Posted on 08/15/2004 8:41:59 PM PDT by geros
We're arguing over symantics though we all agree on the one thing -- the Moongod the slammies worship is the Devil.
slam holds that IBrahim went to Makkah and lived THERE and that he was about to sacrifice Ishmael NOT Isaac.
elohim is actually a type plural.
and pointing it out upsets the orthodox jew.
but allah is singular.
they are NOT the same. NOT pronounced the same... and don't mean the same.
Aisha was 6 when they married and 9 when her 53 year old husband cosummated the marriage, but so what. Muhammed was a poor camel jockey hired by a wealthy twice widowed caravan owner, 15 years older than him. Love ruled and the 41 year old Khajida married the 26 year old Muhammaed. A few years later he had his first vision and she became his first convert. She was his only wife until she died at the age of 65 and after that he took 11 more wives, including a current wife of his stepson. The 6 year old was wife #3. If the moneybags Khajida had outlived the prophet, it's very doubtful that polygamy would have become a popular Muslim tradition.
bump!
I'll take the internal logic of my position over your's anyday.
Many Christians have this peculiar blind spot with regard to Judaism. Despite the fact that Jesus said, to a Jewish audience, that no one could come to the Father except through him, somehow many modern Christians make an exception to this rule for Jews. They don't need to have faith in Christ to be saved, but Muslims and people of all other religions must become Christians.
I understand where this belief comes from, an uncritical admiration for Jews as the (ex)-Chosen People and as Christ's relatives. This has gotten all tangled up with Israel's position as our allies against Islamism and with sympathy for the survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. I even sympathize with these attitudes. But they are very hard to square with what Jesus and the other writers of the New Testament had to say.
I was not asking you about whether Jewish society is superior to Muslim society. I agree that it is.
You specifically stated that Muslims cannot be worshipping the same God as Christians because Muslims don't believe in Christ as Deity or in the Trinity. Neither do Jews. But you dodged my question about whether Jews worship the same God we do.
You can't have it both ways. You either have to exclude both Muslims and Jews under these criteria, or you have to come up with some rationale for including Jews but excluding Muslims.
(Other than the fact that you like Judaism and dislike Islam.)
I never stated that they were the same word. They have the same root, since both Hebrew and Arabic are descended from the common ancestral Semitic language. In the romance languages, there are very similar words in Spanish and French that are both descended from Latin.
The Hebrew Bible uses the terms el and elohim (among others) to refer to Almighty God. Not sure about elohim, but the word el is also freely used to refer to pagan deities, just as we use the common noun "god" today. In pre-Islamic times, allah was used similarly. With the rise of Islam, the term Allah became limited to the God of Abraham, just as the capitalized term God was for Christians.
Interestingly enough, far and away the most common term for "God" in the OT is YHWH, transliterated into English as Yahweh or Jehovah. This is a name or proper noun never used to refer to any other god, unlike the common noun el or god.
since for obscure reasons most modern Christians have dropped using this name, we're stuck with the confusion created by using a common noun as a Name.
You might be intersted in this link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allah
I am fully aquainted with the theology, evolution and etymology of the words in the original OT texts...
not the same.
Bump!
The Arabic term for "God"
The Arabic word for God is "illah". "Allah" is infact a conjunction of two words (i.e. Al-Ilah):
"Al" which means "The"
"Illah" which means "God"
The reasons for using the term "Allah" in favour of "God" are threefold:
"Allah" has no gender. While, God can be male/female i.e. God/Goddess
"Allah" is ONE and literally means THE GOD, While, God may be singular and plural
i.e. God/Gods and Goddess/Goddesses
"Allah" is the personal name of God as used in the Holy Qur'an and Elohim is used in Hebrew referring Allah, The ending letters 'im' is a plural of respect, majesty and grandeur, without the ending 'im', it becomes
Eloh (Ilah in Arabic).
(see http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/8264/Allah.htm)
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