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Muhammed produced no miracles, but there are the claims of knowledge a seventh century man who was semiliterate couldn't have gotten. If true (I'm certainly not convinced) it would indicate "Gabriel" was a spirit entity as Muhammed believed. Since the Koran directly contradicts the gospels on important issues, saying Jesus was not the Son of God and was not crucified, it could very well be that it was inspired by a malign spirit entity, one working against God - a demon.

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Hmmm, Yaffle, lots of food for thought in your post. Let me begin with the limitations of Occam's Razor - surely you know the Razor is wielded by modern skeptics to deny that there is sufficient evidence to believe in God? Yet I see by your profile that you apparently do believe in Him, unless you are attending church from a love of pews and stained glass windows.

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As I understand it, a modern sceptic would suggest that Occam's Razor means that there is no need to postulate the existence of God as absolutely everything can be explained in terms of natural forces. I would argue that natural forces can't answer the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" So I don't think that Occam's Razor is a valid argument against the existence of God - parsimony needs to be balanced against inteligibility, the most parsimonious explanation of reality is solipsism. But I think that it's a valid line of enquiry. You can't avoid awkward questions just because the conclusion might be unpleasant.

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If we believe in the testimony of the gospels, and that at least the words of Jesus are from God (if not every opinion of NT writers), then there is no reason to disbelieve Christ's teachings about demons - he had knowledge of a realm we don't have enough data to speculate about.

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Alternatively, the doctrine of the Incarnation suggests that Christ assumed humanity with all its limitations. Christ wasn't omniscient, when someone touched him in the crowd he asked "who touched me". We know that Jesus was wrong on some points - he believed that Moses wrote the Pentateuch and probably believed in a triple decker cosmology. So who's to say that he wasn't wrong about demons. Jesus was without sin - not infallible.

I don't believe in the existence of demons and of course I could be wrong but it is a massive leap, unsupported by logic to suggest that because Christ believed in the existence of demons, it is legitimate to argue that they dictated the Qu'ran to Mohammed.

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Yaffle, you might wish to read through the thread - it is long but interesting. I'm not a conservative evangelical, that's Ender's Shadow. I'm an eclectic unorthodox sort of Christian, who believes Hindus and Buddhists have had their share of God's light and revelations.

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If it were a demon, its plan seems to have backfired, having resulted in a huge proportion of the worlds population seeking after God.

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So perhaps the demonic plan worked after all.

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Alternatively, the doctrine of the Incarnation suggests that Christ assumed humanity with all its limitations. Christ wasn't omniscient, when someone touched him in the crowd he asked "who touched me". We know that Jesus was wrong on some points - he believed that Moses wrote the Pentateuch and probably believed in a triple decker cosmology. So who's to say that he wasn't wrong about demons. Jesus was without sin - not infallible.

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I don't believe in the existence of demons and of course I could be wrong but it is a massive leap, unsupported by logic to suggest that because Christ believed in the existence of demons, it is legitimate to argue that they dictated the Qu'ran to Mohammed.

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But to suggest that Hindus and Buddhists have recieved revelations from God whilst Muslims recieved theirs from the devil strikes me as being little more than vulgar Islamophobia. Mystics in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions have had visions of deities. What grounds do you have for suggesting that these were genuine angels or deities if the Angel Gabriel was the Prince of Lies in disguise. Or do you just believe that all Muslims are terrorists and therefore Satanic?

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I've given the reasons why I believe demonic possession was a strong possibility

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You've failed completely to demonstrate that this is a strong possibility. A possibility maybe - anything is possible - but nothing you've said demostrates this is a likely one. Neither have you demonstrated an reason why demonic inspiration is any more likely an explaination for Islam than any other non-Christian religion.

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they are simply deluded about some ways to worship God

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Aren't we all?

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I understand that most of you have an ideology that blocks the facts in this matter from reaching your minds

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Hermit has been criticised for the supposed weakness of his/her argument. But I find the reasoning that would suggest that Islam arose from a bona fide revelation from God given to Muhammed and that, as a consequence, Islam is on a par with Christianity and we are worshipping the same God, pretty weak personally. By that argument, any old Tom, Dick or Harry (and yes its usually us men who are to blame here) can claim to have received divine revelation, write his own holy book, and start his own religion - and that's to be regarded as equivalent to Christianity?? I don't think so. By that reasoning, the Mormons are also equivalent, even though their concepts of Jesus and of God are profoundly different to those of the Bible.

Arguments for and against Islam can both be criticised, but I really don't think we are going to convince each other by arguing; I would hazard an educated guess that most if not all of the posters on this thread have strong, conscience-based ideological/ theological views on the subject, and I strongly suspect that none of us are going to be particularly moved by contrary arguments.

At the risk of over-generalising, I think we've heard something of the catholic, evangelical (conservative?)and liberal viewpoints on this thread but I don't recall seeing anything from the Orthodox perspective (correct me if I'm wrong) - I'd be really interested in what they have to say on the subject.

Cheers

Matt

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Originally posted by Sean:
There's a world of difference between saying Islam is equally valid to Christianity, and saying it's inspired by Satan.

