Posted on 03/25/2007 7:31:29 PM PDT by Urbane_Guerilla
I say this with total respect for Christians, Jews, and anyone else who does not worship mohammed, as the slaves of islam do:
The worshippers of mohammed, mohammedans, pretend that Judeo-Christian history is their own. It is a "history" found in mohammed-worship theology (the silly-goofy koran is the primary source) only because not-so-smart mohammed was a sociopath who incorporated elements of other religions while he was devising his own religion designed to associate mohammed with allah.
The irony of islam is that, for rational folks, it is a direct challenge to any basis of faith. The worship of mohammed is so absurd, so made-up, so religious, that it is impossible to raise any question about mohammed-worship without raising questions about any other faith.
With Good Friday approaching, it is important to look at the precursor event, the near sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. God ordered that Abraham slaughter Isaac, as an animal would be slaughtered. Isaac, who was a famously piquant gift to Abraham, would be burnt by his old father.
Abraham was exalted by God for his willingness to inflict such suffering not only upon Isaac, but also, and maybe more-so, upon himself. The beauty of Jesus was his understanding that this barbarism was unacceptable.
There is nothing, and was nothing, admirable about the slaughter of Isaac. The story is repulsive. It is self-evident that any entity requiring a man to kill his son for the pleasure of the entity, to test loyalty, is actually a story about those who believe that arbitrary suffering is good and wonderful.
The story of the worship of mohammed is a story about a sociopath who has spawned hatred, violence and the love of infliction of suffering. Suffering, to allah, is his ultimate pleasure.
There is no way to logically separate the belief in the goodness of Abraham's willingness from the brutality of belief in allah, and his brutal "messenger."
Our President, who in so many respects has been so well intentioned, and who does not deserve the ridiculous and outrageous calumnies put upon him, is tethered to a basic premise about existence which renders him incapable of understanding what we are up against.
He is our Abraham, willing to sacrifice us on the rock altar of belief in the fundamental goodness of submission to God.
I'm not sure I get your point.
The story of the sacrifice of Abraham and Isaac has been difficult for modernists to accept, much like the Book of Job, but it is biblical.
It illustrates both obedience and mercy.
Abraham obeys God, even though he is being asked to kill his son, his only son, his son who was promised to multiply like the stars in the sky and inherit the land of Israel.
But when he proves his obedience, God forbids him to kill Isaac. Instead, he sacrifices the ram caught in the thicket. It was a test, an unpleasant test, but God does not demand the sacrifice of the first born son. Instead, God accepts a substitutionary sacrifice of a sheep.
Clearly this points to the Passover, and another substitutionary sacrifice, the blood of the Passover lamb instead of the first born son.
And, for Christians, this points to the sacrifice of Christ, the Lamb of God.
I agree with you about Mohammed, but I'm not sure what your point is in relating it to the story of the Sacrifice of Isaac--which didn't take place.
You wrote this?
Let me give you a few things to think about with relation to this story.
1. God forbids human sacrifice.
2. God knows everything - and He knew He would not allow Abraham to complete this act. God NEVER intended Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.
3. Abraham was the "friend of God" God shared many things with Abraham - just as friends share many things. God wanted His friend, Abraham, to understand what He Himself would go through when He (God) offered up His own Son Jesus on the cross for the sins of the world.
4. Pray for wisdom before calling anything in the Word of God repulsive. You may just be missing the point of the story.
I'm not trying to be argumentative, but Ishmael might disagree about that 'only son' thing.
Mohammad, the plagarizing pervert, plagarized from the jews before butchering them and taking slaves.
I think the point was for God to convince Abraham to trust him in all things even when doing so seemed illogical.
God had promised Abraham this son, Isaac, as the son who would not only spring from the womb of his septagenarian wife, but who would provide him with a lineage more numerous than the stars in the sky. For God to turn around and ask Abraham to sacrifice this son that he and Sarah had waited so long for, and who God had specifically promised would serve an alternate purpose, defied Abraham's sense of reason. For Abraham to trust God in this matter and to prepare to go through with the act, which God would never allow to take place anyway, illustrated Abraham's willingness to trust God in all things, and proved to Abraham that he COULD trust God even when it didn't make sense.
As a man of reason, I can appreciate such a lesson.
That said, your broader point seems to be about the war on terror, and I'm not really sure what this has to do with that. The president is leading this nation as the head of state of a constitutional republic, with laws that emanate from the Constitution of the United States, not from the Bible or the Torah. This is a struggle between a constitutional republic and a patchwork of Islamic dictatorships. How the president's personal faith factors into that equation is beyond me.
The point is this: like the allah of mohammed-worship, the God of Abraham (who is embraced whole-heartedly by the sociopath mohammed in his absurd construction of a religion whose point is the worship of mohammed) is an Entity pleased by the arbitrary and pointless suffering of men.
