Do you really need to engage with such a generalizing comment? I did not bother to answer because it is plainly obvious that Christianity is only 2000 or so years old and before it, the world was certainly not perfect. In fact, I think it got considerably better. but more to the point, if christianity is the source of the world’s ills, why are current nations where it is forbidden not perfect? And why was the world prior to it so, no other word comes to mind, barbaric?
You were right. Your friends are wrong.
It had qualifiers. A lot of Muslim-bashing sites take surahs out of context or use distorted translations, but essentially the Koran only allows lying to enemies of Islam (often misleadingly translated as “unbelievers”) during war, or when it’s the lesser of two evils. The Koran also says that Muslims can be forgiven if they tell white lies to their spouses for the sake of peace (for instance, it’s ok for a husband to tell her wife she doesn’t look fat in that dress), but the Koran is also very clear that lying and dishonesty are, on balance, bad things, not good things.
For instance:
Surah 40:28.
Be honest because honesty leads to goodness, and goodness leads to Paradise. Beware of falsehood because it leads to immorality, and immorality leads to Hell
Where is the like button?
The Christian Bible also says a lot of things that most Christians would find abhorrent. Furthermore, and this isn’t meant to be a value judgement, without a real-world reference it’s difficult to determine if some abstract concept is exactly equal to another abstract concept.
So people who believe that Allah and God are the same don’t have to believe in the exact same things. They can each believe that the other side is simply worshipping him wrong. They don’t have to conform to what some outsider thinks they should believe, because 99% of believers of both religions don’t believe every little line and jot anyway.
But if I had to choose, I’d vote that God an Allah are the same concept, because Allah is the Arabic word for God. I doubt that when Christian Arabs pray to Allah that they are worshipping someone different from when English Catholics pray to God.
Back to the OP:
I argue with them for exactly the same reason that I would debate communists or white power nuts, to pick two examples more or less at random. They represent Ideology, something that I find both disturbing and fascinating.
To see an intelligent human being who bases their world view and political philosophy on a foundation devoid of any evidentiary basis, staking their emotional wellbeing on it, forces me to conclude that this is probably a matter worth exploring. All the more so when that Ideology so often requires them to force political and scientific reality to conform to it, and damn the price. Evolution, easily one of the most powerful scientific theories ever discovered,is under threat in the science classroom due almost entirely to such Christian ideologues. Should they succeed, the assault will almost certainly begin on physics, astronomy, or geology. Don’t even get me started on political Christianity, and the bizarre reimaginings of history springing from that (cough…Barton). How about morality? The latest darling of the apologists is Paul Copan, a man who uses every logical fallacy around in order to argue that genocide is wonderful and holy if God orders it, but that’s it’s not really genocide anyway. At the very best, he’s a moral cretin, as are those who take his arguments seriously.
Had they no political power, I wouldn’t give a damn. As it is, I’m not that apathetic.
Since when? Religious people start religion based threads here all the time; I see a lot fewer threads started from an atheist perspective. Atheism is primarily reactive. Some believer starts gibbering about their religion, some unbelievers wander in to tell them the many ways that they are wrong. And if there’s one thing that religion is consistent about, it’s being wrong.
Because it’s not the only source of evil in the world. All religion is destructive by nature, and most of humanity is religious; and even religion isn’t the only source of evil in the world, just the worst.
I see no reason to think that the Christians who want to push their religion in school are anything but a majority.
i’m going to have to talk to my husband about this to know for sure but I don’t think so, based on the fact that the arabic phrase you say to become muslim is 'there is only one god and his name is allah and mohammed is his prophet." so ive assumed they have a word for “god” but his name is Allah just as the jewish god’s name is 'Jehovah"
The first part of the phrase is “There is no God but God.” There’s no disputing the fact that Allah is Arabic for “God.” And for that matters Jews don’t call their god Jehovah. The Christians came up with that based on a way Jews represented their god’s name in Hebrew.
ok the christian god’s name is jehovah, either way, get my point?
When I debate a Christian (or any religious or woo-believing person, really) I have no expectation of convincing them of anything. I find the process entertaining and hopefully others do as well.
And it’s funny when they completely lose it.
That’s an English translation of the Shahadah, the Muslim profession of faith. “Allah” is indeed the Arabic word for God. Muslims say that Allah has 99 names, but I think in English we’d say those were attributes, rather than names. They’re phrases like “the compassionate” and “the creator” and so on.
Not really. Arabic speaking Christians call their God ‘Allah’ too.
wow…i’m very interested in your type but questions for you elude me at this moment. we can never reach common ground so i dont know where to start. taking pleasure in someone “completely losing it” is something foreign to me. I find it disturbing when other people are agitated and I’m more of a ‘calmer’ than an ‘agitator’ but to each his own. Maybe later we can converse.
We’ve had this discussion a thousand times. You do not know that believers are wrong. It is not possible for you to know they are wrong. They believe one thing, you believe another. Either side could be correct. You can’t disprove God any more than believers can prove God.
You do not know. You do not have all the answers. Your militant atheism is fundamentally no different than the militant believers. You take an unyielding position on an unanswerable question.
It’s the same as “god” and “God” (capitalized and uncapitalized) in English. There’s a word for “gods,” generically, and the capitalized “God,” denoting a proper name,The Arabic word for “god” is “allah.” His name is Allah (capital A) basically meaning “THE God” as opposed to just any god. The name means “God.” it’s not something else. It’s not a different God from who Christians and Jews worship. The Koran explicitly says it’s the same God.
I have those 99 names on my kitchen wall saintly loser. and my husband refers to them as the “99 names of God” In conversation when he speaks he uses both God and Allah. Man I wish a muslim was here. But i’m going home anyway.
Credit where it’s due, Dio’s correct on this one.
This is not correct, actually. They are provably wrong on a number of things. This is a fatuous objection anyway. There are an infinite number of imaginary entities which you can accuse people of not being able to disprove. You can’t disprove the existence of Daffy Duck.
Well, heck, I could direct you to one or two examples on this very board of someone completely bubbling over in frustration to the point of piling oodles of scorn on inoffensive skeptics such as myself.
But in any case, I’ve no particular reason to object to (or care about) your beliefs when they are about how to behave and how to cope with life’s various mysteries and hassles and whatnot. It’s only if you start suggesting that your beliefs should form the basis of law (thus affecting others) or that your beliefs have actual real-world effects (i.e that lack of prayer causes hurricanes) that you’re likely to get challenged.
What Diogenes said. I disbelieve in God for the same reason I disbelieve in Zeus and Sauron and Santa Claus.
It is amusing though when the believers are pushed into making what amounts to a claim that reason and evidence are both unimportant. They can’t win an argument on reason or the facts, so they are pushed into what amounts to a a form of everything-is-equally-true solipsism.
And my assertion that there are no gods IS different than those of the believers; my assertion fits the facts, my assertion is logical, mine is reasonable. Theirs aren’t.