From: Sam Norton (elizaphanian@kohath.wanadoo.co.uk)
Date: Mon Aug 08 2005 - 19:28:00 BST
Hi Khaled,
Salāmu-'Alaikum
> Please consider the following:
> When I get in discussion with people about religion, they say to me you
> worship Allah and we worship God.
> So I ask them. If you Happen to be a Christian living in an Arab speaking
> country, what do you call God?
>
> They answer I get is God of course, then I tell them it is Allah. That
> tends to derail their train of thought and the first word out of their
> mouth is "NO".
I was discussing just that with a friend the other day. I trained with a
Palestinian Christian, and his stories were fascinating.
> That goes to show me 1. The ignorance 2. their refusal to see how Close
> the main 3 monotheistic religions are. ( Judaism, Christianity, Islam)
Ah, but. Wittgenstein again: how do I know that 2 people believe the same
thing when they say they believe in God (or Allah). Practice gives the words
their sense.
In other words, it is what people do with the language that is crucial.
> Which begs the next question. ( Play along here) when Christ does return,
> where do you think is he going to show up? Toledo, Ohio.?
>
> I think not. I would love to see the look on the face of the
> fundamentalists when they see a dark skinned, Arabic speaking messiah
> telling them it's time to go.
<grin> Quite right.
> ( I would love to see a survey showing me how many people think that the
> Bible was originally written in English). And do you happen to know where
> the word Bible comes from. The town of Byblos, North of Beirut was known
> for it's high quality papyrus paper.
There have been a lot of surveys showing that in fundamentalist quarters,
the Bible is believed to have originally been written in the 'King James
Version'. I think there is something here that might be called 'muslim
envy', in other words the desire to have the Bible turn into something like
the Koran, ie a single document from a single place in time, given by
dictation to a singe person.
>
> On a parting note, it's also very interesting to compare Eastern
> Christianity ( not Eastern orthodox necessarily) to protestant/catholic
> practices of those who live in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and
> Jordan to those who live in Europe and those who live in America.
>
> My point is before you go on comparing eastern religion to western, take
> a look at Eastern Christianity to western. How it first got Romanized,
> then westernized.
> That would give you lots of clues to the larger endeavor of comparing
> eastern _ _ _ to Western _ _ _.
I'd be interested to hear your take on my recent (long) post to DMB.
>
> For example in the Lord's prayer in English we say
>
> Our Father who art in heaven.............Give us our daily bread
>
> in Arabic you say:
>
> Our father in the skies..........Give us our bread, enough for our day.
Ah - but the only texts we have were written in Greek. Hmm. Compute that.
Cheers
Sam
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