I'm considering a parallel thread to this - The God of Christianity isn't the God of the Bible. What do you think?

I'm not a Koran Scholar, but I have been assured many times by Muslim friends that respect for the individual and women is a huge part of Islam. So I'm wary of judging on one or two texts. After all, what about, "He advised him to rape his sister, and the advice seemed good' bit?

Is there no place in your thinking, Shadow, for us all to have some facet of Truth in imperfect vessels? Yes, it's true that both can't be right, in the abstract - however, I'm loathe to disregard one of the three Monotheistic religions in a simplistic way. Certainly on the grounds of Jesus being the Way you are right. But... what if Christianity isn't the only way to Jesus?

Like you can't find rape, incest,genocide and the downright silly and cruel in the Bible.

The Bible and the Koran are IMO human texts about how humans experience God ( a point of view, I know, not shared with me by most muslims and a lot of Christians).

Humans are fallible and therefore a fair bit of dross gets shovelled in with the sacred text.

This "their dross is worse than ours - so we're superior!" approach doesn't cut any ice with me.

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Sura 4 v 24 says: "But no place of repentance shall there be for those who do evil until when death is close to one of them he saith 'Now verily I am turned to God'."

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Respect of women? Pah!! Treatment of Prisoners?? double-pah!!

Please bear in mind my comments below relate to a fairly liberal Arab nation:-

Before we left the UK, I took counsel of a Christian friend who had lived in Pakistan. He had once been challenged by a fairly hostile group of Muslims, who wanted to know whether he believed in the existence of Mohammed. He paused before replying simply, "Yes." And continued to me in his explanation, "because the Bible warns, 'there will be many false prophets.'"

So that to me was pretty simple.

I won't post all my observations about the practises of their faith .. but I was gauled by the appalling double-standards apparent. They may well donate part of their salary to charity .. but always to Muslims first. (OK, we may give to Christian charities first, but not through obligation.)

They may well fast all the daylight hours, and then go and feast at mid-night - beeping the horns of their arrogant Mercedes to hurry up the poor Indian guy to run out to the car with the takeaway.

They are taught that the world will end in a battle against Jews - something which I told a very dear Arab friend of mine - was terribly sad. And also grow up believing that the holocaust was mere political propaganda.

They are taught to honour God by respect of fellow man ... and that means their own country folk. I was shocked at the class system which permeated through the beauracracy ... driving tests even ... you Ozzies and Canadians for instance have to take one, but we Brits and Americans don't. And if you're a native Indian - well - forget it mate.

Imprisonment ... the low-life servants from Asia ... bundled into large cells - lots of them - pot of jam with flies buzzing round it and pitta thrown in - just like dogs.

Rape ... Arab Sponsor of Indian housemaid - she is raped by him. The "Police" rooms in the Maternity Hosp - see her baby taken away, her deported ... the babe put into an orphanage in the desert and unloved for 18 yrs ... and then, used to pick up the litter that they drop from the car windows. And of course, "she" seduced him, so nothing is ever said.

I can't rationalise all of this with a loving your neighbour as yourself faith. I could go on and on.

That's the sort of thing we did when we had a deeply literal view of the Bible and weren't restrained by constitutions and human rights legislation from using it.

Textual literalism, poverty, ignorance and lack of democracy allow plenty similar religious abuses to flourish in the present day Islamic world too.

For hundred of years Islamic Spain was a more tolerant and advanced society than the rest of Christian Europe - until the Christian reconquista put paid to that.

I have a train to catch and don't have time to go into more detail - poverty, ignorance and dictatorial regimes which allow sick-making propaganda are certainly not unique to Islam (how many of the worst crimes against humanity in Serbia, Croatia and South America do you think were committed by Christians - many of them devout?)

Attack the abuses of a religion and not the religion itself - unless you're bloody sure and can prove which teaching leads directly to which abuse - and that it's a valid teaching for that religion and not simply the beliefs of a tiny sect/government sponsored propaganda.

Pipkin - words fail me.

