Hoopy – details, unless you happened to be a Constantinopolitan or other Orthodox. (Add in members of the heterodox Monophysite Eastern Churches to be entirely accurate, by the way.)
biker – is there a point to your pursuit of whether Allah is or is not legitimate in English or in Arabic for the concept of God or for the specifically Islamic understanding of Who God is? I’m afraid I’ve been missing it if there is one.
well poly you have not been following the thread.
my original statement was that the only word from osama’s video, that was not translated into english, was the word allah. this was done, in my opinion, so that americans would not realize osama was talking about “god,” in relation to the world trade center being leveled.
i was asked to prove the non translation and i believe i have. those on this board who have heaped scorn on me on this point , have not replied to my last post.
first i am asked to defend and explain my position to the n’th degree and now i am asked to repeat the situation all over again. i am beginning to believe no one in this thread has any sort of balance toward fact, proof or thought.
if my last post does not clearly prove my point to you folks, then nothing will.
Of Arabia, generally, yes. This is in fact true.
To quote from a reply I made in another thread:
"The pagan components of pre-Islamic Arabia are surprisingly familiar. Islam adopted as much from them, probably, as it did from Judeo-Christianity ( but of course Judaism and Christianity also borrowed from pagan sources - no structured modern relgion sprung forth from a tabula rasa ).
The Semitic pagan religions were all somewhat related. Allah was the paramount deity ( the Woten/Zeus/Ra if you will ), worshipped throughout the Arabian penninsula. To the Babylonians he was Il, to the Canaanites and Israelites he was El, to the south Arabians he was Ilah, to the nomadic Bedouin he was al-Ilah. Muhammed transformed him into not just the paramount god, but the ONLY God, the God of the Christians and the Jews. But as you can see, he started from a position where Allah was already very significant ( note how much esier this makes conversion ).
In the immediate pre-Islamic period, the next most popular deities, at least in the Hijaz, were Allah’s three daughters - al-'Uzzah ( power ), al-Lat ( the goddess ), and Manah ( fate ).
But there were literally hundreds of gods, many of them specific to particular towns or tribes. “Household gods” of that sort proliferated rapidly, many of them, perhaps, transmogrified ancestors that became protector spirits. The Ka’bah alone housed 367. The Ka’bah, by the way, was the supreme pagan sanctuary/shrine in pre-Islamic Arabia - A status ( shorn of its paganism ) that Muhammed preserved in Islam. Again we see this accomodation to pre-Islamic ideals that made Islam not at all foreign to the Arabs."
But that of course is nonsense 
. Muhammed regarded Jews and Christians as essentially strayed Muslims ( In his cosmology, Islam was the original religion of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, that he was just restoring ) and their God as one and the same.
Literally or symbolically? I thought it was just, “son of God”. You’ll excuse the question - Your statement surprised me a bit, but my education on this is lacking - I was raised by athiests after all 
.
Zero, of course . No more than they mean “Muhammed” when they say “Allah”. To them Jesus and Muhammed are just two prophets.
I disagree. I think most Americans have at least the basic concept that “Allah” means “God” in the Judeo-Christian sense ( recognizing that the concept of God is not quite identical from one Judeo-Christian faith to the other ). Nor do I think there is anything necessarily nefarious or racist not translating Allah into just plain “God” ( though I don’t think there is anything wrong with doing so, either ). It’s just convention. Like using Yahweh, it just delineates the religious background of the speaker.
Just MHO.
Tamerlane – every Monophysite or Nicene Christian, constituting all but a vanishingly small minority of Christians (with the exception of Latter Day Saints, on which I’m going to have to defer to Monty or another LDS for the nuances in their belief) believes that God consists of three Persons in one Godhead, the Second Person of which incarnated as Jesus the Messiah. So while Jesus != God as an equivalence statement, Jesus = God is true as a definition statement (but also, and importantly, Jesus = man).
There are Unitarians who consider themselves Christian and who do not subscribe to this definition. But it’s the doctrinal standard espoused by every church from the Mar Thoma through the Roman Catholic to the Two-Seeds-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists and the Apostolic Overcoming Full Gospel Holy Pentecostal Church of God.
