslims converted to faith in Jesus Christ over the past decade than at any other time in human history."If you would have simply looked into this claim, it brings you here:http://www.somebodycares4u.com/millions_of_muslims.htmAlso from Message 11:-Muslims turn to Christ" (article of the American Daily),IRIS' Israel Blog - IRISAlso from Message 11:- "Persecution Harder Among Muslims Who Convert to Christianity, But Saved Souls Bring Great Joy to Believers" (news story of Assist News Service),Page not found – Assist NewsAlso from Message 11:-"India: Islamic Extremist Threatens Christian Convert" (news story of the Compass Direct News),ForbiddenAlso from Message 11:-"6 Million Muslims LEAVE Islam every year" (Interview of AL-Jazeera satellite TV between Maher Abdallah and Shiekh Ahmed Katani)Print Redirect | VirtueOnline — The Voice for Global Orthodox AnglicanismAlso from Message 11:-"Muslim converts face ostracism in France" (Zee News)..".Zee News: Latest News, Live Breaking News, Today News, India Political News UpdatesIm sorry I didnt provide the every single link in the posts. You could have searched them just as easily.As for the wiki links, if you actually read my post Message 16
you will see me asking Straggler what he would like to discuss and WASN'T using the links as evidence. Nice try tho If your going to try to make me look bad atleast do it honestly or, just join the club that follows me around saying im a liar. I'll add you to the list.Everything in this comment can be found in my comments back thread. So it seems you are the liar here. Not me. I'll await your apology.
Edited by Chuck77, : No reason given.Edited by Chuck77, : No reason given.Edited by Chuck77, : No reason given.

Nobody is calling you a liar. What we're telling you is that, so far, the evidence does not seem to support your claim. This has nothing o do with lying. Perhaps you were lied to, and are simply repeating the lie, that does not make you a liar, just not so sceptical as to check their claims. Perhaps you think you heard it somewhere. Perhaps the person telling you was lied to, and simply repeated the claim. None of that makes you a liar.Basically what we're saying is this: After all our posts to the contrary, do you stand by your claim that more Muslims are converting to Christianity than vice versa, and if so, do you have some positive evidence for this. Or will you admit you were wrong when you made that claim(not a liar, just mistaken, it happens to everybody), and we can move on to other subjects?