I am sure you are right in what you say - I am no advocate of hypocrisy in whichever religion - but... "Suffer the little Children"? With OUR educational system, discrimination against those with disabilities, not to mention abortion rate, dubious Child Protection prcedures and exploitation of third world labour..?

I wish posters would stop tarring an entire culture or religious group with the same brush. People are different. Some people behave like bastards. Some are Muslims, some are Christians. Some people will go out of their way to help others. Some are Muslim, some are Christian. It doesn't matter what you call God. It's what you practise on a day to day level that shows you for what you are.

sorry about the mistyping: it is Sura 4 v 22 not 24....

To balance my point, I do suspect that we will be surprised by who gets to heaven, and who doesn't. I have no doubt that many from a non-Christian background who have realised their total dependence on God will be there, and many 'Christians' who slipped into thinking they were doing OK and didn't need God anymore will lose out. I have great hopes that in practice many Muslims will be found to have cast themselves on the mercy of God, and will be found among us on the last day.

Mohammed (sp?) himself engaged in Jihad and such. Christianity did not spread by war in it's early days whereas that's the primary way Islam spread from the beginning.

Yes, Christians have a lot to answer for, but Jesus, the Apostles, and their word do not. But as well shown here, Mohammed and the Koran itself provide the basis for what is evil about Islam.

after all, do we take anyones' comments on the bible seriously if they have not so much as opened it?

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Originally posted by Ender's Shadow:
sorry about the mistyping: it is Sura 4 v 22 not 24....

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Surah 4 v 22 says:

"And marry not women whom your fathers married
Except what is past:
It was shameful and odious -
An abominable custom indeed."

Both religions believe in One God, maker of all that is. They both derive from the same Jewish monotheistic roots.

They have different perspectives over how God is to be understood and how we approach Him (but - hey - isn't that true about different strands of Christianity?).

Let's try and clarify what I'm trying to do here. It's a very limited project - it is to provide a useful extra argument to those who are presented with the claim that Islam and Christianity are talking about the same God. For me - and I admit it is a feature of my personality - it is details like this that give me the grounds for treating Islam as a false religion. It is too easy to be wowed by the good things in it to the extent of losing sight of its probable origin. The bible has relatively little patience with the proponents of false religion - read 2 John and Galatians 5 v 1-12 (ouch!)or even Mt 22 v 29f if you insist on a quote from Jesus's lips - which also offer 'Beware false prophets' - a passage that gets a lot less attention these days than 'Judge not...'.

One of the tests of a true prophet is that they get it right. These quotes establish that Muhammad got it wrong.

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Originally posted by Ender's Shadow:
Please quit whinging about the precise quote - in my copy it is 4:22 - it might be 21 or 23 in yours, as the one you quote is 4:23 in mine.

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The point I am trying to get across is that this quote does not appear in my translation anywhere in this entire section of this Surah, nor indeed anything remotely like it. You are quoting from a section of the Koran that deals with women, orphans and family rights generally. This is the case for at least the first 40 verses.

Put in context this reads so
(Warning long scripture quote)

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[23] The same day Sadducees came to him, who say that there is no resurrection; and they asked him a question,
[24] saying, "Teacher, Moses said, `If a man dies, having no children, his brother must marry the widow, and raise up children for his brother.'
[25] Now there were seven brothers among us; the first married, and died, and having no children left his wife to his brother.
[26] So too the second and third, down to the seventh.
[27] After them all, the woman died.
[28] In the resurrection, therefore, to which of the seven will she be wife? For they all had her."
[29] But Jesus answered them, "You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God.
[30] For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.
[31] And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God,
[32] `I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'? He is not God of the
dead, but of the living."
[33] And when the crowd heard it, they were astonished at his teaching.

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In this context 'scriptures' refers to the the Old Testament (the septuagint?) - from which the Sadducees themselves, as Jews - like Jesus were arguing.

In other words, Jesus's argument to them is that they don't know their OWN scriptures and they underestimate God.

How you get from that to condemning Islam as a false religion beats me.

