discussion on the nature of the creator of the heavens and earth

[russell jones]

While I agree whole heartedly that the way I approach philosophy is from science, and is of the scientific method, but the connotations the terms hold is too much while I am in Philosophy.

 

I don't there there is anything such as absolute truth or the ability to know we have the correct theory of reality.

 

That is why I stopped studyin physics.

 

I think all there is to meaning and to validity is explanatory and predictive value (a la empirical adequacy of science), but that any theory one may adopt is necessary not true (qua Reality).

 

 

I think Philosophy just happens to be the most efficient way for me to learn. I took the best thing science could give me (its method) and have now been in a position to learn about all other fields through this analytic lens.

 

I don't think Philosophy is "right" it is just workin to help me satisfy what things I need right now. Academic Stimulation, Impetus to do my work, and Opportunities for the future that wouldn't be there with physics.

 

As odd as that sounds (about the jobs thing that is).

 

That totally clears it up for me. It's true, the method is more important than the result most of the time.

 

Also, you would be right in saying that opportunities in academics in the Humanities seem to be better than in Science. Everybody is trying to grow there Humanities departments and replace the Baby Boomer retirees, that there are more openings than there were 10 years ago, and there will be even more in 10 years.

 

Specialties are funny because them seem to create realities that drift farther and farther apart from each other. Add religion in to the mix, and it seems like everyone is living on different planets. That brings me to an important question, one that relates to this thread, how much are we describing what is there in Science, Philosophy and Religion, and how much are we creating what is there? Of course this leads to the bigger question, is their any sort of objective reality? I am not talking about the Cartesian idea of experience, but the literal action of mind on matter. Perhaps this is the breakthrough that makes gods?

[the district]

Not so much a circle, but a spiral...

[the.crooked]

goddamnit the district.

 

 

stop saying things that have no context...

[Dawood]

he's just being a stick in the mud.

[I was born here]

if he is everywhere why erect temples to him?

[BH - MG]

" if he is everywhere why erect temples to him? "

 

I asked that same question many years ago. What I found much later on,

blew my mind but did'nt shock me at all. ( Well, some of it did. )

 

Dawood, I respect you and what you believe. Same goes to any and everyone

else who believes in a different God or no God. Now I see no matter what you believe,

say or do, you are all right on track. Free will is the concept that suckers EVERYONE

at some point in their life.

 

Being that I began passing the TRON since middleschool, my brain works at a slow speed.

So I'd rather show you something I think is very interesting. Not preaching...

 

http://www.bibletruths.com/

Corny name? Check. Trizoof of the rizoof? Chizeck!!!

 

The ones who run this site are quite straight foward on their views and tend to defend

their work with harsh delivery. But they always use FACT to back it up...

 

For the ones who have been raised in the CRAZIEST religion "CHRISTIANDOM"

this will possibly be a big relief to you and your family.

 

It contains years of research, writing, interviews, etc, so if you're not into reading,

then um,,, stay here and look at the the colors.;)

 

The Son Dun351

[Dawood]

if he is everywhere why erect temples to him?

 

As for myself, I don't believe God is everywhere. That idea has too many flaws, not to mention In the quran it says Allah is "Above the seven heavens in a manner that befits his majesty" and "there is nothing like unto Him".

We understand from these verses and many others that God is not part of his creation.

He is not "trapped" in his creation. he's greater than the whole creation itself.

The term "Allahu Akbar" means God is the Greatest and that is understood in it's literal sense, that God IS..IN FACT, the GREATEST/largest/most tremendously huge being and nothing is like God. To say that God is everywhere makes everything God, that can't be because God in his majesty can't be confined within such a small universe (compared to himself) and if God were everywhere , then he would be in a toilet bowl and that would contradict his loftiness and honorability.

[thinksmall]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVrLRROZEiI

 

“You can’t be a rational person six days of the week and put on a suit and make rational decisions and go to work and, on one day of the week, go to a building and think you’re drinking the blood of a 2,000-year-old space god. That doesn’t make you a person of faith…That makes you a schizophrenic.”

 

, on Mitt Romney. Lol!

[dowmagik]

who said that? it sounds like bill maher's style.

[Removed]

 

same goes for you frankie fiver.

 

Sorry the last post was a bit blunt. I respect that you are putting your beleifs forward for criticism or praise.

 

 

The reason I keep reading this thread is I enjoy reading it.