Hi Chuck,Once again, you seem to be getting very agitated over what I consider to have been a perfectly reasonable and polite post. Please, for the sake of conversation, reign it in a little.Still, that aside, let's look at what you've provided.From Message 4; A single testimonial from a Muslim-to-Christian convert. This is wholly invalid as evidence that Muslim-to-Christian converts outnumber Christian-to-Muslim converts. I did click the link. I read some (admittedly not all) of the article. It is not up to me to follow all the links that might appear on the pages you link to. If I were to attempt to follow every link that led to another link, I would soon be trying to read the entire internet. I can't do that, I'm not the Flash. If you think that a particular page contains evidence that is important to your case, present it, link to it and explain why you think it is important. That is how debate works. It is not up to others to go looking for evidence that supports your position, that's your job.Still, let's take a look. It appears to be a list of links, each leading to another testimony about how awesome it is to be a Christian convert from Islam. Once again, these testimonies are irrelevant to the question of whether there are more Muslim-to-Christian converts or otherwise. If any of them contain data on this question (and I'm certainly not going to go ploughing through them all), please present it. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of testimonies. These are invalid as evidence for your claim. The plural of anecdote is not data. Cool. Let's take a look...Oh dear. It appears to be a page full of uncorroborated claims. It claims over and over again that there are millions of converts, but it offers no evidence for this, no citations, no statistics. It lauds the number of Christian converts from Islam, but provides no umbers at all for the Muslim converts from Christianity, so no comparison can be made. Further, the page contains claims that have been clearly demonstrated to be false, so it seems reasonable not to trust it as a source.I do not regard this page to be evidence in favour of your claim. Ah, I see. I thought that all of those pages were part of the Salem Voice blog, whereas they are actually from disparate sources across the net. If you want people to look at your links, it's just good form to y'know, link to them. Remember, it's your responsibility in a debate to provide evidence for your own position. it's not my job to do your homework for you.But okay, let's look at them; This page contains much the same material as the Salem Voice link. Once again, it consists solely of claims and anecdote, none of it provides us with checkable data. This is not valid evidence for your claim. This is just a blog post. It amounts to no more than one person's opinion. Further, it appears to simply be recycling the claims from the previous links. This is by no means valid evidence for your claim. It really isn't evidence for anything. This is simply a report on the comments of Pastor Ciniraj of Salem Ministries, the same source that appeared in your previous link. It is also the same source that made the discredited claims about Uzbek and Kazakh Christians. This is simply more repetition, more baseless claims and more recycling of the same information. It contains no hard data, no attributable information and amounts to no evidence for your claim. This article recounts the sad story of the murder of a Christian man by al-Shabab, the Somali al-Qaeda affiliate. The article makes no mention of conversion to or from Christianity save that the murdered man was a Christian convert. That Christians are oppressed by Muslim terrorists does nothing to further your claims about conversion.Frankly I am amazed that you could even consider this evidence for your claim. It is obviously irrelevant. This is nothing more than a repetition of the claims by Sheikh Ahmed Katani. Those claims are as baseless in this article as they were in the first, since he just pulls the claim out of his ass, offering no statistical back up whatsoever.As a side note, I am curious as to why you seem so eager to take the rantings of an Islamic fundamentalist as gospel. It doesn't matter how they might be ostracised or not. The claim you made was that there are more Christian converts from Islam than the other way around and this article has absolutely no bearing on that claim, beyond repeating the same unverifiable figures that all the other pages cite. This is not evidence in favour of your position. It doesn't really work that way. Apart from the fact that it's your job to back up your argument, you need to consider that more than one person is going to read your posts. If you provide the links, only one person (you) will need to mess about searching for them. If you don't hotlink them, everyone who might want to read them will have to search for them. You are just creating more work for everyone and in the process, you are making it far less likely that people will be bothered to read your sources. If you want to communicate as effectively as possible (and why wouldn't you?) then link to your sources! I know that. I was just mentioning them for completeness' sake.So, to recap, I have gone through every single page you linked to and found no evidence whatsoever for your claim. All you have presented is a long list of repetitious claims, none of which are backed up with hard data. Not one of them makes any serious effort to compare the number of Muslim-to-Christian converts with the number of Christian-to-Muslim converts. Absolutely none of this is valid as evidence for your position. You have effectively provided us with nothing at all. You're not going to get an apology because I did not accuse you of being a liar. I have no idea where you got that idea from. I was trying to discuss your claim in a polite and reasonable way. You have responded by calling me a liar. That is not good form. For the record, I do not believe that you are lying, I think that you are simply mistaken.Please Chuck, don't get overwrought over nothing. I've already said, this isn't anything personal, it's just that I disagree with your position, so I am criticising it. That is what we do here. It is called "debate". If this is all it takes to get you riled up, then I think that you either need to grow a thicker hide or consider whether this is really the place for you.Mutate and Survive

I think we are hitting our heads against the wall, because fundamentalists of all stripes are going to put more credence on Testimony than evidence.

quote:

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In religion, testimony generally involves an inward belief or outward profession of faith or of personal religious experience.

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Christians in general use the term "testify" or "to give one's testimony" to mean "the story of how one became a Christian"; less commonly it may refer to a specific event in a Christian's life in which they believe God has done something deemed particularly worth sharing. Christians often give their testimony at their own baptism or at evangelistic events. In the current age of the Internet, many Christians have also placed their testimonies on the internet.

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SourceWhen Chuck accepts Testimony over evidence, he also has a tendency to throw in qualifiers like "more" and "most" that he is incapable of backing up with evidence.We have seen that here and on another thread where he claimed that "most" religions had stolen their creation story from the christian bible. In both threads he was incapable of supporting either claim.The nut of the problem is that as a fundie he accepts testimony over evidence. Not sure how we get around that.P.S.It is "rein", not "reign".