If wresting scripture out of context like that is the way you treat the Bible, then I have to say that it doesn't give me much faith in your interpretative abilities with the Koran.

This trick of cherry-picking nasty passages and saying "Look at this drek, how can anyone believe in that!" is used by Atheists and Sceptics to discredit Christianity. Look for example at the
Sceptics Annotated Bible

which is provided by an Atheist precisely as a resource so that people can do the sort of thing you're doing, but use it to attack Christianity as a false, dangerous and destructive religion.

People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones or rather "Judge not... For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get."

Indeed that passage applies very well to this discussion, for the way you judge Muslims is the way atheists judge Christianity. By encouraging this style of argument in the end you're making a rod for your own back. It can be used to treat all religions based on ancient sacred texts as false.

Louise

PS.
A historical tangent to Mark the Punk/

I agree with you that Jesus never modelled such behaviour )however his words were used to justify autos-da-fe and witch-hunts - namely

"Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for
him if a great millstone were hung round his neck and he were thrown into the sea." was used to justify capital punishment for 'heretics' eg. Protestants, or Moriscos/Jews in Spain

Also - Matt. 5, v.17-18 were used to claim that the Old Testament law was still in force so that 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live' and similar were to be taken literally.

So sadly Christians did manage to use Jesus's own words to justify these things

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I think (and I am using a technical term here) that Muslims are doctrinal heretics, in the sense that they don't believe that Jesus is the Son of God,

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Indeed. Dante, in fact, put Mohammed in Hell as a schismatic, one who splits the church, and therefore akin to, say, an Avignon Pope and, perhaps, Henry VIIIth. or Luther.

"God is only bound to turn again towards those who do evil through ignorance and then turn again. Surely, these will God turn again to, for God is knowing, wise. His turning again is not for those who do evil, until, when death comes before one of them, he says, ‘Now I turn again;’ nor yet for those who die in misbelief. For such as these have we prepared a grievous woe."

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Such of your women as commit indecency,
call four of you to witness against them;
and if they witness, then detain them
in their houses until death takes them
or God appoints for them a way.
And when two of you commit indecency,
punish them both; but if they repent
and make amends, the suffer them to be;
God turns, and is All-Compassionate.

God shall turn only towards those who do
evil in ignorance, then shortly repent;
God will return towards those; God is
All-knowing, All-wise.
But God shall not turn towards those
who do evil deeds until, when one of them
is visited by death, he says, 'Indeed
now I repent,' neither to those who die
disbelieving; for them We have prepared
a painful chastisement.

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Endar, you choose to read this as meaning that there is no room in Islam for last-minute repentence, but to me it seems to say that God will not look kindly upon those who knowingly continue to sin, figuring that they can do what they want and then get in a last-minute confession before they die. I find your choice of this passage a bit ironic, since the idea of the 'death-bed repentence' was one of the things which caused me to disdain Christianity. (Was it in the Middle Ages - I don't remember - that the idea of only making a single confession was the norm and that you should wait until you thought you were going to die to make it?)

But in a more general sense, this whole idea of judging which God a religion worships by comparing isolated bits of scripture, taken out of context, is totally meaningless. And it becomes even more meaningless when you add in the problems caused by using translations from the original languages and cultural environment (as is all too obvious even when dealing with the Bible texts alone!)

k - one easy definition that works for this discussion: evil is any action that supports the work of the Devil / Satan in his attempts to destroy / undermine / tarnish creation. In this case, Islam by undermining the faith and destroying the churches in the lands that it has conquered is evil (note that this isn't saying that Muslims deliberately persecuted, just that the combination of their deceptions and financial persecution were enough to do the destuction)

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In this case, Islam by undermining the faith and destroying the churches in the lands that it has conquered is evil

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Then to the same extent Christianity is evil. Go learn some history. Your argument is circular: you start from the presumption that Islam is evil, and so therefore its expansion is evil. Whereas presumably in your eyes Christianity is right, therefore its aggressive expansion through most of the last few hundred years is also right. It is OK for Crusaders to sack Jerusalem and carve out fiefs in the Middle East, or for the Habsburgs to destroy Moorish Spain, or for the British to conquer India and steal everything portable, because, hey, we're the good guys. Your depth of political analysis appears to be at the level of the author of the Chanson de Roland: Paiens ont tort, Chretiens ont droit.

