The Simple Religion

The Simple Religion
By Salama Abdel-Hady
In a Catholic , a claim is there:
Muslim’s Belief is simple because we Just believe in only One God, without any complications of introducing a Powered Holy Cross,
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Do not COPY & PASTE or use Swearing Language.
I will leave one point at the time from your trash book.
If you are ready for an adult conversation.... .then you can use the right language ....

[Ibrahim Al Copti]

Dear العيقباني1

Muslim’s Belief is simple because we Just believe in only One God, without any complications

If Muslims really believe in the absolute oneness of Allah their God

How they claim that he has 99 attributes (de******ive names) and each one is considered a full God worshiped by Muslims

If your Allah is an absolute one, where did this multiplicity come from ?

and a second logical question :
If Allash is one :

is one (1) here considered numerical (=1) >> meaning that # 2 is bigger than it ?

or algebraic / mathematical in nature ( can be subtracted, multiplied, divided ... etc ) ?

These are just points for a good start of a theological debate

God Bless

[Faith-Hope_Love]

Hi Ibrahim

You said something tantalising in your reply, that mulsims worship every one of the 99 attributes of their god as a separate entity. Can you elaborate on that or give me some references please.

I ask this for the following reason.

without any evidence or elaboration on what you said, there's a huge logical leap involved in going from counting attributes to counting entities that possess those attributes. For example the judaeo-christian god has a lot of attributes, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, loving, vengeful, jealous yet this doesn't describe 6 gods, it describes 6 attributes given to one god. I'm pretty familiar with muslim faith (as practiced, not as pondered by theologians), but I can't think of anything that resembles pantheism in islam.

On your question about the 'oneness' of god and what it might resemble in maths, I don't really understand what you're trying to say, it seems more incoherent than it seems logical.

:) Just playing devil's advocate here, let the games begin

[Faith-Hope_Love]

oh, by the way

In playing devil's advocate in this argument I am going to be wilfully blind to the original poster's claim that islam is simple because it doesn't have the complication of a 'powered holy cross'.

Islam may not have a 'powered holy cross' but it suffers from no shortage of 'the weird and wonderful'.

To find examples of this you need to do no more than google the claims made about the kaaba in mecca, its black stone and various other holy places or holy objects that any serious practicing muslim ascribes supernatural importance to.

Some people take this superstition to truly ridiculous heights, such as in the second part of this video on utube

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

the part I'm talking about starts at 05:25 in the video.

The first five minutes of the video are irrelevant to the point I'm making, but they're entertaining, although tragic.

[Ibrahim Al Copti]

Dear faith

You said

You said something tantalising in your reply, that mulsims worship every one of the 99 attributes of their god as a separate entity. that mulsims worship every one of the 99 attributes of their god as a separate entity

I did not mention any thing about separate or united entities

my friend the Joker has an Arabic thread about it
you can read it
and if you want to help out, why don't u translate it

http://www.copts.net/forum/showthread.php?t=24881

and also here
http://freecopts.net/forum/showthread.php?t=12996

it deals with the same Islamic logic, when they ask about the trinity / oneness of YAHWEH

Also you know that some of these names are attributed to many pagan deities like AlRahman (one of Yemen gods) ...

To make it short, all I am trying right now is to stir the pot, and see what comes out

by the way, playing devil's advocate won't make any sense to guys like Mr العيقباني1

God bless

[Faith-Hope_Love]

Hi Ibrahim

Thanks for the prompt reply.

I am comfortable enough in arabic to read and comprehend, but I am desperately hopeless at composition (to join the arabic discussion) let alone the more difficult task of translation, so there's no way I can faithfully translate the arabic discussion into this thread and be of help to you.

The Joker's thread of argument seems to be as follows.

1. god has 99 names in islam
2. they may sound like attributes but they're not attributes (he gives an example, a man called Karim need not necessarily be a generous (karim) person)
3. therefore, these are not attributes of a god, but 99 gods (this is a rather interesting point to which I will come to later)
4. finally, the evidence that the joker produces that this is indeed how practicing muslims think of their god, is that they name people in this way (abdallah, abdelfattah,abdelkarim etc...)

On the first point, islam's god indeed has the much celebrated 99 names, but it's not at all clear from this fact alone that there are 99 islamic gods, this requires some more evidence, and as I mentioned earlier, the judaeo-christian god has a lot of attributes and names as well, but this does not by itself imply pantheism.

On the second point, the islamic names for god may or may not accurately depict the truth (he may be called karim, but is not actually a 'karim' individual) is purely a matter of faith, not logic.

On the third point, which is that the 99 names are not merely names of god but an aggregation of all the pre-islamic arab conceptions of god, the point is largely valid historically.

At a certain point in history arabs were feeling left out, sensing that god had spoken to the christians and the jews and gave them divine revelations, but left the arabs out. In response, it was decided that muhammad was going to have some revelations of his own, and that any arab who could not identify culturally with christians or jews could at last have their very own words and prophecies from god.

This fatuous and self centred argument is written in history, from the way that the koran was haphazardly plagiarised from snippets of many different religions, to the way that the early muslims took it upon themselves to spread the faith by the sword, to the way that they insist until this day that no true koran can be written in any other language but arabic.

On the fourth point, which is that muslims 'prove' that there are 99 gods by naming their children after the 99 names I have to protest this in two ways.

First, it is again illogical to jump from 99 attributes of god, to 99 gods.

Second, it is unfair and it is not something that you would like to have done to you as a copt. There are plenty of copts with names such as abdelmalek, abdelnour, abdelmassih, abdel.etcetera

To make the leap between multiple names of god and multiple gods in islam, but to completely ignore this in coptic tradition is, just on the face of it, stupid.

[Ibrahim Al Copti]

Hello Faith
Nice points

I am going to answer from my prospective not the Joker's of course

The only thing I sense is that you are thinking about it from the prospective of a Christian

Theologically, Islam belief in the absolute oneness of Allah .... Some kind of a numerical one and he is not omnipresent accroding to Sunni majority

On the contrary, we believe that God is one in Nature but with infinite existence (more elaboration needs another thread)
These are alien terms to Muslim theologians

So, Muslims claim that you cannot worship except Allah, but literally they worship his names too (AbdalRahman, AbdalRahim ... etc) where Abd means worshiper or slave of

Of course some Copts and Arab Christians adopted the same concept ... but without a Christian theological basis

So, my original question was

If your Allah is an absolute one, where did this multiplicity come from ?

The answer puts the Muslim between two choices

+ The multiplicity from within (so, why they won't accept a similar concept like the trinity)

+ Or Multiplicity from without which leads to Shirk (or polytheism in Muslim terms)

So the leap you are talking about here

First, it is again illogical to jump from 99 attributes of god, to 99 gods.

is an internal theological problem within Islam
that is why I refered to "Islamic logic", and you see it as illogical

This is a very fast response because I am at work right now ...

God Bless +++

[Faith-Hope_Love]

Hey Ibrahim

I think I understand you, but this information is far more about muslim theology than I would be familiar with.

On your comment,
Of course some Copts and Arab Christians adopted the same concept ... but without a Christian theological basis

I don't get that at all, what people adopted is just a habit in naming their kids, not a polytheitic concept.

There is no contradiction between having one, say, president, but describing him in a multiplicity of ways, commander in chief, head of executive branch of government, head of state. And I would say that this is exactly what arab christians do, and until now I assumed that this is what muslims were doing.

But, if you say that their theology supports this, not merely the naming of kids, then so be it.