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.

Hi Chuck,I'd rather not get sidetracked off-topic with a years-old POTM. I'm glad you like it, and I'll just say that I don't think you're taking my words quite the way I meant them, though that seems to be nigh-universal around here when the word "faith" enters the picture. I'll just leave it at that so we don't go off-topic.------------------------ That's the problem, Chuck. From appearances, you're using personal anecdotes, selectively chosen, to draw a sweeping conclusion about reality on a global scale. Someone else mentioned that "the plural of anecdote is not data," and that statement could not be more true.If I were to try to examine the frequency of religious conversions, I would not start by looking online to see how many conversion stories I could find; this selects only for those individuals who bother to post a story on the internet, and can easily be skewed by language, my specific search terms, and so on, on top of simply being nothing more than a collection of anecdotes. I would not even look at whether one religion or the other is "true;" people believe things that are known to be false all the time.Instead, I would try to create a survey. The best way would be to convince a government or two to add a little subsection to census data, asking if respondents were previously of a different religion. This way we could get a nice, broad and random sample of conversions to and from all religions and get some real, blind data. Failing that, I would seek a grant to fund a study. I'd create a survey, print out a few hundred thousand copies, and randomly select locations around the globe to send some grad students around to random people for responses. The randomness is important - selecting only a specific area, or a specific income group, or a specific language, or a specific race/national origin, all of these can (and usually do) skew the statistical results. If I wanted to find out the percentage of Republicans vs Democrats int he US, for example, I wouldn't only send my surveys to specifically rich or poor neighborhoods, because the results would be unlikely to represent the whole. Blind, random surveys across the entire spectrum of the population are far, FAR more likely to give us accurate results.Debate isn't "over" because Straggler posted the Guinness results. I'd like to ask the same question of them - where did those results come from?My key point is that you seem to be making a conclusion based on information you cannot possibly have. You don;t know how many Islam > Christian conversions happened last year - you have no way of knowing. Likewise with Christian > Islam conversions. You have a "general sense," more like a "gut feeling" that one is greater than the other; I presume largely because you find one of the competing religions to be more personally gratifying. But like my bank account, our preferences cannot affect reality - your "gut feeling" that the "truth" of Christianity means there will be more Islam > Christianity conversions carries no more weight than my feeling that I "deserve" a larger salary will somehow make my direct deposits larger.The question "which occurs more, conversions from Islam to Christianity, or Christianity to Islam" is a quantitative question, and this means that the only way to answer it is quantitatively.We need numbers. Until we get those numbers, we can make predictions, but we cannot draw conclusions. Our best answer without a good statistical survey is quote simply "I don't know."I'll leave the obvious No True Scotsman debate on who is or isn;t a Christian for a thread where it's more appropriate and on-topic.

Let’s just remind ourselves of your original claim and the rather assertive manner in which you made it: Message 444 Despite your rather antagonistic approach it appears that you are utterly unable to justify this statistical claim of yours. As demonstrated most comprehensively in this thread by Granny Magda and Rahvin. I suggest that if you are going to make claims in such an unnecessarily robust manner in future you at least select a topic in which you are confident of being able to make an evidenced case. Otherwise you just end up looking foolish. The above link isn’t evidence of more Christians converting to Islam than vice versa. Or any other such statistical assertion. But it arguably is a case of the proclivity of believers to create a sort of propaganda based approach to the whole conversion thing. You are far from the first believer to conclude that there are hordes of others converting away from different faiths as a result of seeing the error of their ways. You are far from the first believer to conclude that these hordes of converters are some sort of evidence of the veracity of one religion over another. The problem — As with all these things is that all any of you really have is deep personal conviction and testimonies that you find personally significant.None of it is evidence of anything meaningful at all.

Perhaps a different way of saying this is that Chuck has been repeatedly and vigorously explaining that he is convinced, while we continue to ask what information he found so convincing.The questions of the day are "what information does Chuck have that caused him to be so convinced," and "does anyone else find that information convincing, and should in fact Chick find it convincing?"