To further this debate it might be also agreeing with the translation of the the Koran we should use (I found this on the net)

Considering the prophet in my opinion got his ideas from meeting Jews and christians I consider that the Koran catches glimpses of God but misses out altogether in some ways.

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In this case, Islam by undermining the faith and destroying the churches in the lands that it has conquered is evil (note that this isn't saying that Muslims deliberately persecuted, just that the combination of their deceptions and financial persecution were enough to do the destuction)

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Firstly, a philological point. In one sense, the God of Islam is the 'same' as the one of Judaism/Christianity, in that 'Allah' and the OT name 'Elohim' are at root, the same word.

But I think that the 'picture' of God given by the Koran, although right in some aspects, is always going to be missing/in error in the eyes of Christians who believe Jesus to be Immanuel: God revealed as a man. (In the same way, we believe the Jews are not getting the full story if they do not recognise that Jesus is the awaited Messiah, and that His words are therefore of more importance than those of ANY OT prophet.)

Louise posted about how 'tolerant and advanced' Islamic Spain was, 'until the Christian Reconquista put paid to that'. I would like to point out that the Islamic Moors that invaded Visigothic Spain in the early 8th century weren't being very 'tolerant and advanced' in bringing their armies across from North Africa. And what eventually happened was a 'reconquest', the descendents of the people the Moors had ousted taking back what had been theirs.

Panurge posted this, which I cannot leave unanswered:

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You might even wonder if the reason for the rise of militant Islam is because it seems to offer a hope to the marginalised people of the Earth, the poor and needy. Once upon a time Christianity did that. Now for many people around the world it is seen as irrelevant or part of the problem. Why?

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Originally posted by Gill:
I confess to a certain horrified relief when the Afghan minister was murdered last week by people who then went gaily off on their Haj.

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You will have seen that this is untrue. He was not murdered by pilgrims but by security personnel who belonged to a rival faction in the snakepit which is Afghan politics.

I notice there seems a tendency to a) quote a particular circumstance as typical of Islam/Christianity as a whole: with a counter-tendency to argue b) that the original is nothing like that, and that the said circumstance is a total travesty etc etc.

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Originally posted by Firenze:

Raises the question, when are the actions of believers truely representative of the religion they believe in? When they do something admirable and humanitarian of course. Hmmm.

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Originally posted by Ender's Shadow:
That's quite apart from the little matter of suicide bombers....

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In that sense Islam differs from Christianity in the same way Judaism differs from Christianity.

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Originally posted by Helen Earth:
What is the relation between the God of Islam and the God of Christianity?

Both religions believe in One God, maker of all that is. They both derive from the same Jewish monotheistic roots.

They have different perspectives over how God is to be understood and how we approach Him (but - hey - isn't that true about different strands of Christianity?).

Overall - we have more in common with Islam than there is to divide us. We're not the same, but there is a lot we could learn from one another if we just stopped to listen instead of hurling insults.

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Lots of agreement here.

We both believe that there is One God who created the heavens and the earth, (and I gather that Arabic speaking Christians call God "Allah"). Since there is only one Creator God, then obviously the God of Islam and Christianity is One and The Same.

However, the 'concept of God' that is taught (not always followed) in each religion is quite different. In Islam, God is 'Other', quite different from human beings. They are not created in God's image. We do not have anything similar to God; we are created beings and God is God.

In Christianity, God became incarnate in Jesus the Christ, and is 'the only-begotten Son'. In Islam, God does not beget, neither is He begotten. Jesus is a prophet, to be respected and honoured and learned from. Jesus was born of Mary, a virgin, by a miracle done by God. (Not too different from what many Christians believe...)