[the.crooked]

As for myself, I don't believe God is everywhere. That idea has too many flaws, not to mention In the quran it says Allah is "Above the seven heavens in a manner that befits his majesty" and "there is nothing like unto Him".

We understand from these verses and many others that God is not part of his creation.

He is not "trapped" in his creation. he's greater than the whole creation itself.

The term "Allahu Akbar" means God is the Greatest and that is understood in it's literal sense, that God IS..IN FACT, the GREATEST/largest/most tremendously huge being and nothing is like God. To say that God is everywhere makes everything God, that can't be because God in his majesty can't be confined within such a small universe (compared to himself) and if God were everywhere , then he would be in a toilet bowl and that would contradict his loftiness and honorability.

 

but god as the greatest must contain all that is lesser.

 

thus us. thus everything. to say that god is everything and more, might better suit your conception.

[Dawood]

Why must God contain everything to qualify as being God? Do I have to be my children in order to be a father? Does the CEO of a corporation become his workers while still being him?

I don't understand why that suits my conception better, besides...

I didn't make this up. It's not my idea, it's the quran and billions of Muslims believe it.

[thinksmall]

Ya dowhombre, Maher said that - the link used to go to a clip from late night with Conan.

 

Maybe I'm starting to sound crazy. But I always thought the world was created with one social class among animals, that there wouldn't be two social classes where one would feed the other. (Humans feed the philosophy of God) Im talkin' domestication and agriculture and how God does similar. Isn't it unnatural to have a supreme being that is not among us?

 

Seriously though.. Why couldn't religion be straight forward, instead of one big giant metaphor everyones gotta solve. Im sayin' that it was never meant to be a metaphor..... which is probably what some of you hombres believe but see it in a different perspective than I.

[the.crooked]

Why must God contain everything to qualify as being God? Do I have to be my children in order to be a father? Does the CEO of a corporation become his workers while still being him?

I don't understand why that suits my conception better, besides...

I didn't make this up. It's not my idea, it's the quran and billions of Muslims believe it.

 

i meant god as omnipotent and omniscient.

 

 

the god as the infinite. that is without description could be described as everything plus what is lacking, no?

[Dawood]

well, I don't invent ideas or take from this literature and that literature to make up my own copy and paste view of what God is. I believe in the quran and what it contains of the descriptions of God. I don't ave any authority to make up my own God.

[thinksmall]

So I've been studying Bureaucracy a whole lot these past few days right... And it's similarities to most religions are staggering. You've got God, the imperative all-knowing overseer. The universe came before God, so he's just a praised leader in such society. In Bureaucracies, the TRUE leader is never really known - or imperceptible. Also in such society, the apparent leaders have little knowledge or control about the actions they take, they follow the imperceptible leader to wherever they are told, consciously or not. The rules and laws in most religions are also unnecessary, I mean c'mon you cant dance? Sure dancing is an act of little self-control and it ain't humble / it doesn't flow with society. But there are forms of dancing that is most humble, and most dignified.. and I certainly don't need a law to tell me about my humbleness.

 

I should write a book, 'Religion: the Greatest Form of Societal Organization'. Or become immortal, create my own global Bureaucracy through many generations and have the world under my knees.

 

Religion came with civilization and governance. Remember how religion suppose to spread, how it's a machine with a solid program. Religion is a Bureaucracy. (Look at U.S. bases in 130 different countries and the number of Muslims in the world, its the clash of two same systems) Shit, it may be cool if you want to be a peon in such form of organization........ but I'm not gonna enlist anytime soon.

[Dawood]

thinksmall,

Just so you know, I don't come on here preaching my religion to people. I stopped doing that a while ago. I come here basically to discuss ideas with people and to educate people on Islam while discussing because I've found most people don't know about Islam and have lots of misconceptions about it....anyway...

whether on not you're enlisting consciously or subconsciously, you're still enlisting to something, some idea, some cut and paste of ideas that came from other than yourself. Put short, there's nothing new under the sun and peoples actions or reactions are a set of pre programmed mechanisms employed by your environment. Everybody worships something, whether they believe in luck or bad luck. In christianity or some other religion, ism or schizm.

Everybody worships something, even the self indulgent materialistic people worship their own desires. It's inevitable.

