Some Buddhists, while they believe in an afterlife, don’t think there is any god that can be worshipped.
There is “God” as a concept severable from any religious or cultural tradition, in which even a skeptical philosopher like Martin Gardner (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Gardner) can believe. And then there are gods such as Zeus or Shiva, which are artifacts produced by particular cultures. Yahweh/Allah falls into the latter category, not the former. It makes no difference that he is the God of monotheistic religions. What the ancient Hebrews believed about their tribal god has shaped what the Jews, Christians and Muslims believe about their shared God. It is possible that there is one God in the universe but that He has nothing in common with Yahweh/Allah, did not speak to Abraham, Moses, Jesus, or Mohammed, and pays no attention to the prayers or worship of Jews, Christians or Muslims.
BrainGlutton: Perhaps your analysis is not quite accurate. Islamic theology represents Allah not as the tribal god of the Israelites or any other tribe, but as the universal God of all peoples. IOW, the Islamic understanding of Allah corresponds to your first description, God-as-such, not an artifact determined by contingent cultural features. You might look at Islamic theology and see the contingency or artifactness of Allah as described there, but just be aware that Muslims themselves understand Allah as that “concept severable from any religious or cultural tradition, in which even a skeptical philosopher […] can believe.” This is what Aldebaran has been trying to say. You should listen to him when he explains his faith, and consider that he actually does know what he’s talking about, even if his ability to express himself clearly in English sometimes obscures his meaning a little. Again, you might not think this belief of Muslims is a valid one, but the fact remains that this is what they believe.
Why do some of these Gods need to be culled and not others? And how do you know which ones should be culled?
Some people believe (as I do) that all of these beings need to be culled–that a rabbit on Pluto makes just as much sense as the Abrahamic God (not much).
I believe the reason is self-evident.
Whatever floats your boat. If you don’t believe in any God, it is not any skin off of my back.
It is, in all sincerity, not self-evident to me. Can you tell me how you know which “gods” should be culled and which ones shouldn’t?
You’re debating a semantic point. Use a different vocabulary to ask that same question, and it answers itself.
“Can one person claim that another’s belief of the characteristics of God is false?”
The answer is yes, of course. You see it happening every day. One person can easily claim that another person’s understanding of God is flawed, and this concept can be easily understood in the abbreviated version of “you worship the wrong God.”
I’m not asking if one can conclude that another person’s belief in a god is false. What I’m asking is, how does one know which god or gods are false? How does one discern a difference between an invisible pink unicorn, a magical sky pixie, and Allah?
I’m sorry, my post was in response to the original post, not the one above it. I think that was the source of the confusion.
No problem— sorry I misunderstood.
Well, happy solstice everyone! 
Apropos to that: I have to say that I arrived to the conclusion that the current flavor of god has a lot to offer yet. However, the concept of deep time made me doubt on the current mainstream faiths’ ideas of what God is:
Consider that 700,000 to 230,000 B.C.: Homo erectus got the Promethean gift: it learned to use fire.
Consider also that 1 million years = 40,000 generations
Then consider the following timeline:
http://www.fsmitha.com/timeline.html
After pondering this subject, IMHO the evidence points to the development of rites to the Neanderthal and the Cro-Magnon virtually at the same time, (they began to bury their death and left evidence of an early concept of an afterlife and religion) the encounter of those two early humans, mostly in Europe, lead to the demise of the Neanderthal, the result of that struggle is what lead to us (for good or for evil).
But this is important: it was not until around 5000 BCE that we got the Hebrews coming up with the concept of the one current mainstream God, the problem, as anyone that takes time seriously, is this: There was roughly 25,000 years(!!) where the “real” God never bothered to show up (much more than that if one considers fire the item that made us human), then the Son of god appeared around 2000 years ago and a few hundred years later, God showed up to a guy in the Arabian peninsula.
For me, there is a huge and totally unnecessary gap that occurred before and after God bothered to show up.
So unnecessary that I arrived to the conclusion that whatever the Bible or other religious book say, there is no other choice but to realize the books are grossly incomplete. The Bible and other religious books are hitting a cultural “event horizon” of sorts, and this incomplete status is turning into irrelevancy as time goes by.
In conclusion: the probability of the mainstream god being the “wrong God” is very high, so much that I consider it a losing wage.
I cannot advise on who is the right God, I only can say that I don’t know, but by seeing prehistory and history I can say that whatever the right God is, he/she/it is busy elsewhere, or it is evolving with us.
Even the god mentioned in the Bible admits there are other gods out there. He doesn’t claim to be the only one or that people can’t pay tribute to any of the others–just that the people who believe in him gotta put him first in line.
GIGOBuster, thanks for putting things in chronological perspective. I have often thought that these earliest periods of human prehistory are what’s referred to in the Taoist scriptures as “the people of old.” Since Taoism dates from the very early period of Chinese history, its reference to people of a far distant past must mean Taoist thought has carried over some continuity from prehistoric shamanism.
So does Christian theology, and Jewish theology. But it doesn’t matter. The God they all worship is a cultural artifact. The things they believe about him are determined far more by the purported revelations of ancient prophets than by anything any theologian or philosopher sat down and thought out about what God should be. Yahweh/Allah is no less culture-bound than Rama or Huitzilopochtli.
See, the funny thing is, in many of the cases of people saying that “anyone who worships anything is actually worshipping the same one thing”, they believe that that “same one thing” is their God. Now you tell this to the guy worshipping Cthulu (forgive the cliche), that they are actually worshipping Allah, they’d be plenty pissed. Much the same as if the same Cthulu-ist believed that anyone who worships anyone is actually worshipping Cthulu, and then told this to a believer in Allah. And etc…
Get what I mean?
