I understand that many Americans wont do the same but I wonder if they do think that we have different God? We have different religion but we still do pray for the same God, don't we?
[tags] respect, god, Islam, Christians, Americans, Arab, Prayers [/tags]
Det news - Fitness USA, a gym chain, is investigating an alleged civil rights violation involving a local Muslim woman who says her afternoon prayer was interrupted by a fellow patron, and that her complaint to management about the situation was rejected.
"The manager told me,You have to respect her (the patron), but she does not have to respect your God,said Wardeh Sultan of Dearborn.I've had my membership for seven or eight years, and I've never had a problem with praying there.I told that manager, 'I can't believe you said that' Sultan said.Honestly, I feel humiliated and I feel ashamed, right now, to go back to Fitness USA.
[tags] respect, god, Islam, Christians, Americans, Arab, Prayers [/tags]
Can I just say that math thing is really, really annoying. I have commented many times, only to forget to do the math thing and have lost my comment. I would appreciate if you could somehow rearrange the order of the questions or preserve the comments even if the math is not done correctly.
ReplyDeleteMost Christians do not see the Muslim God as being the same as their own God, though some exceptionally liberal Christian groups such as Unitarians undoubtedly do. (The Unitarian-Universalists are much more syncretic than most Christian denominations.)
ReplyDeleteJewish thought has traditionally recognized all three monotheistic faiths as believing in the same god though you may find some difference of opinion even here. (In fact, historically, Jews have had more of a problem with Christianity due to the idea of Jesus being the son of God - a blasphemous idea in Jewish though - than they've had with the Muslim conception of God.) Muslims, of course, perceives all three religions as recognizing the same God.
Part of the problem lies in the fact that just as Islam does not accept any revelation coming after it as being valid, similarly most Christians do not recognize any revelation coming after the foundational events of Christianity as being valid. That means that Islam is often considered not merely flawed (the way that Muslims tend to perceive Christianity) but actively false and misleading.
Apparently there is more to this story than was initially reported. The Muslim woman no longer looks so innocent:
ReplyDeletehttp://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=23583_The_Gym_Jihad
Many Christians in the United States (and I use the term "Christian" loosely here, since most who call themselves Christian are anything but that) consider the Christian God and Muslim God as different/separate. Christians that are more enlightened to the tenets of Islam realize that Allah, in essence, is the same God of the Bible, but the characteristics attributed to the Biblical God differ from the characteristics attributed to Koranic Allah.
ReplyDeleteThere's more to the subject, but this is the quick version.
Actually, most mainstream Christians don't believe that other Christians believe in the same God if they don't accept post-Biblical creeds, particularly the Nicene Creed. They would have problems with Muslims that date back to the Council of Chalcedon, where Catholicism rejected monophycitism, and the monophycites, a century or so later, formed the first big group of converts to Islam.
ReplyDeleteNot, mind you that a significant fraction of them have heard of such things as the Council of Chalcedon, or monophycitism, nor do any of them have a terribly clear understanding of the product of the Council of Nicea (nor a clue as to its process). It doesn't matter that they don't really understand what they believe. What matters is that you don't believe what they think you have to believe (whether you or they understand it or not) about God to be talking about the same God.
Don't feel bad about feeling baffled. It's definitely baffling.