Show me your definition of GOD(s).

[Dawud]

Thanks
I'm not going to talk about God here as much as possible - too much immaturity and spiteful hate

[Whateverist]

I have no idea why everyone seems to be posting non-sense and avoiding the subject.

The definition of a god (or at least God) according to Islam is set by both the Hadith (Sayings of Mohammed that never made it into the Koran) as well as the Koran itself. There are 99 attributes aka "names" that define "God". These names are sometimes used to refer to God.



In Islam God is the creator of everything; Heaven and earth, the sun, moon and the planets, man, animals... well you get the picture.
He (yes it's a HE) is immortal. Existed and will always exist. Was not created. Omnipotent, omni-benevolent, omni-sapient, omniscient, and omnipresent. He was not born and did not give birth (although the later is understood generally as he has no child.)
God is capable of extreme punishment or great mercy.

When people die, the soul goes back to him.
Mohammed was supposedly asked once about where God is to which he responded "he is closer to you than your own carotid."

In Arabic the word Allah is a contraction of Al Ilah. Which both mean "The God". This is contrary to what a lot of people who do not know Arabic claim; that Allah and God are not the same. Christians use the same word in the Arabic bibles.



Notice the small "w" with a vertical line on top. This is a shaddah (it doubles the letter below it) above it a superscript alef to make the second a in allah a long "A".

Thank you very much for your straight forward reply. It does sound as thought God is understood as meaning everything. But that God should be thought of as male is beyond me. Perhaps this is a result of a language, like French or Spanish, which assigns gender to all objects. Being a native English speaker this has always seemed strange but, you know, viva la difference.

Or do you think that God is also supposed to be understood as person-like and especially with the qualities associated with men? I know not all Christians understand God to be a personal (i.e., person-like) god. It is the great unwashed masses who are told fairy tales with personified gods to make them fear and obey. Likewise with heaven, hell and judgement. Not every Christian thinks that you literally spend eternity as yourself in a place called heaven or hell. Neither do they think there will be a pronouncement made by God or his representative of the fate you merit. That is just for mass consumption.

I wonder if we have any Muslim members (or theists of any stripe) who hold a more nuanced belief in 'god', 'eternity' and so on.

I'm also curious why you, Lord Xenu, count yourself as an atheist now. Had you been a Muslim before and if your were, had you believed it all on the literal level? Perhaps you have an intro thread I should read. (Welcome to the forum by the way and thanks again for the thoughtful reply.)

[Dawud]

Muslim scholarship holds God to be without gender...

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Never has and rejects this concept...

[lordxenu]

Muslim scholarship holds God to be without gender...

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Never has and rejects this concept...

In Arabic, God is referenced to with male pronouns.

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I'm also curious why you, Lord Xenu, count yourself as an atheist now. Had you been a Muslim before and if your were, had you believed it all on the literal level? Perhaps you have an intro thread I should read. (Welcome to the forum by the way and thanks again for the thoughtful reply.)

At some point in my life I used to be a Christian then a Muslim, then at 17 I gave it all up. Who knew books would do that to you?

I never believed in literal Islam. At the same time I never had read the whole Koran. I used to trully believe that there were scientific miracles in the Koran. But as I read more and more, I realized that such claims were not unique to Islam and its book.
I learned that all religions had evolved from something else. All religious books have errors and inconsistencies.

I just grew up I suppose.

To answer a previous question, yes God is supposed to be without gender (just like bacteria). But Arabic only has male and female pronouns. There's no "it" in Arabic.

[Tex]

God: First Causer, Non-Contingent Being.

[Ryantology]

Quite simple really - if I talked about the "largest planet ever"

We wouldn't know all its attributes or be able to even imagine specifically what it looks like etc - but we can know that it's there. We can know it.

Likewise if there were such things that were beyond human perception but knowable through their effects around us (e.g. a human mind) we could get to know it but not understand it.

Not taking any presumptions there cannot be things that are beyond human perception, you can see that there are many things we can be aware of and not fully understand.

What if you talked about the "largest planet ever"? And why is this a terrible analogy?

First, we know planets exist. We live on one. We can point at it and say "planets definitely exist, here's one for you to look at". Right away, the comparison breaks down because there are no gods to point at. To say that any real physical object has a 'largest' counterpart is not a leap of faith, it is a physical certainty.

How about the 'largest'? Planets cannot be indefinitely large. A planet which acquires enough mass (around 15x Jupiter's) will become a brown dwarf star because there is enough pressure in the core to ignite deuterium. There can be millions of them at that threshold this very moment. No doubt that one of them, by some fraction of a percent, will be the 'largest', or at least, the most massive, but again, this is not faith. This is formula.

When you are talking about something humans invent, such as God, what can't we know about him? We can invent any attribute we want, and when we invent mysterious, 'unknowable' attributes, that is just laziness on the part of the inventor.

There are real things of which we conceive but do not comprehensively know. Gods and other fictional beings are not among them. It fits the theist mindset well that you have to appeal to scientific ignorance to justify your deliberate lack of imagination. And, it is deliberate. You could as easily pretend to know everything about god as you pretend to know only a little, but if you really believed you knew your god inside and out, you would probably not fear it as much as you do.

God is one without the ability to pluralise,
God relies on nothing to sustain Him,
God does not Beget (use part of Him to create another - or pass on the role of God), nor was God born (necessary being),
And there is nothing exactly like God. (Nothing we can imagine is God).

These are all qualities you have arbitrarily applied to the fictional being of your choice. They mean nothing to us and you cannot demonstrate the reality of any of them. You may mistake these as axiomatic fact, but don't expect everyone else to share in your errors.

[goodnews]

Hello . If it were possible in this realm to intergrate past and presant mankinds introspection to elucidate a clarification for an explanation that is difinitive of God = God is all things to all men or one could say God is all in all I guess there are as many definitions of God as there are definitions of definitions! one thing I am sure of is that we are still at the beginning of our creation and this lesson of good/evil will be well worth it ps: I used the big words to confuse the Satanists

[Ryantology]

Hello . If it were possible in this realm to intergrate past and presant mankinds introspection to elucidate a clarification for an explanation that is difinitive of God = God is all things to all men or one could say God is all in all I guess there are as many definitions of God as there are definitions of definitions! one thing I am sure of is that we are still at the beginning of our creation and this lesson of good/evil will be well worth it ps: I used the big words to confuse the Satanists

Good job, I'm confused.

[Tonus]

Hello . If it were possible in this realm to intergrate past and presant mankinds introspection to elucidate a clarification for an explanation that is difinitive of God = God is all things to all men or one could say God is all in all I guess there are as many definitions of God as there are definitions of definitions! one thing I am sure of is that we are still at the beginning of our creation and this lesson of good/evil will be well worth it ps: I used the big words to confuse the Satanists

Who were you trying to confuse with all of the typos?

[Whateverist]

God: First Causer, Non-Contingent Being.

Thanks but neither of those mean anything to me. Both are just fancy sounding hypotheticals.