Some would indeed argue that. If so, though, do we really put all members of these religions in the same class as someone who is directly inspired as Mohammed or such, or regard them as people who are (at least partly) mistaken -- whatever the source of their founder's teachings? Because it is easy to cry "Oh, no! Mohammed must have met an evil spirit" and then run with it to "All Muslims are demonically inspired" with all the paranoid fears implied. It's simply not the same thing. Do we regard the Hindus in the same way?

What about Christians who have "charismatic" experiences which are doctrinally dodgy or even heretical? (Not that all or even most are, but certainly they can't all be right!) If someone says they have a vision from God and they're wrong about what they say He is telling them, does it mean their followers (who may be doing the best they know) are specially tainted somehow?

Perhaps this would be less of an inflammatory issue if we separate the issue of "was Mohammed in contact with something malevolent pretending to be Gabriel" from the view of Muslims in general. I largely see Islam as a heresy of Judeo-Christian religion rather than something wholly outside. (And the same goes for Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and the like -- I think their doctrines even about the nature of God to be very mistaken but I don't regard them as outsiders to Christianity altogether.)

quote:

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Originally posted by Fr. Gregory:
He even raids the gnostic gospels for the legend of the boy Jesus making clay pigeons, breathing on them, clapping his hands, and hey! they fly away. As for preaching from the manger, well I ask you.

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Just a few pedantic points. The apocryphal infancy gospels are goofy, but not gnostic. Also, there is no manger in the Q'ran: Mary gives birth alone in the wilderness and the infant Jesus speaks up in her defense when she returns to town and is accused of unchastity. Finally, I have no memory of the clay bird story in the Q'ran. Is it in some other Islamic source?

Sorry, I'm an incurable pedant. But I also think that if we're going to criticize Islam, we have to get the details right.

Below, for your education, I have set out Splodge's guide to the pecking order of the great religions/prophets. My schema seeks to "rightly divide the word of truth" and shows which prophets are closer than others to the full measure of the divine truth and the Counsel's of the Almighty. In descending order of spiritual enlightenment:-

Hail the prophet Splodge!

Cautious suggestion: that there is no possibility of being born again by following Koranic teaching.

My son Scrambled Eggs is a big fan of yours!

You have scored a hit with your first post! Ding-ding-ding! Cigar, or coconut?

I suspect that a number of Shipmates may be familiar with the writings of your alter ego...

Big Hug!
Bye-Bye, Po!

quote:

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Originally posted by Astro:
I see Islam as anti-christian in that Christainity is a religion of grace while (in my understanding at least) Islam is a religion of works.

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It worries me that people who don't seem to have much clue about the realities of Islam find it so easy to pass swingeing judgement upon it.

Talk to any half way sensible Muslim about his/her faith for 30 seconds and you'll quickly discover that Islam is far from being a "religion of works". In fact, you might go so far as to say that Islam is as much a "religion of grace" as Christianity.

Here's a starter. A few years ago, I studied a number of faiths, and one of them was Islam. Now, a significant part of the Islamic picture of God is 'The One', which unpacks to the twin concepts that God is indivisible and God thus cannot be incarnate in the world (and thus, critically, Jesus, being human, could not be God). The separateness and holiness of God is overwhelming, so that all sorts of restrictions abound in regard to images, his names, etc., as found in much of Judaism and some Christian churches.

The points made earlier about not Islam not acknowledging Jesus as saviour are, in fact, rather understated - the idea of God becoming man would in fact be blasphemous in Islam, a viewpoint which seems from our viewpoint perhaps close to the heresy of dualism. (Though in their borrowing from Judaic sources there is a certain degree of scope in textual ambiguity to argue that God is described incarnate in the Q'ran, the theological stance is invariable from my experience - though some folks may know otherwise).

quote:

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Originally posted by ChastMastr:
What about Christians who have "charismatic" experiences which are doctrinally dodgy or even heretical? (Not that all or even most are, but certainly they can't all be right!) If someone says they have a vision from God and they're wrong about what they say He is telling them, does it mean their followers (who may be doing the best they know) are specially tainted somehow?

.

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Good point. As a charismatic myself, I am well aware that this is something against which I and my fellow-charismatics need to be strictly on our guard. IMO, ANY revelation purporting to be from God that contradicts or goes beyond the Canon of Scripture has to be suspect in terms of its origins (either from Man or from The Other Place), and that goes for Islam, Mormonism or a neo-gnostic post-canonical teaching like Prosperity Theology.

