the Catholic Church created Islam

[Hesychios]

My basic veiw as to the Origns of Islam (and this is slightly different from my original question, but…

If you look at the beilefs of the ebionites which were a pre Nicea “Jesus” sect,

and compare them with the basic dogmas Islam teaches about Jesus

there are a lot of similiarites…

emphasises one-ness of God, deny virgin birth, Jesus was a prophet…

and also, if you look up the wikepedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebionites

pay attention to this part

“Some scholars argue that the Ebionites survived much longer and identify them with a sect encountered by the historian Abd al-Jabbar around the year 1000.[34] Another possible reference to surviving Ebionite communities in northwestern Arabia, specifically the cities of Tayma and Tilmas, around the 11th century, appears in Sefer Ha’masaot, the “Book of the Travels” of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, a rabbi from Spain.[35] 12th century Muslim historian Muhammad al-Shahrastani mentions Jews living in nearby Medina and Hejaz who accepted Jesus as a prophetic figure and followed traditional Judaism, rejecting mainstream Christian views.[36] Some scholars argue that they contributed to the development of the Islamic view of Jesus due to exchanges of Ebionite remnants with the first Muslims.[10][24] However, Muslim theologians and those who accept their narratives of early Islam maintain that the Islamic view of Jesus was revealed in the Quran well before any significant Muslim encounter with Christians such as the Migration to Abyssinia.”

this is unverified, but there has been some beilef that Mohammeds parent(s)/guardian(s) were ebionites themselves… but this part is more speculation, while the development of Islams doctrines are more historically noted.

Actually, you have put forth a respectable theory.

Personally I doubt Mohammed had close relatives who were Christian heretics. As stated above somewhere it seems the Quranic faith is syncretistic. It intrigues me that Ebionites may have still existed in the further reaches of the Arabian peninsula, they lasted into the fourth century within the empire under discrimination and persecution. It is a historical fact that there were Jewish tribes in the deserts, whether by conversion or ethnic descent who can say, but they did exist, and some of these might also have been Messianic Jews, possibly even Ebionites with a Gospel of Matthew.

 

[Contarini]

One can most certainly think he is worshiping God, when in fact he’s worshiping a figment of his own imagination.

That doesn’t really make things any clearer. What do you mean by “worship”? As I understand the word, “worship” refers to an act of will. So I don’t know what it would mean to say that you think you are engaging in one act of will, and are really engaging in another one. Of course we speak metaphorically this way–so, in novels you sometimes read something like “he thought he really loved her, but he just loved a figment of his imagination.” In other words, the woman in question didn’t really have the qualities he ascribed to her, and/or his love wasn’t sufficiently unselfish and clear-sighted to create a real bond between him and this other person. I presume that you are speaking of something like this. But I don’t take this (when we use it of one human being loving another) to be more than a psychological metaphor describing weakness and immaturity in love. I take it to be a dramatic way of saying “his love for her was very imperfect,” not that he literally didn’t love her. And that is also what I mean when I use different God language. So, for instance, to someone who believes in Divine Command theory and puts God above the moral law rather than seeing the moral law as an expression of God’s nature (a relevant issue here, since this is the charge brought against Islam, or at least some forms of Islamic theology, by Pope Benedict in the Regensburg speech), I might say, “that’s not the God I worship.” But again, what I really mean by that is “you are ascribing very mistaken ideas to God.”

Perhaps a better analogy to get at what you mean would be the case, in the digital age, of a man engaging in an online “relationship” with what he thinks is a woman, only to discover that this person doesn’t have the attributes she claims, and indeed is not a woman at all. Clearly in that case the man really is developing feelings and desires for a “person” who does not in fact exist. In that case the other “person” is not just a projection of the would-be lover’s desires, but is also a figment deliberately concocted by a mischievous person on another computer. Yet another case would be someone who has hallucinations and dreams up an object of love who exists *only *in his own mind. A different example would be someone who falls in love with a real person, but gets her name and some information about her wrong. So he may think her name is Mary and she is a computer scientist from California, when her name is really Susan and she is a farm girl from Iowa. There I would argue strongly that the man really does love the woman he thinks he loves–he just has some things about her wrong. (And this is what I would claim is the case with Islam.)

