The foundation of your belief in Jesus and the Bible rests on only the Bible and the tradition. How solid a foundation is that? Sure, there are kernels of historic truth in the text, but that doesn’t make all of the text historic, and in this I think you agree with me. In between these kernels writers can and do make things up. How much room was there for invention, Chinese whispers and exaggeration? I would say rather a lot.
As a poor analogy, think of the poles marking a ski piste. They fixate the course, but in between them every skier is free to do what they want. The general trend will always be downhill, but the rest it is up to them.
To you, Jesus is not just anybody else, but to support this position you have to go on faith, beyond the evidence. It is telling that every single religion finds itself in a similar position. Is there a single religion that does not extrapolate beyond the historical data?
There is a kernel of historic truth in the Iliad, or so it seems. Is that a valid reason to believe in the Greek Gods who figure so prominently in the text? Not many people would say that these days. The belief in the Greek Gods has been killed off by Christianity, and not by a process of historical investigation and discovery. Whereas you will see the hand of God in that, I see emotion and historical contingency.
The Muslims who conquered large parts of the Near East and Europe were inspired by their belief, and when contemplating their achievements they would say ‘Allah is great and Mohamed is his prophet’. They used their own achievements as proof for the existence of Allah and the special place of Mohamed. If you were to argue against that, what would you say?
In response to your question about Islam, I would say, firstly, that Allah and Yahweh are the same God. Given that I already accept the existence of the latter, I can hardly deny the existence of the former.
Re Mohamed, I can only say that I find his character repellent. While it is difficult to be absolutely certain of the historical facts relating to his life, it appears likely that he consummated his marriage with Aisha when she was nine or ten, and it is generally accepted that he bought, sold, captured and owned slaves, as well as allowing men to have sexual intercourse with their female slaves outside of marriage. These facts alone are sufficient to bar him from serious consideration, in my book. It is possible, of course, that he never actually said or did these things, but I’d need to see some strong evidence before changing my mind, as the incidents are fairly well-attested.
How can they be the same God if one is a Trinity and the other one is not? That is stretching the meaning of ‘same’ beyond the breaking point.
So do I, but that is a subjective judgment that 2 billion Muslims disagree with. What it boils down to is that you believe in Christianity at least partly because you like the character of Jesus. However, things don’t become true just because we like them. Others like the characters of the Greek gods. They were worshipped for centuries in large areas of Europe and the ME. Great works were accomplished in their names, many remnants of which still exist for us to admire. Does that make them true? The same for Mohamed and Allah.
There are many different Gods and they can’t all be true. I have yet to see a method to distinguish between true and false ones that is not entirely subjective. Would you agree?
They might refer to the same god, if you accept that one or both views is very inaccurate. They cannot be the same god, because they are too different.
Jacob, Abraham and other OT patriarchs behaved similarly. Do you also bar them from serious consideration? If not, why not?
Indeed! And many horrid things, including genocides, flow directly from the instructions of the OT god. When I raise these issues I am generally met with the answer that the gods are the source of all morality, and therefore a mortal may not question the morality of anything of which a god, in its divine caprice, may approve. It therefore seems very strange to me to have the purported immorality of Mohammed raised as an objection to his claimed standing with the divine. If a god may, consistent with morality, order the extermination of thousands of children, surely he may approve the marriage (and consummation thereof) at a tender age of one of them.
I also disapprove of such things, of course. But my morality doesn’t depend upon the mere subjective caprice of any of the gods; and no system which does depend upon such things can legitimately be called “morality” at all.
I have to say, when I was raised as Muslim I never heard a word about these supposed 72 virgins. I’m not saying it is part of Islamic teaching somehow. But I’m pretty sure it is not a major aspect of the faith.
I know its not a core belief of Islam and I intended it not be taken seriously, hence, the wink emoji. There are other important and better distinctions between Islamic and Christian concepts of God.
I think that the Christian and Islamic God are the ‘same’ in that they are both the “God of Abraham”, but different in that the Christian and Islamic traditions interpret him quite differently.
This is not dissimilar to Macbeth – you have the Macbeth of Shakespeare who is a very different character from, say, the Macbeth of Nigel Tranter’s historical novel Macbeth the King (which I can remember reading as a kid), in spite of them both being based upon the same historical figure.
What you interpret as “same roots” is what I interpret as being the ‘same’ God. What you interpret as not “being the same themselves” is what I interpret as being “interpret[ed] quite differently”. I would not call them “cousins” I would call them “Donald Trump” as described by a MAGA/QAnon supporter, versus as described by the rest of the world – same person, very different description.
Religious traditions evolve, therefore so do the deities they have at their center, even when they are, at root, the same deity. Compare the Jewish pacifist & anti-wealth Jesus of the Gospels with some modern Christians’ pale-skinned, blonde-haired, ‘Muscular Christianity’/‘Prosperity Gospel’-compatible Jesus.
I think when the Abrahamic religions speak of their god, they are describing the same person. They just have different understandings of him. It’s similar to how, in my field, different schools of thoughts have differing ideas on what Freud believed or meant in his writings, even though it is the same work of the same person they are interpreting.
What does it mean to say that two fictional characters are the same person? I suppose it means that they are intended to be understood as the same person. The MacBeth analogy fails because the various characters were based on a real king of Scotland. But the Christian and Muslim gods are based on YHWH, who is more like Sherlock Holmes than MacBeth.
Now of course Mohammed said they were the same person, and he ought to know. Jesus is considered a prophet in Islam, though not God himself, reinforcing Mohammed’s understanding. The Christian opinion, if there can be said to be only one, is less clear.
Yes. Or think of the many interpretations of Batman, including the campy 60’s TV series starring Adam West and the current film starring Robert Pattinson.
And there’ve been film interpretations where Sherlock Holmes is a mere frontman for the real genius. So I don’t think the fictional versus historical is a real problem. Actually basing the different interpretations on the same historical figure makes it slightly harder to reinterpret the character differently – as you are constrained by certain immutable historical facts.
Not a problem with MacBeth, though, as there are almost no historical facts there, and many of the supposed facts are mutually contradictory. YHWH, on the other hand, isn’t a historical character. And though Sherlock Holmes has been reinterpreted in many ways, he’s never been reinterpreted as three people, so far as I know.
No, but Robin of Sherwood interpreted Robin Hood as being two people, one Anglo-Saxon (played by Michael Praed) and one Norman (played by Jason Connery) – so I don’t really think that this is a crucial difference.
For them to be the same deity they first have to exist. And if they exist in the way their followers claim, they can’t be same.
What they actually are is different concepts of something that orginally might have been one deity but over time evolved into quite distinctive characters. Saying they are the same is like saying that my quite different cousins are actually the same as my uncle.
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