Anyone who claims that there is only one god, and that the god that this guy worships is different than the one that someone else worships, is a dumbhead.
That’s not my problem. This one is a pretty open-and-shut case.
Anyway, if Muslims and Christians are really taking these texts seriously, they should realize that Gen 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”, has another valid Herbraic translation, namely, “In the beginning, [it] created God, the heavens and the earth.” (the it is implied by the grammar). This it (I’ve seen it referred to as the Boundless) defies reference. It is, AFAIK, the subject of works like the Kaballah and the Zohar. It is probably best expressed in the Tao Te Ching or in certain aspects of Hinduism, etc.
It’s all been one long misunderstanding.
I am a Christian who attended Wheaton College. Here is my facebook status about this issue:
It seems that the dismissal of professor Hawkins boils down to her claim that “Muslims and Christians worship the same God.” The college feels this is outside of their theological statement of faith and she cannot continue in her position as a Wheaton educator with that belief.
The “same God” question really comes down to a matter of interpretation. Certainly Muslims, Jews, and Christians all have fundamentally different views of who God IS, how God has revealed Himself to humanity, and how God reconciles a fallen humanity to Himself. That is more than enough to say we are not worshiping the same God… from a certain point of view. (going a bit Kenobi here) The other way to look at it is all three faiths claim the Old Testament as truth. They believe in a single God who created the world, made a covenant with Abraham, and led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. So if your focus is on the history of our belief in a monotheistic God, then yes, all three faiths worship the same God.
Rather than focus on which perspective is the more correct one, I think the much more relevant and interesting question is WHY this question is so important to people. Why is it even brought up by either side, when the above paragraph is so obvious?
In the Wheaton professor case, Hawkins brought it up. Why? She brought it up in an effort to build a bridge between cultures. I think her hope was that Christians would stop seeing Muslims as “other” and see that we do share parts of our religious belief in common with them. Her intention was a good thing, a positive effort, although most likely a misguided one.
On the other side, why is Wheaton College willing to make this a critical part of their theological beliefs? Why are so many evangelical Christians so offended by the very idea that from a certain historical perspective, we DO worship the same God? I feel that, like so many other things in our culture today, the answer boils down to fear. I think it is more comfortable for evangelicals to view Muslims as “other”. I think that some Christians may even feel that if Muslims are worshiping the same God, then God Himself shares in some of the blame for radical jihadists’ terrorist actions, and the very idea of that repulses them. If we stop viewing them as “other” and start ministering to them as human beings, that is scary to a lot of people! It brings them in close, into our personal lives, and forces us to care for people who share religious beliefs with people who do very bad things. But I think that is where Jesus would want us to be. He wants us to be willing to go to scary places and share the love of Christ with everyone. By following His example, you’ll never go wrong.
I look at the “same God” question as very similar to a trick question posed by the Pharisees to Jesus. How did Jesus respond to these “gotcha” questions? He exposed them as irrelevant. “Whose picture is on the coin? Then give it to Caesar.” Jesus didn’t get bogged down in technicalities and different perspectives. And neither should we.
in fact for a thousand years the Jews and the Muslims have not (in either of our views) fundamentally disagreed on the who of God.
Christians get confused perhaps.
It’s mainly an issue, as far as I can tell, only for certain American evangelical Christians.
Catholics (and many Protestant sects) typically recognize the shared profession of the faith of Abraham, and adoration of one God. Professor Hawkins, in fact, was quoting from Pope Francis, though the Catholuc perspective here is not at all original to him.
Yes it is your problem. You are a human amongst humans. Saying something is clear to you has only minor relevance in a world where others don’t agree.
“There are no deities. This one is a pretty open and shut case” There. Does this mean I can safely assume religion will now have no relevance to me?
Look. I enjoyed your Dr. Laura link. I don’t think it demonstrates that bible literalists are not bible literalists (though kudos for making an A != A argument in a thread in which I mentioned Taoism). Literalists have a justification to escape all of those rules- all they have to do is quote Romans 13:1, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities”, and they are off the hook for killing people working on Sunday and so on. While gay marriage was still illegal, they were scripturally free to fight as hard as they wanted to maintain that form of discrimination.
But the Jehovah=Allah thing should be plain and obvious to anybody who takes the time to read the relevant passages, believer, non-believer or in between. I don’t know how anyone could read the bible and argue that Jesus is not supposed to be the son of the god of Abraham- that would blow the whole monotheism theme. Might as well not have an Old Testament in that case!
And I don’t know how anyone could read the Koran, or simply observe Islam, and say Muslims are not worshiping the god of Abraham. The Grand Mosque is built on the spot where Abraham is said to have almost sacrificed Isaac, fer cryin’ out loud. So Jehovah=Allah is not just obvious to me, it should be obvious to anyone paying attention.