Since I don’t believe in any God or gods, the question of whether or not Christians and Muslims and Jews worship the “same God” is a bit academic to me, but it’s worth pointing out that there are real differences, especially between the God believed in by Christians and the God believed in by other Western or “Abrahamic” monotheists.
Christians believe in one God who exists in three persons and who was incarnated as a human being. Muslims (and Jews) believe in one God who does not exist in three persons and has not been incarnated as a human being. Different people will characterize those differences in belief variously, from “They are all worshipping the same God in different ways” to “Christians/Muslims are worshipping the true God, but in a better way/in a manner less pleasing to him/in a way which is utterly corrupt and worthless” to “Christians/Muslims are worshipping a false God.”
The differences between the God conceived of in Christianity and the God conceived of in Islam strike me as pretty significant, though there is clearly a commonality. I would say there is a closer degree of commonality in some ways between the idea of God in Islam and in Judaism, although in other respects Judaism and Christianity may be a bit closer to each other (sharing a large portion of each other’s scriptures, for example).
The whole scenario of “same/different god” is based on human conceptions of who/what the deity/-ies in question are like.
My understanding is akin to the views of three people as to the identity and nature of David B: an infrequent long-time poster to Great Debates; the managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer; and a Springfield neighbor with kids who regularly play with his. Each would form a quite different picture of who the man David B is – each would refer to him by approximately the same name, some using variants on his actual full name and others the handle he uses here. But the person who is their referent is one and the same.
There is agreement among Christians, Muslims, and Jews that the deity they reference by “God” is the same one that revealed Himself to Abraham, who supposedly manifested himself to Moses, through Jesus, and to Muhammad according to their separate traditions. And each conceives of him, as MEB has outlined, in significantly different ways – but all three claim to have a clearer understanding than the other two of the nature of the Friend of Abraham. That is, they each claim to be explaining, better than the other two, Who it is that Abraham encountered, and Who continued to reveal Himself to others.
I don’t in any way mean to be offensive, but this is the typical feeling coming from Christianity/Islam/Judaism. If you’re worshiping one God, then we’re all worshiping the same God, because there is only one God.
Well, when I was Hindu, I didn’t in any way feel I could be worshiping any of the Gods from those religions. Hinduism has a very different feel to it, IMHO.
While Hinduism may have one central God at the core of it, it is not so much a God as the physical manifestation of the Universe! That is not comparable to Yahweh or the Trinity or Allah. So the God we worship is not the same.
We also worship hundreds of manifestations of the same God, in His many forms. The method of worshiping is not the same.
The outlook of our religion - reincarnation, karma, dharma, which is all about paying for your sins - is something unheard of in the three major world religions. So the basic tenets of the religion are not the same.
So how can you say we all worship the One God if the One God has a different face every time He turns around?
And this is only one major* religion I’ve mentioned - this doesn’t even go into the dozens of other major religions out there.
*When I say major I’m talking purely in terms of number of followers, nothing else.
When I’m in philosophical mode, and I contemplate the Deity of the Deists, I am personally convinced that there is a supreme being of all reality. Intellectually I can give assent to this “God of the philosophers.” Behind all the various names and faces and attributes seen by different religions, I think there’s really a “there” there, but none of the individual versions conceived by humans can completely account for the full reality. Nevertheless, all of them are aiming their devotion in the same direction.
I can understand what Muslims like Aldebaran mean when they identify their Allah with this ultimate, absolute God of the philosophers. Because, looked at objectively, of all the theologies around the world I’ve studied, the closest match with this God of the philosophers is found in the Islamic theology of Allah and the Vedantic metaphysics of Brahman. (Actually, the Vedantic Brahman is probably an even better match.) This is especially recognizable in the works of Muslim philosophers like Avicenna and Averroes. If you read their accounts of Allah, you will not find any significant difference from the Deists’ conceptions of God that our Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence.
Anaamika, your input from a Hindu perspective is valuable, but then remember that Hinduism includes a Vedantic explanation of Brahman which is so universal it can accommodate any other religion’s conception of God. In general, I don’t think the differences of rituals, dharma, etc. should carry much weight in comparing conceptions of divinity, because those are human processes, and do not say anything about the ultimate nature of divinity, which is the question here.
That’s when I’m doing philosophy. When I’m in devotional mode, I am drawn to the Goddess, whether She is conceived as the Shakti Devi of India, or the Maiden-Mother-Crone of modern Celtic Wicca, or Diana-Demeter-Hecate of the Greeks, or Allat-Manat-al-‘Uzza of Arabia, doesn’t make much difference to me. Marion Zimmer Bradley, in The Mists of Avalon, kept emphasizing the wisdom of the Druids: “All the gods are one god, and all the goddesses are one goddess.”
Heh. More evidence that Hare Krishnas are not like other Hindus :).
Back in my Pagan days, I had a magazine article comparing Paganism to Hinduism and talking about parallels between the two belief systems. I really liked the article, and I naively showed it to a Hare Krishna guy who hung out downtown passing out books.
He read the article, thought about it, nodded, and said, “Yes. I believe this was written by demons.”
The idea that there were similarities between (for example) Krishna and Angus Og (an Irish god of love) was utterly repugnant to him. The Hindu Gods were the real ones; all others were false gods or demons.
What fun, what fun!
Daniel