Heresy!

"Thou shalt have no other God's before me." As Long as I put God first and Shiva Second, Im good to go.

no steve the point is that jesus prayed to someone else. so if jesus is praying to someone else, aren't we suppose to follow in his footsteps? why do christians worship jesus when he never asked them to?

Lazy, you obviously didn't read my post about the compilation of the Christian Bible, nor do you a solid foundational knowledge in the history of Christian scripture.

You presume the Bible contains everything Christ did or taught, but what it is in actuality is a collection of writings that happened to fall in line with Christian (read: Catholic) dogma. It was intended as a canon that included every belief, but instead was created as a work of some of what the Church teaches.

This will probably be my last post here, unless the topic takes a more serious/mature turn.

Most Christian denominations believe that Jesus and God are the same person. But I see what you are saying, if Jesus was God why would he pray to himself? The trouble with all religions is that they have awkward questions that you must either ignore or explain away by some rather creative logic.

SteevoKun, that's an interesting view on the Bible, certainly one that's not exactly common amongst Catholics. Is there some sort of oral tradition or another source where other teachings and deeds of Christ are included?

no steve i did read your post and with respect, it's totally off on a tangent. given what we know about jesus, we have to conclude that he :
1-never called himself god
2-never asked to be worshiped
3-never asked to be feared

jesus always talked by what we can call 'the father'.


and if jesus was god, first things first, he wouldn't need to eat, drink, sleep or go to the bathroom. the fact that he did those things makes him ungodly, by definition. he's not omniscient or omnipotent as the jewish texts describe. how could this dude be the creator the universe. above all he died. that is just ludicrous. it is only logical to believe that he was a man and nothing more.

Blasphemy!

lol invictus that's my word

Chrispminis: The inclusion of writings in the Christian canon was based upon their correspondence with the established doctrine of the time, as opposed to being based on another account of Christ's specific actions/sayings.

Lazysummer: There's an entire aspect of Christian theology called Christology that deals with this subject. Christ is believed to be 100% God and 100% man (once again, like any religion this belief obviously requires faith, as does the belief in any particular God, regardless of his/her/its nature). He is a person of the transcendent Trinity who has, according to the Divine Plan, taken on the station of a creature, of man, to impart to us the Salvation of the Almighty. Obviously any religious ideas taken out of context lose their meaning, but within the framework of Christian belief these doctrines make perfect sense, although they obviously don't fit into the Islamic understanding of God.

Oh, and Lazy, I'm pretty sure there's portions of Islam that are equally "ludicrous." In fact, as a student of philosophy and religion in general, I know there are more ludicrous things, but that with faith they lose any sense of incredulity they would inspire in people who have no understanding of Islam. It's the same thing with the whole question of the nature of Christ as it pertains to Christian doctrine.

well shouldn't christian theology be based on christ?

your reply is basically saying "that's the way it is, no thinking about it, it's just there"

how can you call that a legitimate argument?

i'm talking about jesus' teachings himself. not what some dude paul or the church or anyother theologian tells you. i'm saying look at christ himself and his actions.

p.s. the islamic understand of God is exactly the same as judaism - that there's one god. he's not man. he's not woman. he's nothing like anything else in this universe. he is an entity that incomprehensible and unfathomable. he is above time and space. he is the supreme creator this universe. these ideas aren't just in islam or judaism there in other religions like taoism - where people worship something discrete and abysmal, without even giving it a name.

finally i believe christ believed in this same entity, who he called the Father.

i'm just talking about the fundamental beliefs of the religion steve, not specifics.

islam believes in one god, who created adam and eve and after that sent messengers/teachers to mankind to teach them morality and goodness, e.g. noah, jacob, joseph, lot, abraham, moses, jesus, etc. with muhammad being the last of the chain.

judaism believes the same thing but they stopped short at moses and are still waiting for the messiah (who muslims recognize as jesus)

christians also recognize jesus as the messiah, a teacher, but also worship him, they see him as equal to god. that's something that's rabbi's go nuts over, let alone imams.

For the record Taoism sees worship as symbolic, Taoists don't actually worship the Tao. It's like "worshipping" the Buddha. It's symbolism, not literal adoration.

Actually, Lazy, what I'm saying is you're ignoring the context in which Christian doctrine makes sense. It's like language, if you use a random word from Japanese (say, baka) within the context of the English language (say, You're a baka) the statement will make no sense to a monolingual English speaker. Likewise, presuming that God is a simple, unitarian being is going to put you in a position from which it's impossible to make any sense of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. It's not that you won't be able to understand the doctrine due to its lack of clarity, it's that you're talking apples and oranges. That doesn't mean you'd ever agree with the doctrine of the Trinity, but if you look at it in the right context you'd at least be able to understand it. There are thousands (at least) books on Christian theology. If you're actually interested in learning about Christian theology look there, or look on a Christian website.

P.S. Did you know the Muslim God has multiple personalities?

