Haha you see this is your problem. It’s not about turning around or winning this argument.
Then why are you the one saying “haha” in two successive posts? My point was precisely that this isn’t a worthy manner of conducting this discussion. We could both go around saying “haha” for a hundred years and not get anywhere.
I’m trying to explain what I believe and why, and I’m trying to engage your arguments substantively. I invite you to do the same thing instead of saying “haha” and rudely asking me to reread my posts, as if I didn’t know what I was saying.
Monotheism was NEVER considered the plumb-line. People can worship Satan as the only transcendent being. That is monotheist but its obviously FALSE.
I have already pointed out (in post 243) the reasons why this is not the case. It is in fact impossible to worship Satan as the only transcendent being. Satan is, by definition, a being created by God. It
might be possible to hold a strictly dualist view of reality and then choose to worship the “evil” god. But in fact, as monotheists have been pointing out to dualists for hundreds of years, strict dualism doesn’t make any sense, and dualist religions usually resolve into a form of monotheism in which the good God
is ultimate and transcendent in a way that the evil god isn’t.
My point stands. Monotheism has always been the criterion used until relatively recently, and in all the posts on this subject no one has been able to come up with a
single counterexample from the Fathers. Mickey tried, but he failed. St. John of Damascus condemns Islam in no uncertain terms, but he never says that “Allah” in Islam is a false god. Given the pungency of his language, this omission is pretty significant. The medieval Byzantines who
did say that the God of Muhammad was a false god did so on the basis of a mistranslation of the Qur’an which led them to suppose mistakenly that Muslims thought God to be a material object (this is incompatible with monotheism as I defined it in post 243).
There is nothing more to be said. Now what you said above, once again contradicts your OWN words I quoted from Post #258. Now you are again saying “The God of Islam is the true God”. Seriously Edwin, how am I suppossed to take this discussion seriously? In one post you say there is no such thing as the God of Islam and then you come around and tell me that there is
You could take this discussion seriously if you took language a bit more seriously. I did not say that there was no such thing as “the God of Islam.” I said that there was no such thing as “the God who revealed Himself to Muhammad.” The God of Islam is the one Creator of the universe. That is the essential way in which Muslims themselves define God, and this definition agrees with the view of God shared by Christians and Jews. Therefore, the
only possible ground for saying that Muslims do not believe in the true God is their denial of the Trinity (but both of us agree that this is an untenable position).
Christians and Jews differ from Muslims in that we do not accept the Islamic claim that the one God revealed Himself to Muhammad. You have chosen, for polemical purposes, to take the Islamic claim of revelation as the essential characteristic defining “the God of Islam.” That’s what leads you to the mistaken conclusion that I’m contradicting myself. But this is an unreasonable position. Muslims themselves do not think about God this way. They define God
first as the one eternal Creator, and then make the claim that this eternal Creator revealed Himself to Muhammad.
Thus, your phrase “the God who revealed Himself to Muhammad” is simply a verbal figment on your part. It points to nothing real, so why use it? In Islamic thought, the God who revealed Himself to Muhammad was not some otherwise unknown being with no characteristics except the characteristic of having-revealed-himself-to-Muhammad. He was the God who created all humanity and who had previously revealed Himself through the Hebrew prophets and through Jesus. Thus, it is unreasonable to say that the proposition: “There is no God who revealed Himself to Muhammad” means that Muslims worship a false god. Rather, it means that they believe one particular false thing about the true God. (They actually believe a number of false things about God, but this is the key one.)
You are welcome to bow out of the discussion if you wish, of course. If you do post, and if your post does not in fact address the arguments I am making, I will myself bow out, since I’m sure we could both be spending our time more profitably than repeating the same points over and over!
God bless,
Edwin
