Dear Christians

[Rayaan]

So Ray... are you still participating in this discussion? Or have you abandoned it now?

Well, I abandoned it earlier, but now I guess I ... unabandoned it?

I just felt like adding some more information in this thread since I had more free time today and because I wanted to see what is your response to them. I will do so by condensing my thoughts to the most important points so that the discussion doesn't become too laboring for ourselves.

From the comparison tables, one item in particular interests me... Islam doesn't agree with Christianity and Judaism that the Adam and Eve story describes the human condition, ie fallen man.

I think that the idea of "fallen man" is just a particular interpretation of the Adam and Eve story, but the story itself is basically the same in all 3 religions.

Secondly, what you said about the human condition is contrary to that which is shown in the comparison table you linked to.

Here it is again but with an inclusion of red lines:



... which shows that Islam and Judaism agree with each other that no man is born into sin, thereby negating the fall of man.

Many Christian denominations believe that the fall corrupted the entire natural world, including human nature, causing people to be born into original sin, a state from which they cannot attain eternal life without the gracious intervention of God. Protestants believe that Jesus gave his life as a sacrifice for the elect, so they may be redeemed from their sin. In other religions, such as Judaism, Islam, and Gnosticism, the term "the fall" is not recognised and varying interpretations of the Eden narrative are presented. The term "prelapsarian" refers to the sin-free state of humanity prior to the fall.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_man

Thirdly, we were talking about the concept of God as described in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, not about the Adam and Eve story. That's a deviation from the main topic.

As I wrote here, the whole Trinity aspect is major difference between the Christian and the Jewish view of the nature of God. You purposely skipped that (important) point.

From the other link you posted:



Which of those two are most similar to each other? Hmm that's a very difficult question actually. /not


And yes, whatever things that Jesus taught was nothing outside of Judaism; he basically taught the same Jewish laws because he was a Jew himself.

As Bart Ehrman wrote in his book Jesus, Interrupted:

We have already seen that there was nothing about Jesus’ message or his mission that stood outside Judaism. He was a Jew, born to Jewish parents, raised in a Jewish culture; he became a teacher of the Jewish law, gathered around himself a group of Jewish followers, and instructed them in the essence of what he saw to be the true worship of the Jewish God. (Ehrman, p. 237)

But, later, Paul and some other Christians before him changed the central message of Christianity in a way as if keeping the Jewish law has nothing to do with because, to them, only through the belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus as an atonement for sins can a person be saved - not through the Jewish law.

Jesus taught his followers to keep the law as God had commanded in order to enter the kingdom. Paul taught that keeping the law had nothing to do with entering the kingdom. For Paul, only the death and resurrection of Jesus mattered. The historical Jesus taught the law. Paul taught Jesus. Or, as some scholars have put it, already with Paul the religion of Jesus has become the religion about Jesus. (Although, as I have pointed out, Paul did not invent this new take on Jesus but inherited it.) (Ehrman, p. 239)

Aside from that, again, the main point of my discussion (which you still haven't been able to refute) is that the Trinitarian Christian god is certainly not the same as the Judaic god nor the Islamic god. The god that you believe in is a misinterpreted version of the Judaic god which was originally the same as the Islamic god. Your own link states that Islam and Judaism are about "strict monotheism" whereas Christianity is about "Trinitarian monotheism."

All the above is more support for my argument that the Islamic and Judaic gods have more in common with each other than they have with the contemporary Christian god.