That said, Islam is not really a religion, per se. It's more of a way of life than a religion. Most people in the world believe in God. It's just that simple. Most people believe in some sort of being that created the universe and that is more powerful than them. Truthfully, me being a believer in God, I can't see how anyone would NOT believe in God in some way shape of form. I can't even drive my car down the road and let go of the steering wheel without my car swerving off the road so I can't possibly conceive that the whole universe stays in orbit all by itself, without direction. It's just unbelievable to me.

[El Mamerro]

thinksmall,

I can't even drive my car down the road and let go of the steering wheel without my car swerving off the road so I can't possibly conceive that the whole universe stays in orbit all by itself, without direction. It's just unbelievable to me.

 

I still maintain that's because of a lack of knowledge about how the universe works, but that's just me...

[the.crooked]

On the same topic:

 

 

That the world can maintain itself in certain ways is why it is predictable what will happen when you do let go of your steering. While theory is only an approximation and only one of an infinity of possible consistent systems of approximation, that we have found some level of consistency shows that there seems to be some consistent way in which things happen. We call this causation.

 

 

It is in our ability to asses the random chaos and unique events of reality that we have the ability to not need a "god" for these things to happen. Pure chance takes care of the process of emerging patterns and rules of occasion.

 

Entropy increases and so does complexity. As complexity in a system builds higher order concepts can emerge as parallel processes.

[thinksmall]

I can't even drive my car down the road and let go of the steering wheel without my car swerving off the road so I can't possibly conceive that the whole universe stays in orbit all by itself, without direction. It's just unbelievable to me.

 

The universe stays in orbit because the universe works itself up, as an ecosystem. It works because of the NATURAL occurrences of the universe's inhabitants. Its a natural order that is not as sophisticated as you may believe.

 

You just said yourself, right there, that God and religion is a bureaucracy.

 

You should remember that bureaucracy is a thing of man. It is because of man's incapability to create a form of organization as great as that of nature that bureaucracies exist. The connotation of bureaucracy is unnatural.

 

If God is perfect, if he is all-knowing, why does he succumb to the weaknesses of man?

 

I believe the reason why discussion about Muslim religion/bureaucracy is important is because the world is on the brink of a revolutionizing or evolutionizing war. One that could very well happen. The two major bureaucracies of the world are going to clash. America vs. Islam. It's why few hypocritical Americans want the doom of the very powerful Islam world.. And why few hypocritical Muslims want the doom of the also very powerful America. Personally, I would like neither to win.

 

Sorry if I come off offensive, I just wrestled with my jerk older brother onto hard furniture. My back aches. Which is, yes, a weak excuse.

[thinksmall]

The CREATION of the universe may very well be at the hands of God. IF so, what God therefor created is a NATURAL system of organization.

 

So far, ideologically, we could say that humans are the one occurence that fucks up the 'natural' system. But, humans and their incapability to compromise on many issues may very well be the intent of nature; that we will never get to thoroughly fuck up the universe. If humans do find harmony in all of this, it will be a harmonic organization that does not impend doom on the universe's natural system of organization [in no way do I imply Green Fascism]. Which if the universe is mathematically perfect -- as the perfect God would want it to be --, harmony will happen.

 

I believe that the American and Muslim bureaucracies will not be able to reach their desired extent (spread faith, spread democracy), because it is not the intention of nature.

[Dawood]

Since you said it, The CREATION of the universe may very well be at the hands of God.

I'll add to it.

That's all I'm saying. Everything that science confirms, e.g. The natural system of organization is a sign of creation. The fact that God created everything and that humans are incapable to compromise on many issues have nothing to do with one another. Humans are by nature oppressive to one another, that's why we're in need of a moral system and belief in a divine creator. Not for that reason alone, but humans are imperfect, while God is perfect.

Even if the universe stays in orbit because the universe works itself up, as an ecosystem...then, where did the universe come from? We can't point to or touch ONE single thing in this universe that came from thin air. Nothing. Everything has an origin. Everything. Therefore, the universe itself must have an origin. You can call it a spontaneous Big bang or whatever, but that explanation still doesn't explain where these gases came from to spontaneously "bang".

 

you said...

If God is perfect, if he is all-knowing, why does he succumb to the weaknesses of man?

 

I'm not sure what that means. elaborate on that.

