Monothiesm And The 3 Abrahamic Faiths

Yea but I can't drink that many white Russians they need to ease up the requirements !

I actually highly recommend the whole series of CrashCourse.

I'm not ashamed of my European culture or heritage or national identity or faith like most of you here who subcribe to feeling ashamed about who you are or your ancestors or beliefs.

I suggess a crash course in standing up for yourself and value who you are.

lets ty to stay on topic and ask instead of assuming.
Also, lets not take up every opportunity to speak in a condescending manner towards each other. If someone posts something that is wrong, lets try not to get offended and offer a well written, unemotional response. It would be nice if we tried to learn from one another instead of winning an argument and scoring points.

Who are you even talking about?

Definition of Apologist


By definition and your statement, you are. I also would advise you read up, or watch up on the linked video about the crusades. It's okay to admit that people who shared your faith to have done wrong. It's best to know this and learn from it rather than attempt to justify it.

So moving along now - maybe someone of the Judiac branch of the Abrhamic religions can answer this:
Is there an Anti-christ figure mentioned in the old testemant?

In common sunni Islam, followers believe in the Dajal which is the Anti-Christ. A few years ago I started to doubt this common belief and started doing some reading into it. I personally now believe this was a concept that infiltrated Islam from Christianity. The Anti-Christ is mentioned nowhere in the Quran. Furthermore the tradition of soothsaying and predicting future events is pretty anti-Islamic as a concept. Additionally there are several verses from the Quran that refute that anyone one, including the Prophet Mohamed, would know anything about the date of Judgment day. An important fact since the Anti-christ is considered to be by both Christians and Muslims to be a major sign of the coming of judgment day.

I'm wondering if Judiasm has any such mention of an Anti-Christ. Should there be mention of it, it would give me a pause to rethink my stance on it (I don't believe in Anti-Christ, or the return of Jesus, or the Mahdi).

As I understand such things, the Bible -- OT or NT -- does not refer to the antichrist as a specific being, but as a concept. The "spirit of the antichrist" is basically anyone who denies Jesus' suggested identity/status.

As for the OT:


Yes it's from Cracked. Deal with it, they're hardly worse than any "hard" news site these days.

Yeah definetly now think Anti-Christ is an alien concept to Islam.
We also have "the-beast" in these same set of sayings, that I think were forgeries. Now if I could only convince the common Muslim what a waste of time it is to dwell on Antichrist, Mahdi, Jesus's return.

By the way, these same forgeries and sayings are the primary amunition that ISIS uses to recruit people.

See ISIS don't/can't quote the Quran to arabic speaking muslims because most of us can read it, and see things in context.

They do however quote these "week" sayings of the Prophet (I don't believe they are his sayings, and even mainstream Islam says they aren't entirely correct).

These group of week Hadiths (saying of the prophets) have been contested more and more by bigger and bigger figures in Islam.

They basically warn of the signs of the end times:
- Large scale battles with the Romans (western world)
- Emergence of the Antichrist who will lead the christians
- The Mahdi will re-instate proper Islam and remove wickedness from the land of arabia and levant.
- Jesus will return to earth to help the Mahdi complete his mission.
- The beast will emerge and tatoo believer or infidel on the forehead of every human.

They've been intertwined with some legitimate signs that are mentioned in the quran.

Anyways, my problems with these signs-hadiths are they very much in contention with some fundemental beliefs of Islam. Such as accountability for ones ownself. Many Muslims don't practice their faith because they think we're in a period of tribulations and the Mahdi is going to come and fix all the world's problems. So they're all pacifists and like "w/e dude, Mahdi will come then I'll get off my *** and follow him to paradise".

Also this belief that the Anti-Christ is coming and will be greeted by Jews as their first Messiah, and by Christians as Jesus returned, puts us all in a state of paranoia from each other. If these hadiths do anything at all it is establish doubt and mistrust amongst the people of the book.
That is entirely anti-Islamic, entirely anti-abrahamic, which is why I don't believe in them.

Too late she is already here:

Christians: sex in missionary position for the sole purpose of procreation
Muslims: sex in any position for please and/or procreation but not in the pooper, please

If I wasn't so white I'd have signed up at the local Mosque already.

Late but pretty sure you can find that at sharjah's Library translated

I need to visit that library. Thanks for the info. Is it just called "Maktebet Al sharjah"/"Sharjah Library" ?

ya

"Your lord and savior, Prof. Saevel has spoken the truth. Don't you dare disagree with him, for then you'll forever be stuck in your Middle Eastern problems".

It's disappointing how it didn't take long to reach that point. I thought we were here to discuss our pov's, providing rational arguments for them, that if you don't agree with, at least you'd put some effort into trying to understand them, and maybe agree to disagree.