But to return yet again to the question of the OP, I canot see how Allah and the God of the Bible can be one and the same. At some point, the concept of God as espoused by religions such as Mormonism and Islam becomes so stretched and different from the Christian concept of God that, notwithstanding that the Being that is worshipped is called 'God', He/She/It is not the same. An essential touchstone of the Christian concept of God is the divinity of Jesus and the belief that in Him God has made Himself manifest to us. Since both Islam and Mormonism deny that divinity (Mormons if I recall correctly believe Jeuss to be God's son and Satan's brother but certainly not God Himself), it follows that the god in which they believe is essentially fundamentally different from the God of the Bible

"In the beginning God created Man in His own image and ever since Man has been repaying the favour" (can't remember who said that but very appropriate for this thread methinks)

Yours in Christ

Yours in Christ

Yours In Christ

As Christians, we generally believe that "all that is needful for salvation" is found in the Bible. So any other conception of God that anyone else can have, automatically makes it to be about another God?

I think that most of us here believe that God exists - that God is a real phenomenon.

Let us, by analogy, consider a real phenomenon, an elephant.

A relativist approach to God might be seen in the parable of the blind men who each felt an elephant and decided that it was several quite different things. The man who felt its tail thought that it was like a rope. The man who felt its tusks thought that it was like a spear, and so on.

Now most Christians reject this view. The orthodox, (and as I understand it the Orthodox) position is that whilst God is in essence unknowable he has revealed himself primarily but not exclusively through Christ and the Church. If you like, we are in the position of someone who had watched a documentary about elephants. We may not know the body temperature of an elephant, or the gestation period of the elephants young, or it's exact evolutionary relationship with moetherium but we do know that it is big and grey and intelligent and vegetarian and lives in Africa and India. If you like, the documentary is analogous to God's revelation of himself in Christ.

Now imagine a hack author, a Von Daniken or Graham Hancock, writes a book about elephants suggesting that elephants are intelligent beings from the planet newageguff and were brought here in a spacecraft shortly after the sinking of Atlantis. They argue that the veneration of Ganesh by Hindus is evidence of their superior intelligence.

Now it is quite legitimate for those of us who have watched the documentary to reject this view as nonsense. It may be the case that those who read and believe the book by our hack author end up behaving in ways we believe are incorrect. It might even be that those who take the theories seriously end up behaving in ways we find offensive.

However we are both talking about elephants. We are both talking about the same thing. There are not two kinds of elephants, those described by the reputable documentary and those described by the hack author. There is one kind of elephant which is understood imperfectly by those of us who have watched the documentary and which is understood incorrectly by those who have read the book.

If we were talking about entities that did not exist, Martians for example, it would be legitimate to talk about two different kinds of Martian. For example those that appear in War of the Worlds and those that appear in Quatermass and the Pit. It makes sense for an atheist to suggest that there are two entities, or more properly constructs, which might be termed "The God of the Bible" and "The God of Islam". But if one believes in God you are talking about one entity and two sets of statements about Him, one true and one false, or at least less true.

I've held back here but I have to disagree with the claim that the God of Islam is that different from the Judeo-Christian God. While we do have different theology and even different ethics to an extent (depending on interpretation), we do generally believe:

(1) there is one God
(2) He is utter good and not evil
(3) He is merciful
(4) He is also just (how the last two play out is part of the differences between not only Christianity and Islam, but different Christians and different Muslims -- we should not leave out that both sides have practiced "holy war" for example -- and both sides can point to, say, Israel vs. the Canaanites as precedent, whether this is a right or wrong interpretation)
(5) there is an afterlife to which the righteous (in some sense) will receive joy and the wicked (in some sense) will receive punishment
(6) we both revere the books of Moses and such as sacred Scripture
(7) we both believe that idolatry is forbidden and that pagans and polytheists should be shown that there is one God who made everything
Etc. -- the list does go on. If you took a Muslim and a Christian to any polytheistic culture, they would think we were practically the same religion, comparing us with worshipping multiple gods, gods who are not primarily concerned with right conduct, the approach to the afterlife, etc.

Obviously (from my other posts) I believe Christianity is right when it conflicts with Islam, but this doesn't make Islam something like, say, Hinduism, which does not make the claim that God appeared to this guy named Abram millennia ago and told him to follow Him.

It chimes with my research that at the heart of all religion is an awareness of the same God - it is surely this awareness, this "eternity set in the hearts of men" that drives the religious impulse in the first place. But of course God's nature is perceived and misperceived, understood and distorted in every religion. Thus IMO every religion including Islam has a greater or lesser understanding of God and his ways.
The fact that all religious people are in a sense seeking God, albeit in very crude, half blind, even harmful ways sometimes, is the best explanation account to for the commonalities and "perennial philosophy" shared by all faiths.
So yes, Allah is the same God as the christian God but God's nature as revealed in Christ and recorded in the bible is misunderstood or inadequately realised by muslims
(however this is no racial slur, for Mohammed & muslim probably have no more an inadequate and distorted understanding of christian doctrine than you would also find among members of the average unchurched white "christian" population)