 

Also, thinksmall...the clash of civilizations that exists today is again a result of mans oppressive nature. I can't say who's right or wrong because, truthfully muslims today as a whole are not fulfilling our responsibility toward God or toward mankind and I see that as one of the reasons there is so much turmoil on earth. Peoples sins or wrongdoing has an effect on society at large and the more wrong people do, the more harm falls on them. Some people call it karma, I call it punishment. The muslim world is passing through a stage of punishment as we speak for turning away from guidance. If you read about Islamic civilization during it's peak you would be surprised at the justice and benefit to mankind it produced. That's another story, though.

 

Also, you talk about nature as having an intention....is nature a unified being? Does all of nature have one intention?

[thinksmall]

I believe nature's intention is harmony. And yeah, it seems to be a unified being. I feel like i just put myself into a hole by saying that.. but yeah.

 

It seems I am again finding a subtle appreciation for Islam again. Lol. Not recklessly dancing and acting like an overall buffoon everywhere is doing me some good, so I can understand where that self control bit comes from. Surprisingly, the fundamental things about Islam, that I know, seems correct. Like if i do act like an overall buffoon, karma is gonna kick me in the ass.

 

Is karma the only punishment? I should pick up the English translation of the Quran sometime, just for reflection and better understanding.

 

I also just recently came to a semi-conclusion that a huge clash will have little chance of happening because there are too many decent humans on both sides who don't want it to happen. Events like Indonesia and the Crusades aren't gonna happen anymore. And America won't be allowed by it's people to attack Iran. Though unfortunate things have already happened, I just feel like it won't amount to something worse.

 

I wrote that God succumbs to the weakness of man because of the bureaucratic way he organizes his people, in a manner that his people are not very knowing. Though I'm sure there are people of all religions who don't fully grasp the meaning behind their religion - the meaning which is actually very accessible. I falsely assumed that all religious folks were like that.

 

Hmm. Seems again I'm realizing that I know little about this subject. Lol. Carry on..

[thinksmall]

Are the limitations in Islam for moral and intellectual sustainment? Like if you dance for an hour, people aren't gonna beat you with a stick, throw rocks, eat your kids.. they'll let karma do karma's thing right?: which is that the guy who was dancing will be restless and end up doing stupid stuff.

[Module X]

I don't there there is anything such as absolute truth or the ability to know we have the correct theory of reality.

 

That is why I stopped studyin physics.

 

I think all there is to meaning and to validity is explanatory and predictive value (a la empirical adequacy of science), but that any theory one may adopt is necessary not true (qua Reality).

 

 

Physics isn't about truth to me, it's about beauty. And I think the sheer extent of its explanatory and predictive power gives one a great deal of insight into "reality," whether or not it directly reveals "truth" in the strictest philosophical terms. All I'm trying to say is different strokes for different folks; to me your argument goes both ways. In my case I threw philosophical logic out the window because I see no reason to trust words (treated in philosophy essentially as units of logic) more than math, intuition, or literary writing (in which words are treated as the essentially abstract, layered implements which they in fact are.) Like I've said before though, no dis to philosophy, I still think it's just a matter of what you find personally meaningful. Also I don't have as clear cut a career plan as you seem to; I would feel like a jackass if I were a directionless humanities major. As a physics major with a bit of environmental geosci/climate modeling under my belt I at least have a lot of options, practically speaking.

 

It's very frustrating to write about these topics so casually because I think we spend an inordinate amount of time in semantic confusion over our basic terms such as "reality" and "truth" - I guess this is why I find it necessary to put them in quotations sometimes. That and Dawood's jihad against reason make this thread a lost cause to me. Maybe I'll come back and write a more in depth response, but I think we understand each other well enough.

[Dawood]

thinksmall,

You keep referring back to this dancing thing as if the pinnacle of being a muslim is to not dance. Go ahead and dance if you want to. The main thing in Islam is that rejection of God will land a person in hell. There's lots of rules in islam that don't really pertain to this discussion because a person is going to practice according to his ability and understanding. As for punishment. There's punishment in this life and there's punishment in the hereafter. The punishment in the hereafter is much worse so when there's hardship or something bad happens to a muslim in this life our response should be gratefulness to receive the hardship now and not in the next life.

 

you should read the quran, it's an amazing read.

[Dawood]

That and Dawood's jihad against reason make this thread a lost cause to me. Maybe I'll come back and write a more in depth response, but I think we understand each other well enough.

