Spengler wrote:Oao,
Reasoned and informed criticism of the other person's religion is allowed; your posts don't meet the standard. This "trash" (as someone appropriately put it) can be found anywhere. Spare us.
Hakeem,
To anthropomorphize God as "Father in heaven" (Avinu shebashamayim) is typically Jewish; also as mother (Isaiah), husband (Amos) and bridegroom (Song of Songs). There is not a single such characterization in the Koran. That helps clarify why Judaism and Christianity have so much in common (along with expiatory sacrifice), and much less in common with Islam.
I never said that there was NO similarity between judaism and christianity. How could it not be if judaism was the only monoteistic religion and christianity sprang from it. But it is also clear that Paul gradually and increasingly deviated from Judaism and over the years it was also made less and less similar.
The notion that it is possible to unify them today based on some commonality is, in my opinion, an illusion. It stems, I think, from an underlying erroneous notion that religion is the source of morality. It is easy to demonstrate that this is not the case: it is agreed today that religion has both moral and immoral aspects and, if so, one must have criteria external to religion to decide which is which. Furthermore, there are much more serious arguments and evidence for this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... ood-debate
Pay attention to A.G. Grayling's comments and specifically:
AA: Anthony, you’re nodding in agreement. But is there an argument that the good perhaps even in atheist people today is something that is the result of religion’s influence?
AC Grayling: “No. If you think about the dominance of Christianity in Europe, which really took hold right about the fourth century AD, that was nearly 1,000 years after Socrates and Plato and Aristotle had begun to think about the nature of the good and the good society. Have a look at the New Testament documents or those that were selected by the church as canonical. They say: give away all your money, turn your back on your family if they don’t agree with you. If people do bad things, help them to do them more, turn your other cheek. Take no thought for tomorrow, make no plans.
“This was a morality, an unliveable morality premised on the idea that the world was very shortly to end, it was going to end next week or next month.
“And when after several centuries had passed by and the parousia hadn’t happened, they began to import wholesale the wonderful heritage of ethics that had been discussed by the Stoics and the Epicurians and the Aristotelians for centuries before their time.
“What we think of as distinctive of western morality has its roots in the non-religious secular tradition of ethics that comes from classical antiquity.”
