well, it’s going to be hard to test this empirically… muslims being much more serious about that whole graven image thing than most christians…
Of course, you could also ask if it’s no worse than the others, if you swing that way.
I think Dale the Bold’s analogy is revealing in that it demonstrates the thought process that renders down all religions to the same level of meaninglessness. If you believe there is no God, then be a man and say so, instead proclaiming that all conceptions of God are one and it doesn’t matter which you subscribe to–which of course is simply a shiftier, more underhanded way of saying exactly the same thing.
Lets try that last paragraph again.
Central to Christians beliefs if the belief that God sent his only son, Jesus, down to earth to die on the cross and take mankind’s sins. I don’t think this is part of Muslim theology. This is not a minor difference in the ritual practice of religion.
Actually this is one of the few points where Islam and Christianity differ. Keep in mind that doctrine doesn’t just spring up fully grown, but has to evolve. There is no mention of the word “Trinity” in the New Testament, and the doctrine itself is far from fleshed out in those books.
There is no such concept as a separate divine being in Judaism, and even the New testament at times seems somewhat unclear on the matter, at least as far as “the Holy Ghost” or “spirit” goes.
I think the doctrine of the Trinity is the result of a lengthy process which began when early Christians were forced to cope with the coming of Jesus Christ among them. The New Testament does mention the three elements of the trinity a few times, but leaves them unexplained. The Old testament, on the other hand, says explicitly that “the Lord God is One God”. The Koran has a message that is virtually identical word for word.
The concept of the Trinity as three distinct yet unified beings was suggested only in the 4th century AD, after much religious wrangling. It was finalized near the end of the century by the Cappadoccian Fathers.
It shows the revisionist (or at least editorial) nature of religions. Several elements in Christianity are taken from Jewish tradition, while others were clearly inferred by religious scholars after the fact (like the doctrine of the Trinity). A similar story for Islam, where Mohammed put together a religion that drew inspiration from many elements of Judaism and Christianity, with much shared material and some original additions. A body of additional religious traditions centered around the life of Mohammed , the Hadith, are second only to the Koran’s authority in Islam.
But the messages of Christianity and Islam (certainly of the Bible and the Koran) are far too similar to entertain the notion that we are talking about different gods. Jesus/God, Allah, and Jehovah are all essentially the same being, which some anthropologists have suggested evolved out of a tribal war-god (possibly explaining why Jehovah was so upset all the time and had no difficulties resorting to wholesale slaughter of peoples). Parts of the Koran and the Bible are also surprisingly similar.
The difference in this particular case is that Moslems, who believe in a more “purist” (probably inspired chiefly by Judaism) version of monotheism than Christians, are unable to understand how the glory and power of the Ultimate Being could ever be contained or transformed inside the shell of a man, suffer like a man, and be killed like a man. Moslems do recognize Jesus Christ as a prophet of their same God, which is an important signal that we are talking of one and the same God at least as far as Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition is concerned.
To suggest that all the deities of humans are one and the same seems far-fetched to me, mainly because I see no evidence to support that assertion. It’s quite New Age, it may even be politically correct, but I think it is wrong to assume that simply because many religions bear similar human signatures they share the exact same central being. Some yes, all no.
But what we have in this instance is three different people telling different stories.
One says the boy lives all alone in a magical palace, has done so since he was born, will never grow old and that he likes kitties and puppies and is a pacifist at heart and helps all people.
The other says the boy lives with a loud raucus family, including his mother, in a cave. They say he was born there as the result of his mother murdering his father and using the material for a genetic engineering experiment. They say that after being spawned into the fully devloped body of a man he raped his sister and the family budgie and thus begot the rest of his family. They also say that he likes setting fire to the neighbours house.
The third says that the boy is in fact a ghost. he lived once somehwer else, but now he has no physical form. He is eternally sad and hates the little boy from story number one because that little boy killed him and is now pretending to be him, but e isn’t really. The little boy has no house but wanders aimlessly through the world randomly torturing and aiding people. If you believe what this person writes then you can control the little boy with the magic words in appendix C.
How can ou poossibly conclude that we are talking about the same little boy considering two of the authors say that they are not talking about the same subject? Even bewteen the two authors who say they are discusing the same subject how can we possibly say that both stories are equally true. One must be a lie.
You see the problem is that Dale the Bold’s analogy requires us to presuppose the essential similarity in physical, temporal and psychological makeup of the three boys. He must be a little boy, must live in a the twentieth century or later (otherwise no toy plane), he must be real. He must not have been be blind or comatose from birth (otherwise no sneaking out to watch the races). If we don’t accept the general description in the first place any sugestion that no one story is better or worse than the other becomes patently untrue. If the boy is from third dynasty Egypt then the first story is immediately worse than the others. It either isn’t describing the same boy or it is untrue. Since the only evidence we can ever have about the existence of this boy is from the stories we must either conclude that at least one of these boys is not the same entity, or else that at least one of them is entirely fictional, in which case he still isn’t the same entity.