 

It's funny because me and the majority of people throughout the world feel that I reason just fine. if it's my belief in God that you're referring to as being unreasonable.

[El Mamerro]

Wait, you can't dance if you're a Muslim?

[iloveboxcars]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JA15Ak03.html

 

German researchers have evidence that may prove the Koran was not written by Mohammed.

 

 

 

Islam watchers blogged all weekend about news that a secret archive of ancient Islamic texts had surfaced after 60 years of suppression. Andrew Higgins' Wall Street Journal report that the photographic record of Koranic manuscripts, supposedly destroyed during World War II but occulted by a scholar of alleged Nazi sympathies, reads like a conflation of the Da Vinci Code with Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail.

 

The Da Vinci Code offered a silly fantasy in which Opus Dei, homicidal monks and twisted billionaires chased after proof that Christianity is a hoax. But the story of the photographic archive of

 

 

 

the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, now ensconced in a Berlin vault, is a case of life imitating truly dreadful art. It even has Nazis. "I hate those guys!" as Indiana Jones said.

 

No one is going to produce proof that Jesus Christ did not rise from the grave three days after the Crucifixion, of course. Humankind will choose to believe or not that God revealed Himself in this fashion. But Islam stands at risk of a Da Vinci Code effect, for in Islam, God's self-revelation took the form not of the Exodus, nor the revelation at Mount Sinai, nor the Resurrection, but rather a book, namely the Koran. The Encyclopaedia of Islam (1982) observes, "The closest analogue in Christian belief to the role of the Koran in Muslim belief is not the Bible, but Christ." The Koran alone is the revelatory event in Islam.

 

What if scholars can prove beyond reasonable doubt that the Koran was not dictated by the Archangel Gabriel to the Prophet Mohammad during the 7th century, but rather was redacted by later writers drawing on a variety of extant Christian and Jewish sources? That would be the precise equivalent of proving that the Jesus Christ of the Gospels really was a composite of several individuals, some of whom lived a century or two apart.

 

It has long been known that variant copies of the Koran exist, including some found in 1972 in a paper grave at Sa'na in Yemen, the subject of a cover story in the January 1999 Atlantic Monthly. Before the Yemeni authorities shut the door to Western scholars, two German academics, Gerhard R Puin and H C Graf von Bothmer, made 35,000 microfilm copies, which remain at the University of the Saarland. Many scholars believe that the German archive, which includes photocopies of manuscripts as old as 700 AD, will provide more evidence of variation in the Koran.

 

The history of the archive reads like an Islamic version of the Da Vinci Code. It is not clear why its existence was occulted for sixty years, or why it has come to light now, or when scholars will have free access to it. Higgins' account begins,

On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Koran.

 

The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Koran, the text Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God's word. The wartime destruction made the project "outright impossible", Mr Spitaler wrote in the 1970s.

 

Mr Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars - and a Koran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave. Why Spitaler concealed the archive is unknown, but Koranic critics who challenge the received Muslim account suspect his motives. Higgins reports,

"The whole period after 1945 was poisoned by the Nazis," says Gunter Luling, a scholar who was drummed out of his university in the 1970s after he put forward heterodox theories about the Koran's origins. His doctoral thesis argued that the Koran was lifted in part from Christian hymns. Blackballed by Spitaler, Luling lost his teaching job and launched a fruitless six-year court battle to be reinstated. Feuding over the Koran, he says, "ruined my life".

 

He wrote books and articles at home, funded by his wife, who took a job in a pharmacy. Asked by a French journal to write a paper on German Arabists, Luling went to Berlin to examine wartime records. Germany's prominent postwar Arabic scholars, he says, "were all connected to the Nazis".

 

Why were the Nazis so eager to suppress Koranic criticism? Most likely, the answer lies in their alliance with Islamist leaders, who shared their hatred of the Jews and also sought leverage against the British in the Middle East. The most recent of many books on this subject, Matthias Kuntzel's Jihad and Jew-Hatred, was reviewed January 13 in the New York Times by Jeffrey Goldberg, who reports

Kuntzel makes a bold and consequential argument: the dissemination of European models of anti-Semitism among Muslims was not haphazard, but an actual project of the Nazi Party, meant to turn Muslims against Jews and Zionism. He says that in the years before World War II, two Muslim leaders in particular willingly and knowingly carried Nazi ideology directly to the Muslim masses. They were Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, and the Egyptian proto-Islamist Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

It may be a very long time before the contents of the Bavarian archive are known. Some Koranic critics, notably the pseudonymous scholar "Ibn Warraq", claim that Professor Angelika Neuwirth, the archive's custodian, has denied access to scholars who stray from the traditional interpretation. Neuwirth admits that she has had the archive since 1990. She has 18 years of funding to study the Bavarian archive, and it is not clear who will have access to it.