That's intellectual laziness on your part.

This the 100th time I've seen the "No true Scotsman" thrown around thoughtlessly like that. I'm going to address this now, so that (hopefully) this doesn't happen again.

The way you used the "No true Scotsman" assumes there's no way to scrutinize claims and weigh them against one another based on the weight of their evidence. Put in another way, the way you understand this fallacy and apply it here can be phrased this way:

"If there are different claims, then they should all be given the same weight/credibility, regardless of their supporting argument/evidence"
Or:
"If there are different claims, then truth shouldn't be pursued because it's not possible for it anymore to be reached".

The above, albeit more convenient (and saves you the effort of trying to truly (pun intended...kek) understand the subject, so that you can keep living the delusion of having mastered every single subject in existence), is academic and intellectual laziness. You shouldn't fall back to it every time somebody says, for example, ISIS practices aren't Islamic. You should instead *** the aforementioned claim based on its own supporting argument. I know calling out people on logical fallacies earns you fancy points in debates (especially internet ones!), but you should at least make sure you understand them well and apply them correctly, else it backfires on you.


I'll write this in a "for dummies" format, using Islam as the subject:

What is Islam?
To Muslims: what Allah revealed to prophet Muhammad.
To non-Muslims: the religion/doctrine Muhammad founded.

Both mandate that whatever is claimed to be 'Islamic" be traced to prophet Muhammad.

Now imagine if I came up with my own version of Islam that violates core beliefs of the religion. Like adding idol worship
(violates clear Quranic verses), 10 daily prayers instead of 5, or mandating Jeet Kune Do practice. This, uh, happened quite a few times in history. Now, let's assume I gained a few followers. In 100 years, you might see that my dumb brand has been added to encyclopedias and such as a sect or subsect of Islam! and that's understandable in the context of categorization. After all, "original" Islam was what inspired me to come up with it. But that doesn't make it a candidate for being a valid interpretation of Islam for reasons you should know by now.

My Two cents.

When a religious person starts discussing the pursuit for "truth" in regards to which of their denominations is more correct it becomes very difficult to reconcile.

Religion is subjective.

There is no absolute truth because this cannot be tested and validated. It is about belief.

Belief systems always have some personal element involved that resonates with that individual, that may have no bearing on another's persons belief within the same system, even at a local level.

Every person interpretates religion on an individual level, and what they choose to call themselves, I have to accept that decision.

If a crazy person blows up a building in Oklahoma and claims in was done partially in line with his Christian values, I'm going to accept that he self-identifies with Christianity....even when other Christian groups disagree.

If Mormons say they are Christians, I'm going to accept that they self-identify with Christianity ....even when other Christian groups disagree.

The same goes with Islam.

To me, this doesn'the mean one religion is better than the other. It means many different people read the same material and have vastly different perspectives.

Denounce the people who kill in the name of your religion. Denounce what you see as not the correct way to practice your religion, but don't expect people to not refer to these people as how they have labeled themselves.

Well-said, Kara. That basically sums up why I'm annoyed with the way modern Christianity has hijacked the term "Christian". The word signifies a follower of Christ. That's it. Instead, now we have a number of arbitrary requirements dictating who can use the term.

Don't accept the Nicene Creed? NON-CHRISTIAN
Haven't been baptized into my sect? NON-CHRISTIAN
We don't like what you're teaching? NON-CHRISTIAN

In one of the history museums here we had an exhibit on death rituals, many that were Christian related but modified by location.

Something that I hear quite often is that there are as many interpretations of a religion as their are practitioners. If you get any 2 people of the same religion, even of the same sect or even of the same place of worship, they will disagree about a number of things. As a result, there also as many versions of "god" as there are worshipers of god.

This is how we get things like this:

Oh and sorry about that last image. That wasn't as large as I thought it was and you can't zoom in on the individual branches. Here's the better one:
HQ image

Sorry for the late reply, Kara.

I appreciate your input. Apparently our disagreement gets as deep as the basic premises of your reply go, and I do understand where you're coming from. Here are my thoughts about them:
The "there is no absolute truth" statement becomes self-contradictory if you apply its own logic to it.

Also this leads to an epistemological discussion on ways to establish knowledge and "truth".

But the thing is, my post wasn't about which religion or sect is correct in its claim for truth, it was about why we don't readily accept ascribing any sect or practice to Islam at face value. It's an academic subject, it uses methodology that can give weight or take away from such claims.

If a crow claimed to be a pigeon, would you accept it as one?
Perhaps if you were an eagle, you wouldn't care. But I'm sure both crows and pigeons will have something to disagree about there.

