It was really clumsy. 
I had in mind things like
or
(from the Arguments for the non-existence of God thread), and perhaps also
I thank you and Tamerlane.
Based on the church I grew up in, Jews believe in the same god but with an incomplete understanding since they deny that Jesus was the messiah.
Muslims do not since the koran is wrong and Allah would be a false god.
I don’t personally believe in any of them.
We all worship the same God, but the other guys aren’t doing it right.
In that…?
Are you Christian, Jewish, or Muslim?
The beauty is it applies to all of us.
Not to Jews, who hold that as long as gentiles follow the Noahide laws, they’re exactly as righteous as the most observant of Jews.
Orthodox Jew here. We believe that Muslims worship the same deity as we do. We believe that Christians worship a deity with many of the same characteristics, but do not believe in its fundamental unity as we and Muslims do. It’s not quite idolatry, but it’s not an acceptable belief for a Jew to hold.
Why do we consider our way of worship better? Because we believe the Torah was divinely revealed to the entire nation en masse, and included in this revelation was a promise that it would never be abolished or superseded. Even if we were to ever consider the possibility that G-d might consider doing something of the sort, it would need to be in a revelation that is equally public, not in a private conversation such as with Jesus or Mohammed. So as far as we’re concerned, the Torah’s pedigree to divine validity has not been adequately challenged.
The Allah of Islam is no way the same God of the Jews and Christians. The Christians accept the OT as and Jesus was a Jew that became Christian so to speak.
Mohammed was never a Jew or Christian and his religion was lifted from a variet of sources and some happen to be Jewish and Christian and some are tribal religions of the Arabian penninsula.
But the OT and NT are not authoritiatve documents like the Koran.
The Islamic God is totally different and not a continuation like the Chrisitan god is to the Jewish god.
It’s more like Islam it Rome and Christianity and Judaism are Greece. And as Rome adopted some myths of the Greeks and identified Greek Gods with Roman ones, so did Islam.
So calling Allah the same as the Jewish Jehovah is like saying The Roman Jupiter is the same as the Greek Zeus. No they are not. The Romans based their gods on the Greeks and transferred stories.
You can call a rose a rose, but if it’s a weed it ain’t a rose
How can Jews and Christians believe in the same God if Christians believe their god split himself in half and came down to Earth?
That’s not the same deity at all. Maybe it came from an idea that was once Jewish, but the word ‘schism’ has to be more meaningful here.
Maybe this is easier to me because I’m a soft atheist and I think of god and religion as ideas - sort of like democracy, or love, or freedom. Ideas that can be defined but are still open to interpretation. Yet my definition of love and your definition of love may be so fundamentally different that they aren’t the same thing anymore.
Andy Lee:
So what? The point is that the definition of G-d that Mohammed “lifted” is religiously identical to the Jewish version, according to both Jewish and Muslim believers. A single, undivided, omniscient, omnipotent, incorporeal entity. The fact that Muslims believe this being spoke to Mohammed and Jews believe otherwise does not change the fact that they are defined to have the exact same characteristics.
I was going to comment on this in my post as it seems to be a difference, but though in theory yes what you have is sort of on spot, in practice they are still worshiping the OT god, the ones who gave orders and rules to be followed, with god just become man to somehow gain the ability to have had done that.
As an atheist for me it’s hard to distinguish I think because I’m not really emotionally invested in the way a believer is. But the way I see it is, both Christians and Muslims worship the “God of Abraham.” Meaning they both believe that the God who tested Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his son is their God.
If I were to put myself in the perspective of a Jew, I might say “They worship my God but they believe a bunch of other stuff about him that is not the true.”
Let’s say I flew a plane over an unknown island inhabited by primitive people, and dropped a bunch of photos of myself along with some consumer products. The people on that island decide to deify my image and begin worshiping me as a “Sky God.”