And your last paragraph proves my point that the issue here is an issue of perspective and mindset. "i believe"

I'm aware of what Islam teaches concerning the prophets (What happened to Allahu alaihi wasalaam after their names, Lazy?). Also, the Jews didn't stop at Moses, the Tanakh (Torah, Nevi'im, Kethubim) also contains books about many prophets (known as Major and Minor and collectively known as the Nevi'im, which is the plural of one of the Hebrew words used to refer to prophets).

The Nicene Creed is probably the best statement of the fundamental beliefs of Christianity, which is why it was drafted in the first place.

God is all powerful. He can do whatever he chooses. If he defies human logic that is because he testing our faith.

well spending time and directing praise and acknowledging its existence is good enough for me to call it worship. tai chi and meditation is essentially a form of prayer. taioists worship in their own way, and they worship the Tao - i.e. the supreme way i.e. the god.

and again, i'm just saying look at christ and his teachings. christ didn't compile theology books so why they hell would you put so much emphasis on them. use your own mind, that's why god gave it to you.

the muslim god doesn't have any multiple personalities. what do you mean? and the 'muslim god' is the same god who created the earth and heavens in six days, made eve from adam's rib, saved noah from the flood, spoke to moses behind a bush and raised jesus to heaven. it's the same god so don't use labels like 'muslim god'.

Allah has Multiple Personalities? He really must be the god of the Hebrews then!

But I would like to hear more about this multi-personality aspect.

you're being really closed minded and not really giving my arguments much thought. instead you're trying to change the subject and talking about islamic beliefs? why don't we jump into judasm or hinduism. my point was jesus never called himself god, never asked to be worshipped, never asked to be FEARED as all powerful or all mighty and so today's christians should listen to the man and stop worshipping him. dont listen to 'theologists' who have manfactured so much baloney from different sides of the earth and stapled stuff together and created innovations in the religion. you get a totally different thing from what christ meant for you to have. so that's my conclusion, follow the truth, draw your own conclusions, don't have someone else make up truths and feed it down your throat. there is no such thing as trinity. the jews never knew about it and christ never said it. so open your mind and stop believing in it.

lazysummer this is a slippery slope that you have chosen here. If you insist upon constantly using logic to support your arguments you will end up an atheist.

The part about the Rib is disputed. Some Jewish Scholars believe that it was not adams rib, but perhaps a bone that would support male erections, as found in many other mammals, that was used to create woman. However, there is not an obvious agreement, just as some scholars believe the fruit adam and eve ate was a fig, not an apple, since God would not give man a problem without the solution, such as the fig leaf.

Spyman, that post is actually a very interesting logical issue that has nothing to do with any belief/faith in any religion.

Presume you have an all-powerful being, one that can do anything. Can he then create something so big he can't lift it? Either way he's shown to be limited. However, this logical conundrum has nothing to do with the validity or lack thereof of any particular god(s), though it can lead to very interesting philosophical discussion.

p.s the word "God" in aramic (the language that christ spoke) has god as "Elah".
i don't know about you but Elah and Allah sound pretty close

Steevo that is why there is hell, it was specially prepared for people who ask such questions.

i don't want to get into athiests but it's been shown that human biology has an inborn need for a god. taht's why almost every culture has some more form diety.
i think it was voltaire who said if there was no god we would have to create him..?

Spyman, are you suggesting that questioning is worthy of hell?

Lazy, actually what I've been doing this whole time is trying to point out the fact our different beliefs belong to two different ways of thinking. Within the Islamic faith tradition trinitarianism makes no sense, just as unitarianism makes no sense within the faith tradition of Christianity.

The fact is, Christianity was founded by Christ through His Apostles (ones who are sent, literally translated). In Christianity (Apostolic Christianity, the 2000 year-old Christianity) scriptures are taken side-by-side with tradition, just like in Islam Al Qur'an and Al Hadith are taken side-by-side.

Also, if you base your beliefs on your own mind and not on a book then you're obviously not Muslim, since Islam is centered around the revelation of Al Qur'an to the prophet Muhammad, which is seen as the only valid source now available of God's actual words to man.

As for the God of the three Abrahamic religions being the same obviously he isn't since you say you can't even grasp the concept of the Christian God, which is Trinitarian in nature. They all three have similar origins that be traced throughout history, but they also have aspects that make them distinct, especially when you consider Judaism as a modern religion, as opposed to Judaism before the destruction of the second Temple of Jerusalem.

The word Allah was created by Muslims during the time of Muhammad. The words goy (as in a gentile) and gaijin (gai meaning outside, gaijin meaning non-Japanese) sound similar, but I'd be hard-pressed to see them as being similar for some ontological reason. Similarity sometimes is just coincidence. Allah was formed from the Arabic for god (as a noun, not a proper noun) and is similar to other semitic languages' noun "god" because they're all from the same family of languages. You can find words in Sanskrit and English that are similar because they are both Indo European languages, but that has nothing to do with religion nor does it validate or invalidate any argument about the nature of the things signified by those words.