Ah, thanks for the clarification .
I agree that there is no proof of God and there is no real reason to believe in it, but these faiths are part of our culture and heritage, so to discard them altogether would not be right. Faith also gives people a reason to do good things and a way to feel good about themselves; another reason religion is good.
I was watching a show on religion and saw that the reason many people believe in a religion is because when we see certain things, such as our mother’s face, it triggers slight emotional reactions in the brain. Sometimes, this system gets out of control, and whenever we see a leaf, a grain of sand, or anything it triggers an emotianal response. This is often known as a religious experience, so from then on those people will believe in religion.
Tamerlane, Poly got it right. Another way to put it is that Christians worship Jesus. My point (intended for Biker, but he has evaded it consistently) is that Allah, though translated as God in the sense of a Supreme Being, is NOT necessarily the same entity that is worshipped by Christians. The fact that Christians worship Jesus, but Muslims do not, contradicts the point that Biker is attempting to make.
Prove to me he doesn’t exist and I’ll prove to you he does:-)
There was an atheist scientist who looked out at the universe and wondered why there was something rather thn nothing.He willed himself to believe in God.
I have a friend who does not believe in God.We agree that all of this did not just come from "nothing"otherwise “nothing” would have to be something,so my question to him is:
Your silly belief or mine? Yours that a “chunk of Iron” was floating around forever which decided one day to change from it’s “order” and somehow form all of this,or an intelligent being was there forever and decided to do it.At least with the intelligent being theory(which I subscribe to)might be a bit better in the afterlife where I sure with the Iron theory there is none.
Belief is free why take a chance?
Virtually Yours
More accurately, Lib, it might be said that the God known to Jews, Christians, and Moslems is the same god understood differently by the three faiths, with the Christian understanding including a case of non-dysfunctional Multiple Personality Syndrome – and that one personality of the latter took on full human identity as well as remaining fully God. (Trying to have this make any sense outside the context of a thorough Aristotelian or Scholastic theology is one good reason to avoid Trinitarian and Christological questions!)
Yo, biker and Newton Meter!
English is a bloody strange language. We have words in common English that can be translated into English. How can this be? Let me explain.
Languages evolve seperately. Because of this, there isn’t really one-to-one ratio of word meanings. Greek has three different words that translate into English “love.” Eros, philos, and agape all translate thus. Inuit peoples have about seven different words for “snow.” No two languages can capture the subtle nuances of other languages. Sometimes, one has to go into another language to find the mot juste for the particular situation.
English has the strange quality of being a very tolerant language. For instance, I won’t verbally crucify Tamerlane for using the Latin phrase tabula rasa. I recognise that this phrase has been assimilated into English, and is now in common usage. (It’s even in my Webster’s.) Now, nobody would disagree with the fact that tabula rasa is a Latin phrase. This foreign language phrase is translated into English as “clean slate,” but this translation, in my opinion, carries the connotations of opinions of others. e.g., to forgive someone is to give them a clean slate. Thus, the mot juste for Tamerlane was a foreign phrase. If any foreign phrase is used enough, it becomes a part of the language. So, we have two seemingly contradictory facts becoming the case.
A word is in the English language, and is acceptable English usage.
The same word can be translated into English.
So, viewing this particular topic, I have come to the conclusion that both biker and Newton Meter are correct in their respective assertions. The government didn’t translate “Allah” into English, and “Allah” is an acceptable English word. Y’all are both right.
-Soup
thank you soup for shedding a little light into this dark hole of misinformation.
my original point was that the guvmint deliberately did not translate allah into the word god for political purposes.
why that became so incredibly difficult to understand i don’t know.
Now that we have that cleared up, and I do think that the government made a careful choice in terms of whether to translate Allah or not - both in terms of clarity and in terms of furthering the war in Afghanistan, my question is this: So what?.
Christians will say that Allah is not the christian God.
Many muslims will say that the Allah bin Laden calls on is not the Allah they follow.
What is your contention here? Why is it so important that the goverment did or did not translate Allah into English?
