Yes, but it’s not simply religion that’s suffering. From that same survey:
Yes, Joe Biden: 59%
Yes, wrong answer: 5%
No, don’t know: 36%
In my humble opinion, if 41% of survey respondents aren’t aware that the current vice president is Biden, asking that they come up with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is highly optimistic.
Perhaps a fair point, but I’m a Jewish agnostic who hasn’t slept through the night in a week so I’m not at my best at the moment. I’m not saying that Christians are, or should be, bound by the Koran. The point I was trying to make is that the poor woman was just trying to show some empathy for some people who hold beliefs that in many ways are not so different from the ones she (and the administration of Wheaton) hold, and are catching a lot of crap for it - they are still human beings, after all.
Plenty of other Christian (and other religious) schools manage not to be so doctrinaire. I have acknowledged that Wheaton may well get what they want because being jerkish isn’t in itself illegal, especially when done in the name of religion. But my personal opinion is that the Wheaton administration is being a bunch of jerks, and I am quite glad that I live and work in an environment where am allowed to hold my own opinions. And express them, even.
Somehow you seem to be missing that she made her written statement on her personal Facebook page. She happens to have a lot of Facebook friends who are professors and current and former students. Someone apparently drew the Wheaton administration’s attention to her personal Facebook page. If she’d said the same words aloud rather than writing them in a publicly accessible place (even though the place was not strictly a work-managed place), none of this might have happened. Which, in my opinion, sucks.
Academic freedom is all about the ability to dissent. Religious schools are allowed not to permit dissent, and I am allowed to think they’re being jerkish. That’s America for you. And apparently quite a number of Wheaton folks happen to agree that the administration has come down too heavily on what some consider not such a huge degree of dissent. They get to have opinions too. Their opinions (and mine) may not change the school’s behavior or policies, but we are all allowed to have opinions.
Note that myself and others have stated this, and you can look it up on Wheaton’s page or the various articles written about them, Wheaton is a “unique” school in that it tries to create a “holistic religious education.” This isn’t a Notre Dame or Georgetown that offer religion classes but otherwise keep religion out of the secular subjects, it’s a deliberate “cross-pollinated” religious school.
Absolutely not how I think a school should be run, not what I’d have wanted to experience in college or etc, but the thing is people pay a lot of money to go to this school for that experience, and it’s the school’s job to deliver it.
To be fair, the salvation of their eternal soul doesn’t depend on Joe Biden.
And of course, I’m referring to what THEY believe, so please, Bidenites, no hate mail.
Note here’s some stuff about Wheaton from the horses mouth.
From their mission statement:
Here is a statement from Georgetown (a Catholic university that teaches a largely secular education):
These are very different organizations with very different views.
Here are some excerpts from Wheaton’s Statement of Faith:
Also:
Wheaton isn’t just a liberal arts school run by a religious group. It’s a religious liberal arts school–they’re different things.
No, but that’s because of what they are teaching, which is not what they were assumedly hired to teach. That’s the fundamental difference between firing someone for their beliefs and firing them for their actions on the job. The latter is something I find acceptable; the former is not.
Plus, as someone who used to be a fully Evangelical Christian (I’m not sure quire where I fall anymore), I don’t see anything she said that contradicts their stated beliefs, nor of the Scripture which they adhere to.
She didn’t say that Muslims are going to heaven. She said they worshiped the same God. As people have said upthread, this is no different than saying that those of the Jewish faith worship the same God, and that is a very common Evangelical statement.
And I don’t see anything else in her statement that could be the problematic claim, either. It’s not as if it promotes Young Earth Creationism or anything.
To be honest, as of right now, it appears to me that the college is lying about its motivations, and that is not good.
That’s all fine and good*, but it that still leave the problem Malthus noted in his previous post. That if you want to be a taxonomic splitter you can make the argument that all three Abrahamic religions have different Gods. But you can’t argue all that strongly IMHO that Christian and Jews share a God, but Muslims do not. Because the Jews also reject Jesus as God and indeed slot him quite a bit lower than Muslims who at least accord him status as a key prophet ( who figures heavily in some versions of Muslim eschatology as an occultated figure who will return in the End Days ).
As noted Jewish and Muslim notions of God are much closer to each other than either are to Christian ideas. Islam in its formative state was much more heavily influenced by Judaism ( Jews being common in western Arabia, while Christians were not ). You can make an argument for Abrahamic unity ( makes the most sense to me as an atheist looking in ), for a three-way split, or for a two-way Christian/Judeo-Muslim split. But a two-way Judeo-Christian/Muslim split is by far the most tortured taxonomy theologically.
[QUOTE=Tamerlane;18947665
There’s no rule of English that dictates that “Mohammedan” must mean “person who worships Muhammad as a divine being” rather than “person who follows the teachings of Muhammad.”