Now, if evangelicals want to point at Muslims and say, “You’re doing it wrong!”, well that’s a whole other kettle of fish. Still, I’d like to see an argument that Jehovah is not Allah that isn’t steeped in some kind of denial or further motive.
Of course not. Even if we assume all religions are utterly false, they are woven into the culture so deeply, and have been for centuries, that it would be silly to call them irrelevant. I think even most atheists’ world views are colored by religious views simply by virtue of growing up in a culture that has so much religious history. It’s baked into the language, the calendar, notions of good and bad- it would be difficult to separate it all out if you tried.
And anyway I don’t think you can prove your claim, while Jehovah=Allah is clearly demonstrable. They therefore aren’t equivalent statements.
And yet there they are! And in the absence of a visit from the big G, who’s the authority that says what they have learned through their personal interaction with their deity (or however it is they get their beliefs) isn’t right and every textual source wrong? It’s all BS anyway…
Right. That’s kinda my point. It really doesn’t matter how sure you are about the issue, if a bunch of religious people think something, then they do; with all the real world consequences that may have.
Really? Jehovah = Allah is clearly demonstrable? Their existence isn’t even demonstrable, let alone whether one non-existent being is the same as another.
I know what you mean though: you mean that some people historically have said they are the same. If a bunch of modern people write a book saying they are not, why is that less authoritative than something written by a bunch of bronze age sheepherders? Sure, the sheepherders believed they were the same. They had no more basis for that religious assertion than any other religious assertion.
The whole thing is a fantasy and no one’s version of the fantasy is any more provable than anyone else’s.
They don’t even understand their own beliefs.
It doesn’t matter if you take it as literally true or total BS. There is a traditional scripture we can refer to to answer such an obvious question. It goes back hundreds, thousands of years. One could argue that it motivated the development of a scientific world-view that is provable, since this surely has always been a shortcoming of a faith-based system.
Sure, if they think something, they do. But if they call themselves bible literalists or fundamentalists, as the evangelicals at Wheaton do, they can be called out if they stray too far from the established script.
I concede that organizations like the Mormons can arise that incorporate religious ideas that might as well be cut from whole cloth.
Dude, it doesn’t matter if it is real, it matters how the story goes. Could you demonstrate certain things about Lord of the Rings characters, the plot points and what did and did not happen? Gimli is a dwarf who wields an axe; I can prove it. Same with the bible and Islam: Jehovah = Allah. That’s how the story goes.
The sheepherders may not have realized the full consequences of what they were asserting. But it doesn’t matter. It is the sheepherders’ work that became canon. They aren’t just ‘some people’, they are the authors of the canon. What matters is that people who care about this stuff pretty much agree on what is the canon, and we can all go take a look at that if we wish and see what it says.
Depends. There is a canonical story line with an extensive list of characters and plot points. People can add to it, argue about it, re-interpret it in all kinds of ways, arguably to justify just about anything. But I can’t see an interpretation that gets out of Jehovah = Allah, even given that the whole thing is fantasy.
Then you’re not trying hard enough. Today the new testament is canon. At the time it was written it absolutely was not, and there is no way you can reconcile the tenor of one with the tenor of the other. The first is harsh and full of rules and punishment, and not much love. The latter is all about forgiving everyone.
If something can become canon merely through being around a long time and people adopting it (and it can) then the Moslem and Xtian gods being different can be canon. And if that can be true in 3015 because Wheaton said it was so in 2015, then it’s as true in 2015 as it will be in 3015.
Fundamentalism is a mindset not a rational system of thought. Your quote above from Romans isn’t a refutation, it’s a confirmation of my view: as Humpty Dumpty would have it if he were participating in this debate, ““When I read the bible, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” It has enough loopholes to fly a fleet of A380’s through, and it allows fundies to justify whatever they want and still kid themselves they are fundies.
Your LotR example perfectly illustrates why I’m right; something is LotR canon because it was written by JRRT, and that’s that. But religion operates far more loosely because (a) they work from a book which is actually a massively contradictory set of writings by vast numbers of people who didn’t actually agree with one another about a lot of things over a tremendous period of time and consequently is a canon in the same way a Rorschach inkblot is a picture of something, and (b) has always and will always incorporate strong interpretational elements made up by those who believe in it.
If they want to start believing that the deity of Islam and the deity of Xtianity are not the same, they will, there’s nothing you can do about it, and we will have to deal. The fact that may be “wrong” in some sense of the word is a fart in a tornado.
it seems to me entirely possible to judge a religious position on internal consistency of the internal reasoning. So in the case of the evangelical, if they say the Islamic conception of God is outside and a ‘different God’ because we reject the triune concept, then they must by this basis
if they heap on other vague things to justify in addition, then they should answer to the record of the Jewish theologians (who should know better than an american evangelical christian) over a thousand year history who held consistently in the majority that the jewish and the islamic conceptions of the Unicity of God and the core attributes are essentially the same - so same God - even though we muslims were wrong about additional ideas. This was a logical (in the very Jewish tradition) reasoning. So the Wheaton types should be able to come up with something internally consistent.
it seems to me their lack of that - as Malthus has shown - says what is needed.