Are you being deliberatly disingenuous? If anything, soup du jour’s posting demonstrates that your claim was NOT a valid conclusion. It is conceivably true (albeit extremely unlikely, for reasons already explained), but we can not assert it to be such.
If you are to claim that the government DID act as you say, then the burden of proof rests on your shoulders. This includes demonstrating that there are NO OTHER possible explanations – and soup’s selfsame posting shows otherwise.
Weird. If that’s the case, then I would assume that your grievance is with politics and not faith. Your thread title should have been “How can anyone justify politicizing God?” But I think your argument is something of a greased cat by now anyway.
Yeah, but I’m more right
You’ve just said exactly what I was trying to say, only better. biker, you began by insisting that the government did not translate the Arabic world “Allah”. I asked how you could know that “Allah” had not been translated into the English word “Allah” (that’s the one you found in your dictionary).
I never insisted that Allah could not have been translated to “God”, I merely suggested that it could have been validly translated to “Allah”. You need to do some work to convince this particular skeptic that there is anything more to the particular word choice (and “I’m 99% sure…” doesn’t work).
My other point (in my original Allah/God post) was, is it more or less accurate to translate “Allah” to “God” than to translate “Allah” to “Allah”? (My Arabic friends insist on the latter, but they’re not Muslim.)
Finally, if we lay aside the minutiae of translation, then your claim is that someone (it’s unclear whether it’s our government or the media, or if they are the same) are engaging in a conspiracy of disinformation to keep us from knowing that “Allah” is God. But, then you provided a citation from an English dictionary showing that “Allah” has been in English use since 1584!
Wouldn’t you think if there were an actual conspiracy, they’d do a little better? If they wanted to confuse us, wouldn’t they have chosen a word that hadn’t been in use for over 400 years, meaning exactly what you said we all didn’t know it meant? Wouldn’t they have chosen something that wasn’t in all four English dictionaries I checked?
If you’re right, and this is the sort of government conspiracy we can expect in the new millenium, then I can breathe a huge sigh of relief. Nothing to worry about now.
kg m²/s²
Please don’t confuse me with biker.
It’s worse than that. biker’s claim insinuates that the American public is gullible enough to be Osama bin Laden’s claim that Allah destroyed the WTC. “Oh my word! Osama says that Allah was responsible for this deed. Surely Osama can’t be wrong, so heavens! God must be at fault.”
Give me a break. Any simpleton can see through that logic.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Mister V *
**
I’d still be glad to have someone give me a logical answer, however.
Humans are not logical creatures… It is hypocritical to expect a logical answer to anything that a human does… But, you asked for it…
The belief in god, or gods, was originaly to explain natural phenomina, (which, if you will remember, were not explainable by the science of the time). After Christianity, a belief in “God” would garantee you everlasting life in paridise. before this there was no afterlife…
With all that being said, the reasoning for belief in god… Pourpous, a reason for being. Life would be pointless for many people if they were not trying ot please their gods, or garantee themselves a place in “Heaven”… of course there is a differant place for each god, I just assumed you were thinking more along the lines of Christianity…
but I do not believe that that many people believe in god any way. The reason for these people, going to church and not believeing in god, if habit… they are used to it, and just incase there is a god, they go to church every Sunday… or Saturday, or Friday, or every day, depending on their denomination…
so, that is the answer to your question. 
Do you have any actual evidence for that, or is it mere conjecture? If the former is the case, can you explain the methodology by which you discerned the rationale used by the very first theists?
Every religion has a “creation story” and that is generaly the beginning to each of those differant religions. In greek they explained the creation of everything, includeing the gods, that they came from Chaos. Chaos beign an element, and not dissorder as the word is freequently used to discribe in the english…
As for another example, when you are thinking of the ancients, and or Native Americans, they would make personifacations of there gods as animals. these anibals would do something to cause things being the way they are, such as the stag, pierceing holes in teh night sky to make the stars…
The rational of makeign these first theories would be for better understanding, withought the modern science, this was explanation eanough for the ones who built these early builders of religion…