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Hermit has been criticised for the supposed weakness of his/her argument. But I find the reasoning that would suggest that Islam arose from a bona fide revelation from God given to Muhammed and that, as a consequence, Islam is on a par with Christianity and we are worshipping the same God, pretty weak personally. By that argument, any old Tom, Dick or Harry (and yes its usually us men who are to blame here) can claim to have received divine revelation, write his own holy book, and start his own religion - and that's to be regarded as equivalent to Christianity?? I don't think so. By that reasoning, the Mormons are also equivalent, even though their concepts of Jesus and of God are profoundly different to those of the Bible.

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I don't think that one has to subscribe to the argument put forward above to disagree with Hermit. Essentially there are three issues at stake.

1/ Do Muslims and Christians both worship the God of Abraham?

Both Muslims and Christians say yes therefore it is reasonable to say that they do.

2/ Are Islam and Christianity equally true?

As the two religions both say different things about God and about matters of historical fact it follows that they cannot both be equally true. It could be argued that the teaching of Christ is morally superior to the teaching of Mohammed. But considering Christianity and Islam as historic religions both have a mixed record.

3/ Was Mohammed inspired by the Devil?

I think Mohammed did encounter a supernatural being, and it wasn’t his friends winding him up, or a result of the ‘mushrooms’ he’d eaten/not eaten. I think it did provide him with a message that, whilst containing some ‘good’ stuff, was contradictory to some ‘essential’ tenets of the Christian faith. So I don’t reckon the being in question was carrying out God’s instructions.

I look at what Satan, from his point of view, would do in response to Christ/Christianity. First, get rid of Jesus Himself – hence the Cross. That backfires a bit: ‘sin’ is dealt with, Satan is defeated, Hell is Harrowed, Christ is restored to life. Then, try and destroy/persecute the followers, with Pharisees and Sadducees, Roman rulers (esp. Nero ) all doing their ‘bit’. Oh dear, failure there too, the thing spreads too far, and the persecution seems to bring out the best qualities (i.e. least desirable from Satan’s point of view) in the Christians.

So try and corrupt the message: a few heresies will do nicely. But they all sit down at (e.g.) Nicaea and work out what they ought exactly to believe, and write it down so as future generations can refer to it.

So come up with a false religion. Satan knows that the Almighty particularly detested it when Israel prostituted itself by worshipping Baal, setting up Asherah poles, etc. But the error in such ‘old’ religions will quickly become apparent compared to the ‘light’ that Christianity gives. This time he needs a really effective false religion, one that might last for centuries. It mustn’t be ‘obviously’ false, or that will be seem through by wise humans, so very reluctantly, Satan realises it’ll have to be built on certain ‘truths’, like there is One God, and He speaks through prophets, and that He makes laws which should be obeyed, which the Jewish scriptures have a lot to say about. But as a diabolical masterstroke, when he (Satan or one of his demons)) communicates this religion, the man spoken to will be told he is the Last Prophet. So anyone who communicates something from God after the Prophet’s death that contradicts or ‘improves upon’ what he has said will not be considered to have the genuine gift of prophecy.

Where to spread this religion? Ah yes, the very part of the world that Early Christianity first ‘took hold of’. How to spread it? Warfare of course, and make holy war a fairly central part of the message. And, knowing the capacity of human beings to sin and hate, and not forgive, sow misleading ideas amongst the remaining Christian lands that their taking up the sword, rather than the Gospel, will be the best response for ‘liberating’ the lands where the false religion has spread. And with luck, the fighting can be kept going for ages, being re-ignited periodically.

I cannot prove any of the above, not being privy to the counsels of the Enemy. I think it is exactly the sort of strategy he would employ, though. The fact that NOTHING else rival to Christianity has endured so long or resulted in so much resistance to the Gospel speaks volumes to me of its likely inspiration.

Sean's reply was:

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Perhaps the reason Islam is so successful is that (after Christianity & possibly Judaism) it is closest to the truth.

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Precisely. This is confirmation of what Alaric said:

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it’ll have to be built on certain ‘truths’, like there is One God, and He speaks through prophets, and that He makes laws which should be obeyed, which the Jewish scriptures have a lot to say about

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When there is truth, all else is false. If Christianity is true (which I believe it is), then Islam (taken as a whole being different from Christianity) - which may or may not be close to truth, is false.

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Sean's reply was:

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Perhaps the reason Islam is so successful is that (after Christianity & possibly Judaism) it is closest to the truth.
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Precisely.

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1. Christians worship God as revealed in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ; since Islam states that Jesus is not God and thus denies this central tenet of Christianity, it follows that the God of Islam and the God of Christianity cannot be one and the same - no Jesus, no God

2. I think we are agreed that the two religions are not equivalent

3. Possibly - the eloquent Goth has put this much better than me. It follows from point 1 above that Islam cannot be from God - since it at best detracts from and at worse denies His self-revelation in Jesus Christ - so that leaves two possibilities - either it is entirely a human creation, or from the chap with horns; the same would apply IMO to any other 'revelation' such as Mormonism et al

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Originally posted by Sean:
On that basis, if my version of Christianity is true, then yours is false and worthless (or vice-versa).