Abraham necessarily says to himself, if God wants me to do it, I must do it. It is not the same thing as saying, for instance, if God wants me to be kind to others, I ought to be kind to others. It has only to do with the whim of the Supreme Being.
The concept of the whim of a Supreme Being is the gist of mohammed-worship. (The trick to islam, is that mohammed was the conscious stand-in for allah).
There is no difference in the logical premise of mohammed-worship and Christianity or Judaism, for example. Our President knows this, if only subliminally. He is not capable of confronting our enemy, because he shares the same interior premise: God is worthy of obedience even if he dictates the totally inane and brutal sacrifice of a son, especially under circumstances where the sacrifice is a sadistic emotional/psychological event.
The worship of mohammed is a particularly debasing and humiliating, and emotionally cruel circumstance. There is nothing satisfactory from a human pov, other than the debatble satisfaction of belief in monotheism.
But the belief in monotheism, and all it implies, calls into question islam and other "Abrahamic" religions.
Our President is not a deep thinker. I do not say that in disrespect. I abhor his critics, who are witless jackasses, mostly. His belief system, tho, prevents him from uderstanding the enemy. He realizes (at some level of understanding) that the best criticism of our enemy, implicates his own beliefs.
that's something I've always had trouble accepting. I know this: were I in Abraham's position, I would never, under any circumstances, be willing to sacrifice my child, even if I was convinced that God Himself was telling me to do it. I've read all the arguments, and I'm still unconvinced. I guess I'll just have to take it up with the Man himself one of these days.
Of course I also think the prodigal son's brother got a bad rap--you might say I'm a bit of a contrarian.
Yes, true.
But I was recalling the way it is presented in Genesis 22:1-2:
And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am.
And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.
Presumably Isaac is called the "only son" because he is the child promised by the angel who will be the progenitor of Israel and the twelve tribes who will multiply like the stars in the sky or the sand on the seashore.
The passage emphasizes that Isaac is his son, the son whom he loves, his only son, because only through Isaac will the promise of the Covenant be realized. All this emphasizes how dear such a sacrifice would be.
God forbids human sacrifice, but he called for Abraham to commit human sacrifice. Ponder that.
God knew that he would not permit Abraham to actually slaughter Isaac, but he did permit Abraham to go thru that particularly gruesome human experience. If I understand human existence correctly, we all want to be spared that experience, regardless of the outcome
Friends do not put friends thru the ordeal suffered by Abraham, for such a trivial and irrelavant point.
I pray for wisdom, even tho I do not understand the nature of prayer. Do you?
Also, don't you think that Abraham being instructed to sacrifice Isaac, and the obvious agony of Abraham depicted in those passages is meant to place before us in type and shadow the heart of God when His own son was sacrificed -- give us a window, in other words, not merely the fact that God is fore shadowing the sacrifice itself, but by imagining the agony of Abraham, we can walk for a bit in God's shoes as He shed's the blood of His Son to attone for our transgressions.
That point is clear enough. The issue is about the nature of the point.
islam exalts the point, altho islam is actually mohammed-worship, the point of which is to be gloriously obedient, even tho obedience is submission to exquisite cruelty. Exquisite cruelty (the worship of allah and his associate mohammed) is the necessary option of islam.
As the story of Abraham also shows, it is the necessary option of what our President believes.
I don't know the man (W) personally, so I am speculating.
But based on what he has said and not said, it seems W cannot find the intellectual basis for confronting those whose religion leads them to seek our total destruction.
Of course. The Sacrifice of Abraham's only son Isaac is typological for the Sacrifice of God's only Son Jesus.
There is also typology within the Old Testament, as I mentioned, pointing to the Passover and the sacrifice of a lamb in place of the first born son. The Last Supper is a fulfillment of the Passover meal, recalling the original Passover. And Jesus is called the Lamb of God (in Revelation) in remembrance of the sacrificial lamb.
The pagan religions in the land of Canaan demanded human sacrifices, and it was customary to sacrifice the first born son to Baal Moloch, throwing the child into the furnace. Judaism introduces the substitutionary sacrifice. That is why when Jesus is presented in the Temple as a baby, a pair of doves is sacrificed in His place. And in turn Jesus offers Himself as a sacrifice in place of all of humanity, atoning to the Father for our sins.
I very much recognize the foreshadowing. So did Jesus, I suspect.
Typical of Jesus, that extraordinary and lovely man, he put the best possible construction on it, to the extent of his life, for the benefit of us all.
He was no mohammed.
Yes, I do think the agony of Abraham was intended. That is what would make any human being react negatively.
This episode was all about foreshadowing the sacrifice of Christ. God provided a substitutionary sacrifice for the son of Abraham, but for His own Son, there was no substitution possible. Christ was the true sacrifice symbolized by the ram for both Abraham and his son.
This is a beautiful story, not repulsive. I agree with you completely.
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