We worship Jesus, the Son, but in Islam that is a terrible sin, to make anyone or anything equal to God.

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Pipkin and Ender’s Shadow, you’re entitled to your opinions on this - but, since we aren’t going to know for certain until we “see face to face”, please bear in mind that you may be mistaken and stop bringing your own faith into disrepute by slagging off other faiths in such ill thought out and offensive terms.

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It upsets me when I see comments like this. I thought that this is a Christian board. It seems that we can say bad things (see the thread on Calvinism) about Christians and how they interpret the Bible (calling it evil, perverse, etc.) but we cannot use the same terminology when we talk about Islam. I'm beginning to think the Ship is too politically correct for me, and I am saddened by the prospect.

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Originally posted by Dyfrig:
FWIW Sharkshooter, I consider Calvinism and Islam to be wrong.

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But I hope not in the same way: Calvinism is a part of Christianity, Islam is not Christian.

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Originally posted by sharkshooter:
Why do you think they execute Christians who try to convince Muslims that they should be Christians?

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Because they are in power. Christianity did exactly the same when it was in power in Europe. I consider that 'the work of the evil one' too, but I don't think it entirely discredits the Christian faith.

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Originally posted by Ender's Shadow:
In this case, Islam by undermining the faith and destroying the churches in the lands that it has conquered is evil (note that this isn't saying that Muslims deliberately persecuted, just that the combination of their deceptions and financial persecution were enough to do the destuction)

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Ender's Shadow, I should really rather you weren't posting on this site at all, and I hold it to be a failure on the part of the administrators that you have not been booted overboard yet. But, just to help you see things from a more balanced perspective, would you consider thinking about events which took place very recently in the Balkans.

70% of Bosnia's mosques were destroyed by Christian Cetniks, usually with the encouragement of Serbian Orthodox clergy.

Every single mosque in Banja Luka, including the 16th century Feradije Dzami, a UNESCO world heritage site, were completely razed to ground.

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Originally posted by Fiddleback:
....and I hold it to be a failure on the part of the administrators that you have not been booted overboard yet....

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[host hat on]

Fiddleback, I have had it with you. You seem to have made a second career of breaking Commandment 6.

And these latest snipes certainly break commandment 1.

This is a formal demand that you apologize to the Administrators who run this board.

If you don't, you have already been warned that you will be suspended for two weeks.

My preference would be to have you walk the plank.

Now apologize, dammit.

How the hell did that happen?

And SteveTom is too. And we're on more stable ground there.

I think your problem, Ender's Shadow, is that you are equating 'not Christian' with 'evil'. Have you read the thread on Evil in purgatory? It makes interesting reading. Muslims and Christians alike are capable of performing terrible acts of evil, mainly through believing that they'r justiofied in doing the most horrendous things because they're 'good' and their victims are 'evil'.

The most chilling thing I read about the former Yugoslavia was a series of interviews about a year ago with random Serbians off the street. And they were saying things like 'I don't think they're being fair on Milosevic. He showed us what the Bosnians were up to'.

Scary.

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I should really rather you weren't posting on this site at all, and I hold it to be a failure on the part of the administrators that you have not been booted overboard yet.

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Erin, apologies if I didn't conform with the norm' and gave you more unnecessary hassle.

I thought I made it clear I was stating my personal observations, in one specific place. I was not slagging off anyones belief. So did not think I was attacking a person/s. Of course I am not wrapping up the entire Muslim world in my earlier post. My Muslim neighbour does not hold with those traditions or culture.

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Ender's Shadow, I should really rather you weren't posting on this site at all

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Originally posted by sharkshooter:

I believe that Armenianism is wrong, but I don't trash their belief system, since I accept that it is another way of understanding Christianity.

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And possibly Islam is another way of understanding God.

Just as in Christianity itself, there are many varied arguments, dissentions, and ways to interpret scripture...and many faces and attributes of God ... none of us seems to have the whole truth or understanding of God, or Christianity. (The Calvinism thread is a good picture of this happening among us..)