In reality, none of us has the whole truth, so we must all be wasting our time.

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1. Christians worship a God who revealed himself through the incarnation. However Christ is not the totality of God, so, while Muslims disgree with us about a pretty important aspect of God, that does not make Him a different God.

2. Agreed.

3. you haven't covered all the possibilites here. Another is that the revelation was from God but Mohammed misheard/misinterpretted some of that message.

Sorry, but I want something a bit stronger than speculation before I willing accept this slur against the religion of so many people. Like one iota of evidence.#

Tim:
1. Not everyone here who regards themself as a Christian takes the Nicene creed at face value.

2. Sharkshooter said there was one truth, and if you are not spot on you may as well be a mile off (not his words). The creeds do not come close to defining one truth.

Following the numbering-

1. I beg to differ. "In Him is the fullness of the Godhead."

3. 'Evidence' - if it is along the lines of "by a tree will you know its fruits", then Christianity measures up badly, as do other religions; religious hatred and killings are not the monopoly of monotheists either (look at what's happened in India over the last week). I'm simply saying that what I said in 3 follows from what I said in 1. I accept however the possibility that both Muhammed, Arius and Joseph Smith may have heard from God but totally misinterpreted it/ the message being corrupted through the human medium, but I find this less likely as in each case the end result was so far removed from the original truth.

Matt

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1. I beg to differ. "In Him is the fullness of the Godhead."

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But there are also God the Father & God the Holy Spirit. Thats the paradox of the Trinity.

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3. 'Evidence' - if it is along the lines of "by a tree will you know its fruits", then Christianity measures up badly, as do other religions; religious hatred and killings are not the monopoly of monotheists either (look at what's happened in India over the last week). I'm simply saying that what I said in 3 follows from what I said in 1. I accept however the possibility that both Muhammed, Arius and Joseph Smith may have heard from God but totally misinterpreted it/ the message being corrupted through the human medium, but I find this less likely as in each case the end result was so far removed from the original truth.

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So its still down to an unsupported hypothosis.

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Sean, you refer to Islam being the "religion of so many people" - are you suggesting/ implying that if enough people believe something, it becomes true/ truth, no matter how wrong that belief might be?

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tomb
hellhost

Save me the reading please! Has anyone mentioned that St. John of Damascus who worked for the Caliph as a civil servant and who retired to the desert thought of Islam (Ishmaelites) as a Judaeo-Christian heresy?

(How annoying to write a final, lengthy reply and have it destroyed when the thread was moved.)

The Bible has an interesting prophecy concerning the Arabs, who are descended from Ishmael the bastard son of Abraham, according to the Koran.
Genesis 7 The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert; it was the spring that is beside the road to Shur. 8 And he said, "Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?"
"I'm running away from my mistress Sarai," she answered.
9 Then the angel of the Lord told her, "Go back to your mistress and submit to her." 10 The angel added, "I will so increase your descendants that they will be too numerous to count."
11 The angel of the Lord also said to her:

"You are now with child
and you will have a son.
You shall name him Ishmael,
for the Lord has heard of your misery.
12 He will be a wild donkey of a man;
his hand will be against everyone
and everyone's hand against him,
and he will live in hostility
toward all his brothers."
____________________
Turning now to 1 John we find: 22Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a man is the antichrist--he denies the Father and the Son. 23No one who denies the Son has the Father; whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also.

But look at what the Koran says about that:
YUSUFALI: They do blaspheme who say: "Allah is Christ the son of Mary." But said Christ: "O Children of Israel! worship Allah, my Lord and your Lord." Whoever joins other gods with Allah,- Allah will forbid him the garden, and the Fire will be his abode. There will for the wrong-doers be no one to help.

005.073
YUSUFALI: They do blaspheme who say: Allah is one of three in a Trinity: for there is no god except One Allah. If they desist not from their word (of blasphemy), verily a grievous penalty will befall the blasphemers among them.

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3/ Was Mohammed inspired by the Devil?
No serious evidence to support this contention has been offered.

This is still pure speculation without an ounce of even circumstantial evidence.

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I'll recap my arguments:

1. Muhammed claimed to be visited by a spirit entity calling itself Gabriel, who delivered the Koran to him in stages,

2. He wasn't sure if it was an angel or an evil spirit,

3. The message delivered directly contradicts the Bible on key issues, so both scriptures cannot be from God,

4. The message was coherent and each session lasted for hours, uncharacteristic of hallucinations,

5. The message possibly contained information that the illiterate or semiliterate Muhammed could not have known, also uncharacteristic of hallucinations,

6. Jesus taught that demons exist and can influence or even possess people,

7. If you disbelieve Jesus and need more evidence that demons exist, simply go into any large library and look up "exorcism" - there are thousands of written testimonies about them.

All this leads me to believe that there is a strong possibility that Muhammed was inspired by a spirit entity working against God - a demon.

According to Orthodox teaching, yes, demons exist and they are fallen angels or rebellious spirits, all immaterial.

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.)

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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!

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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).

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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.