Similarly on a Yahoo forum a decade ago, when a creationist repeated the "amount of sodium in the sea" PRATT and I explained residence times to him, I also asked him why he and so many other creationists repeatedly resort to such unconvincing claims and arguments. He replied that the only reason I find those claims and arguments unconvincing is because I am not already convinced.Chuck is already convinced. That is why he finds that claim so convincing.Of course, that is based on anecdotal evidence, a single individual's personal testimony, but I find it convincing.

That Chuck is convinced I don't think is in doubt. That the links and references he provides have been written by those who are convinced of similar conclusions to his, I don't think, is in doubt. But when we question Chuck's conclusions he treats it as some sort of personal slight on him and those who he references. He treats our refusal to accept this conviction as evidence as if we are actually accusing him (and those he references) of lying. It is almost as if Chuck just cannot grasp the idea that we accept his conviction, we accept his testimonials as genuine cases, we accept the convictiojn of those he quotes etc. but still reject that these things support his ultimate conclusion.Ultimately I don't think Chuck really understands why his testimonial type evidence is not legitimate as a means of supporting his statistical claim. Or why the equally passionate but mutually exclusive conviction of others (in this case Molsems convinced that Christians are converting to Islam in droves) should be considered just as valid as his own "evidence". You and I know from past experience together that explaining to advocates of "subjective evidence" what they "should" or "should not" find convincing is a fruitless task. By definition they will find convincing the subjective "evidence" that supports their subjective conclusions. Because that is what subjective "evidence" is.Ultimately this is about what actually qualifies as evidence and what doesn't. Why certains forms of "evidence" deserve quotation marks. And what it actually means to "know" or conclude something rather than just believe it with deep conviction. It's all epistemology. Every argument at EvC essentially boils down to epistemology.But most of that (I suspect) will be beyond Chuck. So we shall just keep bashing our heads on the wall of unwavering ignorance trying to explain to him why it is that the deep personal conviction expressed by him and his sources doesn't ultimately support his original claims in the way that he believes they do.

Of course, but that's why we're largely speaking to the lurkers. And verbalizing the concepts helps me organize my own head, so I think it's a worthwhile exercise, even if we fail to convince our opponents directly. Thinking about thinking is rarely a waste. Of course. Yet epistemology is a fantastically important subject that nearly everyone simply takes for granted. Virtually no one asks themselves what they think they know, and how they think they know it.Exploring that is more important, I think, than the individual conclusions we arrive at. I have different thoughts on the matter. We both know this ties into the classic "RAZD vs Straggler" debates on the subject, and I think we would both agree that RAZD is certainly not incapable of comprehending the subject. I'm reluctant to agree that a discussion along those lines will be "beyond" Chuck.After all, the concept (as it pertains to this specific thread) is not difficult. If I ask if there are more apples or oranges in a basket, you don't ask people for their testimonials on whether they like apples or oranges better. You don;t search online for pictures of apple orchards or orange groves. If the basket is available, you count the oranges and the apples and let the numbers tell you which is larger. If the basket is not available and you can't see it to count, you have no way of knowing, and the best answer is "I don't know."

So did anybody find any numbers on how many people are converting from Islam to Christianity, and visa versa?

I'm not sure more specific data is available than the relative populations of each religion and their change over time. Specific x > y and y > x conversions are just more specific than your typical census data recovers. Standard survey types tend to be able to represent only a specific geological area (like a city or a state), not global trends simply because of the scale of effort required. The trend in Washington, DC is likely to be very different from Baghdad, Iraq.

Yeah, it does seem hard to "measure".Too, I was reading on one site I ran across that a lot of people were converting to Islam in Packistan (IIRC) out of fear and persecution rather than because they thought it was true.

Care to share the site with us so we can see what kind of sources they use. Also, the words "a lot" are very relative. Is "a lot" 10? 100? 1000? 10,000? more?