A few years later one of the tribes on the island decides that he also believes I govern the waves, and have dominion over random flotsam that washes ashore on the island and that they will begin to give thanks to me for that flotsam. The conservative/orthodox believers who only view me as a sky god view it as heresy that this other tribe is giving thanks to flotsam that, to the eyes of the orthodox, is just random junk that has nothing to do with the divine (the flotsam doesn’t even contain images of me.)
To me, both sides are still worshiping the same idea, but one tribe has added to that idea in a way that means they can no longer be in religious association with the other tribe, because they have a serious disagreement on matters of doctrine.
If God is just ideas then every sect of Islam/Judaism/Christianity all believes in a different God, and arguably each individual has a “personal God” based on their ultra-unique understanding of doctrine. I guess that’s as valid as anything else (since to me it’s all a bunch of made of folk superstitions that have persisted into the modern world and have no basis in truth.) But I don’t know that it makes sense to me if you have three groups that all agree on certain key facts (the whole Adam/Eve thing, Moses, Noah, Abraham etc) such that you have a clear common origin you should start saying the three groups are all worshiping different Gods because of the different philosophies. It seems to me if you go down that route then you really do have to carry it forward all the way to the “personal deity” concept, and I dunno that that makes sense either.
Yeah, I’m in the same boat as Martin here. Being an atheist and raised a Christian, I’m perhaps biased, but it seems that Christians and Muslims both believe in the “The Jewish God Plus”. That is, the same God, but one who just did a few extra things.
The whole trinity aspect is easily hand waved away-- He’s omnipotent, so He can do anything.
Yeah, and without getting into an argument that could literally span centuries, the concept of the Trinity still maintains the concept of “one God” that exists in three distinct entities.
It’s no different than in my Cargo Cult example if the original cultists worshiped me as a being with wings and the second group began to depict me with wings and four arms.
Yes, the form is different, but the origin is the same and there is a belief that it is the same god that the first group worships.
No, that’s not correct.
With all due respect, such a statement shows gross ignorance of the Jewish understanding of God.
The Muslim concept of God is actually dramatically closer to the Jewish concept of God then the Christian concept of God is to the Jewish God.
Anyway, all three religions worship the God of Abraham.
However, one of the things the Abrahamic faiths have in common is respect and recognition of the faiths that came before them and hostility towards those that came afterwards which are viewed as at best false and at worst demonic.
That’s why Christians often had problems with Muslims while Muslims didn’t have such problems with Christians despite having far more issues with the Ahmadis and later sects of Islam that were seen as being heretical.
This is quite correct, but it does not necessarily logically follow that their gods are the same god. It could be the case that worshiping a different god is okay if you are otherwise a noahide.
The real controversy exists over the Christian version of god (it is pretty clear that the Muslim god is in fact very similar to the Jewish god). It is clear that the Christian god descends, in historical development, from the Jewish god. However, the bedrock characteristics of the Jewish god are his incoporiality and his singularity. Having a human aspect, and trinitarianism generally, creates a radically different notion of what that god is.
Really, the issue boils down to this: the Christian god is, by historical development, the exact “same” god, but it radically differs in characteristics assigned to it in ways that contradict the very fundamental notions of what the Jewish god “is”. Whether it is the “same” god or not is a semantic battle over what is mean by “the same”.
I dunno if that is true. Historically, Christians - who came after Jews - have on occasion heavily peresecuted them, in part a legacy of the trauma of the original Jew/Christian split: the NT has sokme nasty things to say about the Jews, mainly because at the time the NT was written, the Jews were competitors.
OTOH, Jews tend to find Muslims a closer religious “fit” in spite of the fact that they are a further development, comming after Christianity.
The faiths that preceded Judaism are of course no longer around, but the OT is very hostile towards them.
If the answer is yes- then the Jewish HaShem is the Islamic Allah is the Christian Trinity.
Now, how many Jews & Muslims & Christians here can answer ‘Yes’?
That said, I could in good conscience with join with a Jewish group in worship & prayer. I’m not sure they could do the same with a body of Christians. I could not so join with an Islamic group nor could many Quran-adhering Muslims do so with a Christian group.
And that’s OK.