And there’s no rule of English that “Christian” and “Mohammedan” must have such parallel meanings.
There is no such rule. There is also no rule that anti-Semitic should mean only anti-Jewish. But de facto it does, weak attempts to apply it to anti-Arab bigotry on linguistic grounds aside. History and perception tend to trump pure linguistics.
Like I said it is considered archaic if you aren’t some dusty, 1950’s-vintage British academician ;). And some folks find it mildly offensive. Like Oriental for East Asian folks, it has gone out of style.
I was also pretty puzzled by this. I cannot see any religious reason, according to christian doctrine, for saying that Muslims don’t worship the same god.
They aren’t Christian (as they don’t believe the divinity of Christ). And are clearly “heretical” from the point of view of traditional Christian teaching. But I cannot see how any Christian could claim that the “God of Abraham and Isaac” is not the same God of the Christian bible.
That is EXACTLY the God that Muslims worship. The fact they don’t believe that Jesus is the son of god (they do believe he was a prophet) and they believe in a set of scriptures very different to the Christian bible doesn’t change that.
Whether he’s written by A.C. Doyle or by John Dickson Carr, it’s still the same Sherlock Holmes.
And thus that they disagree with C. S. Lewis’s argument for a community of theists with imperfect understanding in “The Case for Christianity.”
Well, a Christian-Muslim/Judaism split would be pretty weird, too, but of course it’s a bit unlikely absent some hypothetical political motivation.
:dubious: Are you under the impression that Lutherans worship Luther?
Good point, though at least they do sorta share that Jesus thing.
Well, not nearly as much as Calvinists worship Calvin :p.
Look, I’m not trying to derive a general grammatical rule. I’m just saying that’s how the term has been perceived and that’s probably why it has gone out of style and it largely has gone out of style. Interestingly enough the wiki on the subject mentions a few old holdouts - all on the subcontinent it appears, which makes sense to me because I’ve really only run into it in much older British history books. I’m sure I’ve had this dicussion before in GQ or elsewhere ( probably twelve times, everything comes around on these boards ).
As another anahronism I remember when I was a teenager the preferred spelling was often Moslem ( I still remember losing half a point for writing Muslim in a HS class quiz which my history teacher insisted was a spelling only used by American black converts ). But these days that has become uncommon as well. I just probably wouldn’t bother being an annoying pedant about that one, because I don’t think it offends anybody ;).
Oh, it’s bound to offend someone. This is 21st century America. 
As for the OP, their college (a private one), their rules.
Just to clarify(not necessarily to you), the holdouts you mention are not holding out in continuing usage of the term * Mohammedan, they’re simply named (probably officially registered as) Mohammedan something or the other, and haven’t bothered to change their name. This is quite common with institutions in India (and probably elsewhere, since rebranding tends to be a painful experience). The Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai, for instance, is still named IIT Madras.
To put it another way. I don’t think any Christian would claim Warren Jeffs, David Koresh, or even Jim Jones worshiped a different god to them. Even if they got incredibly screwed up somewhere along the way.
I am sure many Christians would invoke Satan when describing where theses kind of cult leaders went wrong, but they would not deny they ultimately were trying to serve the same god as them.
“Sterkfontein” is also used as the generic name of the area.
Why are you referring to a stratigraphic unit as a species? Anyway, I’ve not read anything to cast sufficient doubt on the identity of e.g SK27 as H. habilis. Phillip Tobias certainly thought it was, and if anyone besides Leakey would know, it would be him.
And what about the H. ergaster from the same cave? That’s not in any serious dispute, and also in the H. sapiens ancestral line.
I’d say finds like H. naledi make it more and more sensible than ever before. Hell, I don’t think I ever heard the term applied there before the 90s, before that it was all Olduvai, all the time.
Nevermind. Forgot the thread was already to page 3.
From where are you guys getting this premise that Islam rejects the Jews-as-chosen-people thesis anyway? Do you have a reliable source for it, or are you just deriving it by the copropoesis* method?
There are always lazy corner-cutters and downright bullshitters who will publish false claims about subjects little known by their intended audience, which they obtain via copropoesis. It’s quicker and easier than actually doing the research, and they seem to think why not throw that in, nobody will know the difference. I’ve observed how often Islam has fallen prey to this substitution of bullshit for facts, but that won’t fly any more, now that so much attention has been turned to the subject. If everything I’ve seen purported to be in the Qur’an actually were in it, the thing would be the size of Encyclopædia Brittanica instead of the modest-sized book it really is. Moreover, the Qur’an repeats itself a lot, so the actual content when boiled down is even slimmer than it appears.
*In the vernacular: Making shit up.