I’m almost willing to hand “Allah” over to be an exclusively Muslim word as one more step towards eradicating the nonsense that they worship the same deity as Jews, Christians & whoever else do.
As a born and raised muslim, I think it’s perfectly fine for them to use the arabic word Allah (as opposed to Al-Ilah). it emphasizes the fact that we worship the same god. I don’t see any downsides and I think those protesters are acting like dicks.
Intolerant muslims and violent muslims are bad muslims. It’s that simple.
Really? In my personal experience growing up in Pakistan, the most violent and fanatical people I encountered were college students and college graduates. Very often graduates of elite institutions. Even doctors, but more often engineers.
And the word used for God in Pakistan always has been; “khuda”.
Here’s a study about the prevalence of engineers ( long PDF warning ).
What would benefit humanity the most is finally understanding that religion of ANY kind is a lie from start to finish. If that ever happens, it will be one of the major steps forward for mankind.
Straight Dope point of fact:
Various theologians throughout Christian history have promoted different ideas about whether good pagans and unbaptized babies can make it into heaven. Some time in the early Renaissance, the concept of Limbo was proposed, in which innocent persons who had not been baptized would spend eternity in a state of “natural” happiness, unable to go to Heaven, but never punished with Hell.
Although the idea was kicked around by different theologians, (and made it into Dante’s Inferno as ther First Circle of Hell), THE BELIEF WAS NEVER ADOPTED BY THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. IT HAS NEVER BEEN DOCTRINE. Thanks to Dante and a few other proponents, it did enter into the folk beliefs of a lot of Catholics, but it was still never an official teaching of the church.
A couple of years ago, Pope Benedict, (who personally finds the belief in Limbo a bit silly), called for a symposium of theologians to study the issue and see whether the church should ban the belief, outright. They noted in 2007 that there was never a need for that belief and decalared that it should not be taught in Catholic schools.
I would be surprised if Catholics in Africa were ever told that their children were going to Hell–particularly since the majority of famines, wars, and diseases that have recently become endemic to that continent tended to arise decades after Catholic schools quietly dropped any mention of the concept. (I was taught about Limbo in the 1950s, but even before I got out of elementary school and before the time I got to high school in the 1960s, it was already being treated as a literary device for Dante with no theological support.)
There certainly are a whole bunch of Christians and Muslims who disagree with you. I just wanted to make that clear to anyone who is reading that Christians can differ on this.
The Ft. Hood shooter was a Psychiatrist and the Detroit airline attacker was the son of a wealthy banker going to school in England.
I haven’t heard of this and a search only resulted in a incident a year ago when a man with a history of mental illness drove his vehicle into a St. Paul Planned Parenthood clinic. Apparently Jesus told him to do this while he (not Jesus) was watching TV.
So cite or is this how urban legends begin?
“Nonsense”? It’s not nonsense at all. If Christians can validly claim that they worship the same deity as Jews, in spite of the massive theological differences resulting from the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, then it’s just as valid for Muslims to claim that they worship that same deity as well.
Islam, just like Christianity, accepts the Jewish scripture’s account of creation, the alleged descent of all humans from Adam and Eve, and biblical claims about the nature of God in general and God’s early interactions with humanity. Christianity primarily differs from Jewish theology in asserting that God became incarnate as Jesus and thereby redeemed humanity from sin, and accepting a later text (the New Testament) as its chief scripture. Islam primarily differs from Jewish theology in asserting that Jesus and most importantly Muhammad were prophets inspired by God, and accepting a later text (the Qur’an) as its chief scripture.
If you want to claim that Muslims don’t worship the same God as Jews, then by that logic you have to acknowledge that Christians don’t either. By that logic, Mormons and Quakers and Seventh-Day Adventists all worship different deities as well.
You personally may not like Islam and may wish to regard it as totally separate from Christianity, but that doesn’t give you a legitimate reason to ignore basic facts and common sense about the historical and doctrinal links between the two religions.
(Nor, of course, does it give you any say in determining who is or isn’t entitled to use the word “Allah” to mean “God”.)