An insightful post and way too calm and reasoned for the Pit. Next time throw some cursing in, please? 
Fred Clark also summed it up nicely on his blog;
[QUOTE=Fred Clark]
This entire fiasco is made even more disappointing when we consider the enormity of the missed opportunity here. Wheaton’s mission is education. It’s motto is “for Christ and His Kingdom.” Both the positive stories from the legitimate media and the negative attacks from the right-wing echo chamber directed attention to Wheaton College, and that attention created an opportunity to educate and to demonstrate the meaning of Christ and his kingdom. Wheaton muffed that opportunity, desperately seeking, instead, to do whatever it had to do to just make all that attention go away.
[/QUOTE]
My goddamn Samsung 4g lte is taking a shit. I will have to respond later tonight.
I wasn’t making a point about canon with my LOTR reference, I was responding to your point about fantasy:
The point I was making was that the LOTR is clearly fantasy fiction, yet it has structure, a narrative, a set of characters and a set of rules about how that fantasy world works- it is defined. Who’s Gimli? If you think he’s an elf, that’s not just your opinion, you’re wrong. (If you come up with some tangential nutjob string of quotes to try to prove that he really is an elf, people might call you a troll, or who knows? You might attract a cult following.)
It is OK to read the bible in this way, at least by me. You don’t have to believe it for a second. Write on a piece of masking tape, “-by Stephen King”, slap it on the cover, look at it as a bunch of words on pages that refer to stuff that is supposed to give you nightmares. Or whatever.
Well, it refers to some specific stuff. I realize there are religious nutjobs out there that make up all kinds of bullshit and promote it with the utmost zeal. I get that. But if a group is claiming to be the kind of bible literalists that the evangelicals of Wharton claim to be, well, those guys by definition are not submitting new entries to the canon. They stick with the old familiar words on the pages, which refer to some specific stuff. On some points, one can’t just take any position. Some opinions are wrong.
But that brings us to your point a). Being ‘massively contradictory’ &etc. does not disqualify it from being a canon- that’s just how the story goes. The canon is pretty much agreed upon, and has been for a very long time. It isn’t so loose a canon, and I don’t know from where you get your anything goes viewpoint. There is arguably some wiggle room, but the alternative selections really aren’t big surprises. They’re known, and people who follow these things closely are often familiar with those selections, too. They don’t represent radical departures from the ‘traditional canon’, IMHO, but if you think otherwise I wouldn’t mind hearing your reasons why. If you want to rant some more about how wrong the bible is, this is the pit, rant away if you wish.
As for point b), I agree. But some points can’t be interpreted away. For instance, there is only one God in the bible. Beginning, middle, end, God is the same. There is only one God in the Koran as well. In both works, this god is the god of Abraham. They’re the same god.
Do Muslims accept uniquely Christian aspects this god? No, and vice versa, both groups formed different views as history unfolded in different parts of the world. Still, the 3 big Monotheisms share one god.
Yes, there is nothing I can do about it. I can bitch about it on here I suppose.
“fart in a tornado”. I am going to watch for an occasion to use that. 
But the bible isn’t like that. It’s all over the shop.
The bible doesn’t support the position that Jesus was god or the son thereof, but whoopsie, now he is. How does that work? People just, yanno, decided. And they can decide again.
How do you know? And can how you know not be contradicted? Sez who?
To anyone who wasn’t brought up in Xtianity it is passably clear that about 2000 years ago a whole new deity and religion and mindset were invented probably by Peter or possibly Jesus if he existed as more than a foil for Peter’s tales. It was a completely new thing with a deity that preached not casting the first stone and turning the other cheek and forgiving one’s enemies and did not concern the previous middle eastern deity of “thou shalt nots”, vengeful mass slaughter and stonings. But in order to gain acceptance the new was grafted onto the old and before you know it everyone is pretending it’s all one thing despite that being patent bollocks.
You are like a person from Peter’s time saying that these new teachings about the dude from Nazareth are simply contradictory of the well established style of the deity of the Abrahamic narrative and cannot form part of the same religion.
You underestimate people’s ability to come to believe obvious and self contradictory shite.
We have always been at war with Eurasia. But if it suits enough people to believe it, tomorrow we will not and will never have been at war with Eurasia.
Printchester, your first sentence is a little wordy. Replace:
“To anyone who wasn’t brought up in Xtianity it is passably clear”
with
“I think”
and you lose none of the sense while benefitting from a punchier prose style.
Dammit, Princhester, I think you are mostly raving. :mad: For now I direct you to the wiki on Monotheism. I’ll respond more in-depth later, I promise.