I accept this point, but I think that in general the idea that “it’s the same god because we say it’s the same god” isn’t sufficient. To take a bizarre example -
Mr. X states that he worships the same God as Christians, Muslims and Jews. However, Mr. X believes that God was actually born in 1954 in a small town in England. As a toddler, God was bitten by a radioactive spider, which gave him omnipotence. God then traveled back in time and did the things mentioned in the Old and New Testament and Koran.
Does Mr. X really worship the same God?
A second point. Jews believe G-d did those things mentioned in the Old Testament, but not the things mentioned in the New. Xians believe God did everything mentioned in the Old and New Testaments, but not those things described in the Koran. Etc. To the extent that we (and presumably God) are what we do, if we are alleged to have done different things, are we the same person?
Sua
It would be my firm assertion, which I think nobody here would disagree with, that no human being has known everything there is to know about God, on the presumption that He exists. (I can see David B. making the comment that “to know there’s no such thing is all one needs to know” – more wittily phrased, to be sure – but working with the assumption that a God exists which meets characteristics of at least one of the major Western religions, nobody has as yet known the totality of Him. (A line from Ephesians comes to mind.))
Now, given that, we can take a historical view of humanity’s conception of God. Apparently He was the tutelary deity, the private tribal god, of the earliest Hebrews. As time and religious thought went on, they expanded their concept of “my god’s bigger than your god” to “my god’s the only real god; everything else is either imaginary, demonic, or subject to him.”
This unitary single-god concept is key to the Jewish faith, then and now. (Sh’ma, Yizroel, Elohim Adonai…)
Christians have been unanimous in saying they believe in one God, and that He is the same God as the Jewish God. It’s merely that He manifests Himself in the person of Jesus of Nazareth and as the Holy Spirit, seen as two additional distinct personae within one Godhead.
(Jehovah’s Witnesses and a few other fringe groups appear to reject Trinitarianism, as did early Unitarianism. That is not at issue here, because it does not speak to what the mass of Christianity believes any more than does tarring political liberalism on the basis of a few extreme radicals or political conservatism on the basis of a few extreme idiots from that end of the spectrum.)
Mohammed, on his own testimony, was called by Allah, the God of the Jews, to proclaim His message to the polytheistic idol-worshippers of Hejaz. He rejected the Trinitarian concept.
But, though their conceptions of who He is differ in some fundamental (no pun intended) ways, all three religions are acknowledging the same God, differently conceptualized and with distinct aspects emphasized but based on the same original theophany.
Except I’m not an Atheist, I’m a Christian. What it boils down to is being enough of a man to admit the possibility of error.
In my analogy, the logic should follow like this:
The original picture of the boy is the same
My boy is not your boy
My religious perception is not your religious perception
Therefore, my God is not your God.
When I said that one is not better than the other, I mean that the Islamic faith is not flawed in it’s logic. I could aruge my case just as well as any Muslim. In other words, a well-versed Muslim could win just as many arguments as I could. I find all three of the religions a lot more valid and logical than Atheism, so don’t take my point as an indication tha there is no God. The differences occur because different groups ran in different directions. I believe I am right, but will listen to and reason with someone who says I’m not. Being a Christian doesn’t mean you’re closed minded and illogical, it just means you’ve chosen and believe in one of those paths as being the correct one.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t Islam teach that it’s acceptable for a man to beat a disobedient wife? This being the case how far could a religion supposedly based on the same god go and still be acknowledging that god? How about if a religion existed that suggested God allowed that a man could rape a disobedient wife? How about killing her? Are we still talking about the same god here? Of course God is complex, but at which stage does the teaching of a religion become so far removed from the god of love that you believe in that you reject it as being of the same god? Do you simply assume that any religion that claims to be worshipping Jehovah/Allah is doing so, or is there some stage at which you say that the religion is a corruption of man/Satan? If there is a point at which you reject it what is it and how do you know one of the three religions under discussion here isn’t such a corruption?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t Christian and Jewish scripture teach us that one may own slaves (so long as you treat them well)? Doesn’t it also teach us that homosexuality is an abomination? Didn’t G-d send a bear to kill a bunch of children because they made fun of Elijah’s bald spot? (On second thought … :D) So which religion is the corruption, farthest from the god of love?
I don’t intend to have a “my religion is better than your religion” argument, particularly as I don’t subscribe to any of the three. My point is that none of the three’s teachings is all goodness and light.
Sua
Sua I agree with you entirely. IANAC so I haven’t got any vested interest in this debate. My example from the Quran was only to illustrate the point and used because I couldn’t tell you if the Quran equally condones the beating and ownership of slaves, the eating of children by bears etc. If it does then the god descibed is at least being consistent if cruel and arbitrary. AFAIK the Bible never never suggets that a man can beat his wife.
Your examples are all good however and only reinforce my point. Given that all we know of the nature of God is derived from these books, and given that they can all vary in their represenation of God’s capricious and cruel or loving and forgiving attitude, at what point do we declare that we are not discussing the same god, regardless of what the author may claim?
Hijack.
Gaspode: Re: Wife-beating in Islam - Just in case you’re interested, I’ll direct you to Tahireh’s interesting discussion on this topic in her 03:15 pm post ( The heading is “Wife-beating” in bold, within a larger post ) 
:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=92968
- Tamerlane