 

When the Atlantic Monthly story on Koranic criticism appeared nine years ago, author Toby Lester expected early results from the Yemeni finds.

Von Bothmer, Puin, and other scholars will finally have a chance to scrutinize the texts and to publish their findings freely - a prospect that thrills Puin. "So many Muslims have this belief that everything between the two covers of the Koran is just God's unaltered word," he says. "They like to quote the textual work that shows that the Bible has a history and did not fall straight out of the sky, but until now the Koran has been out of this discussion. The only way to break through this wall is to prove that the Koran has a history too. The Sana'a fragments will help us to do this.

In 2005, Puin published a collection of articles under the title, Die dunklen Anfange. Neue Forschungen zur Entstehung und fruhen Geschichte des Islam ("The dark beginnings: new research on the origin and early history of Islam," Hans Schiller Verlag, 2005). This drew on the work of the pseudonymous German philologist "Christoph Luxenburg", who sought to prove that incomprehensible passages in the Koran were written in Syriac-Aramaic rather than Arabic. Luxenburg's thesis became notorious for explaining that the "virgins" provided to Islamic jihadis in paradise were only raisins. The Koran, according to the research of Puin and his associates, copied a great deal of extant Christian material.

 

Apart from the little group at the University of the Saarland and a handful of others, though, the Western Academy is loathe to go near the issue. In the United States, where Arab and Islamic Studies rely on funding from the Gulf States, an interest in Koranic criticism is a failsafe way to commit career suicide.

 

Neuwirth has led the attack on "Christoph Luxenburg" and other Koranic critics who dispute the traditional Muslim account. According to Higgins, "Ms Neuwirth, the Berlin Koran expert, and Mr Marx, her research director, have tried to explain the project to the Muslim world in trips to Iran, Turkey, Syria and Morocco. When a German newspaper trumpeted their work last fall on its front page and predicted that it would 'overthrow rulers and topple kingdoms', Mr Marx called Arab television network al-Jazeera and other media to deny any assault on the tenets of Islam."

 

Despite her best efforts to reassure Islamic opinion, Higgins reports, she has stepped on landmines herself. "Ms Neuwirth, though widely regarded as respectful of Islamic tradition, got sideswiped by Arab suspicion of Western scholars. She was fired from a teaching post in Jordan, she says, for mentioning a radical revisionist scholar during a lecture in Germany."

 

The story thus far recalls the ending of another Indiana Jones film (Raiders of the Lost Ark), in which the Ark of the Covenant is filed away in an enormous warehouse, presumably never to be touched again. The Muslim world will continue to treat Koranic criticism as an existential risk, and apply whatever pressure is required to discourage it - albino monks presumably included.

 

But that is not the end of the matter. The Islamic world is forced to adopt an openly irrational stance, employing its power to intimidate scholars and frustrate the search for truth. It is impossible for Muslims to propose a dialogue with Western religions, as 38 Islamic scholars did in an October 13 letter to Pope Benedict XVI and other Christian leaders, and rule the subject of text criticism out of the discussion.

 

Precisely for this reason, Church leaders see little basis for a dialogue with Islam. Jean-Louis Cardinal Tauran, who directs the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, told the French daily La Croix, "Muslims do not accept discussion about the Koran, because they say it was written under the dictates of God. With such an absolutist interpretation, it's difficult to discuss the contents of the faith."

 

Throughout the Internet, Islamist sites denounce the work of a handful of marginalized scholars as evidence of a plot by Christian missionaries to sabotage Islam. What the Muslim world cannot conceal is its vulnerability and fear in the face of Koranic criticism. In the great battle for converts through the Global South, this may turn out to be a paralyzing disadvantage.

[Sars.Saw.Chicago]

i got somethin i wanna talk about.....

can a relationship between a christian and a catholic work?

to set an example...

a straight edge christian and a not very religious catholic.......

 

 

 

 

also are christians even allowed to listen to metallica/ anythin of that nature...

or have tattoos?.....