I read a column in my school paper today which was written by the columnist who writes all his columns about how he is Christian. Whee.
Anyway, he began by saying that the USA is “obviously” a Christian nation because we keep saying “God Bless America” and our money says “in God we trust.”
I say that’s bunk, because a lot of other religions believe in “God.” Maybe not the same God that Christians do but lots believe in their own God. You can’t go around saying that “God” in those sayings is the Christian God (even if that’s what they intended to begin with.) If we wanted to portray our nation as Christian, we’d say “In Jesus Christ we trust.”
So I want to write a letter to this columnist but the only other religions I could come up with right now were Judaism and Islam.
Who else believes in a being called “God”? I’m asking you to only give me examples of monotheist religions, because saying “Hinuds believe in lots of gods” doesn’t go with my argument (We don’t say “in gods we trust.”)
Somebody better able than I to provide details or another monotheistic religion will surely be along soon. FWIW though, the god worshipped by Christians, Jews and Moslems is one and the same.
Don’t the Zoroastrians worship a god named Matsuda or Mazda or something like that?
Throughout the centuries, polytheistic religions have had cults spring up around one particular god or another. I don’t know that that necessarily means that “Cult of God X” believed that God X was the only true god; rather, I think it means that the cultists got themselves into a particular frenzy over God X but still believed in the other gods.
That’s a matter of opinion, AFAIK. I mean, a lot of purists would say that ONLY Allah is the real god, or the God is the only one. I’m too young to have a full thought out belief system, so I’ll just give those 1.543 cents.
Sikhs–those poor people with beards and turbans and have nothing to do with Islam whatsoever, yet are the targets of idiots–are monotheists, I believe.
Who believes in God? The adherents of the Abrahamic religions: Jews, Christians, and Muslims [who usually call him “Allah,” but when interviewed on western news programs often translate that to “God”]
That said, who believes in “God”?
Unitarians, of course.
Hindus believe in God. They just believe that God is a state attainable by more than one being. So do some Buddhists.
IMO, you are wasting your breath on this columnist, he’s not likely to be swayed by your argument, but you can certainly give it a try. No where in our government does it say that God is a Christian God, or that belief, as such, is a ticket to entry into American society.
Then again, I don’t think he referred to Aten as “God.”
Koreans seem to believe in this horrible, horrible pop band named “god” (no capitals), but I don’t know if that works either.
In the Taoist book The Way Of Chuang Tsu, there are numerous references to “God,” but it’s hard to tell if that’s not just a little trick that Thomas Merton pulled on the world when he translated it. Since Taoism is not, strictly speaking, a theistic religion (meaning that no emphasis is placed on the existence - or lack of existence- of a god or gods), maybe that’s not the best example.