Likewise, that's understandable if you're not Christian yourself. If you cared about Christ or Christianity, the approach that makes more sense to me would be to define what "Christian" means (let's say 'follower of Christ') and apply that standard to the person in question, regardless of their claims.

I think it's pretty insulting to Christ (or any figure) if we established that he preached something and then we started referring to people who live in the exact opposite way of what he taught as his "followers", regardless of what they claim.


Differences in interpretation exist for about everything. That doesn't mean we accept all interpretations. There are accepted levels of differences, that's why the vast realms of jurisprudence and kalam exist. And then, there's the absurd version of "my own interpretation of Islam" that I came up with in my previous post that no sane person would accept.

I'm talking differences that would change core beliefs, something like differences over the nature of prophet Muhammad, whether he actually existed or not, potential altered or missing chapters of the Quran, and so on. Any such movement that have risen at one point or the other in history was addressed and challenged intellectually by Muslim scholars, so these groups, if they every gained a following, remained a minority.

We Muslims also argue that Islam is a special case among all other religions regarding the amount of care and effort that was spent by its followers to ensure we have the very same book that was revealed 14 centuries ago. This doesn't mean that whatever written in it is truth, it just means that if I wanted to study Islam, I could safely assume with a decent degree of certainty that this book is truly the book Muhammad came with, which is what Islam revolves around. The other fundamental source of Islamic teachings, the prophetic tradition or Sunnah has also seen (and still sees) great care. The prophet's life is probably the most detailed and studied biography to ever have existed.

This leads us to Ravael's comment, which demonstrates the problem with Christianity today: people want to follow Christ but don't even know how, because, right off the bat, you'll be faced with problems that undermine the veracity of the holy book itself, which is common knowledge nowadays.

It depends on what religion means to people.

"People rarely mean the same thing when they say "religion", nor do they realize that they don't mean the same thing.

For early Jews and Muslims, religion was law. For early Jews it was also tribal; for early Muslims it was universal. For the Romans religion was social events and festivals (law was separate ). For Jews today religion became ethnocultural, without the law --and for some, a nation. Same for Syriacs, Copts, and Maronites. For Orthodox and Catholic Christians religion is aesthetics, pomp and rituals. For Protestants religion is belief with no aesthetics, pomp or law. For Buddists/Shintoists/Hindus religion is philosophy. So when Hindu talk about the Hindu "religion" they don't mean the same thing to a Pakistani as it would to a Hindu, and certainly something different for a Persian.

People keep talking past each other. When the nation-state idea came about, things got more complicated. When an Arab now says "Jew" he largely means belief; a converted Jew is no longer a Jew. But for a Jew it means a nation.

In Serbia/Croatia, or Lebanon, religion means something at times of peace, and something quite different at times of war." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

I want to address the topic of Trinity as contained at the start of the thread. I do think its a difficult concept, and agree its not explicitly in the bible (new or old testament) There are certainly sections which seem to imply it, even being part of the creeds I'm not sure I would explicitly look upon one who disagrees with the notion as non-Christian.

The best analogy I can think of to the Trinity is an atom. In ancient philosophy atom was thought to be the smallest thing that cold exist, and essentially meant "indivisible". Centuries later we know atoms are mode of three parts (protons, neutrons and electrons) (and those of smaller particles but I digress). Anyways an atom is still one thing, yet its composed of 3 almost inseparable (unified) components. This is how I would view the trinity.

The analogy can be carried further in a couple ways, but I do not wish to go all Faraday on you. I also believe God to be eternal, which is to say he exists outside of time. Which honestly probably makes the trinity an easier concept by comparison.

Anyways food for thought I have a couple other thoughts regarding some posts in this thread but for another time.

The suspense will kill us.

What about Assassin Creed I heard they improved it !

Christians are good people don't let the "Ned Flanders" type scare you away. Most of us aren't more crazy than your average homeless person living on the streets !

So one part is not the same thing as one. One part, is one of many. One is one.

First there was Atom then Eve !

One part I don't get about the Nicene Creed is why modern Christian churches are so stuck on the infallibility of it, when it was basically just an incoherent compromise between a bunch of dudes in 325 AD that were having a hard time nailing down some key tenets. I'm not trying to bash people that believe in that particular interpretation of the Godhead, but I can't help but think that early Christian scholars were trying way too hard to force monotheism when facing something that was clearly more nuanced. The way I see it, they had the choice to either try and shake the stigma that polytheism was a pagan-only thing, or hammer a square peg in a round hole and call it a day.

The opposite - they had a hard time selling monotheism to what was a pantheon worshiping culture. The compromise was to invent their own, smaller Pantheon.

Pagans I thought the Hells Angels took care of them...