But here’s where classical monotheism muddles things. There are many human beings, but (we both agree) there are not many gods. Not only is there only one existing God (of course I know you believe that), but there are no other *potential *gods either (this is the point whose significance I don’t think you quite grasp). So while one may mistake one human being for another, or dream up an individual who has all the characteristics of the human species but does not exist, this doesn’t apply to God. God, as Aquinas says, is not in a species. It therefore follows that anyone who directs the will and affections (in the way that we normally call “worship”) toward what he or she perceives to be a being with the basic characteristics that distinguish the monotheistic God from all individual beings who exist in species (in other words, an infinite being who is the source of all life and is free from all limitation), then that person should unquestionably be said to worship the true God, no matter how many mistakes they may make about God. There is no other “God” even in the imagination with which one could confuse the true God. To speak in this way is to muddle the question by improperly transferring language proper to beings who exist in species to God who exists beyond all species.

I guess I’ll put it this way: non-Trinitarians are not worshiping the same God that I worship, because I am not worshiping the same god that they worship. I know that most people come back with Judaism as a response, but that’s obviously a unique case. Judaism has thousands of years of God’s revelation in it.

That doesn’t help your case at all. It hurts it. If God can reveal Himself for thousands of years to people without mentioning the fact that He is a Trinity, then clearly one can worship the true God without believing in the Trinity. Of course Judaism is unique, but it only takes one unique case to invalidate a universal claim.

Your argument against Muslims worshiping the true God can’t be based on the Trinity. You have to find something on which Muslims and Jews differ if you are going to claim that Jews worship the true God and Muslims don’t.

So does Christianity.

Jews don’t think that this is any truer of Christianity than of Islam.

 

[Contarini]

Beyond that, there are human inventions called “God” that have little-to-nothing to do with the real God. It seems that we believe differently here.

Yes, indeed. I side with Aquinas, although I respect folks like Barth who have challenged this traditional view of God. Aquinas’s view is that “God” is a name we give to a being whose existence we deduce from His effects in creation. God is the ultimate cause of the perfections we see in the world. Anyone speaking of such an ultimate cause is speaking of God, period. We further believe that this Ultimate Cause has revealed Himself to us. But someone who doesn’t accept revelation may still be speaking of the true God.

Christian usage for hundreds of years bears this out. The Christian apologists–I would argue that Paul began this in Acts 17–repeatedly assume that the supreme deity acknowledged by pagans is the true God, and that pagans err in worshiping lesser beings instead of that deity. They never once, to my knowledge, suggest that this supreme deity is somehow “another God” or only a figment of the pagans’ imagination, although they do claim that the pagans’ lack of revelation and lack of humility before the revelation they do have (see Romans 1!) leads to much vagueness and error in their relationship to the true God, and in particular drives them to seek intermediaries who are actually enemies of the true God.

From the many conversations I have had with them. The difficulty with Islam is that sometimes it seems that all facts and beliefs are open to dispute.

Outsiders to Christianity often have the same impression

I do not believe that all Muslims say this or believe it. But it has been said to my face on multiple occasions, so at least some believe it.

I can believe that easily–Muslims often say very muddled things, as Christians do!

I take our Lord’s word for it that he existed.

And Muslims take what they believe to be God’s word for it that his favored son was Ishmael!

The point is that if you’re going to be skeptical about Islamic ability to “trace” their faith to Abraham, you need to take seriously skeptical claims about Christianity as well. Unless, that is, you are just saying that Christians don’t accept this claim based on *our *faith commitments. I don’t even think that that’s true, as a matter of fact. Our Scriptures clearly teach that Ishmael was Abraham’s son, and the connection between Arabs and Ishmael is a fairly well-rooted part of Jewish and Christian tradition.

Edwin

 

[Zooey]

shhh. it was the jesuites!! they started islam. or was it the Jews? the Masons? whoa! i got it. it was the aliens! peace

And:crying: all this time, I thought it was my Uncle Wombat!!:bighanky:

The very second I saw the name of this thread my a Chick-o-meter started blinking all over the place.
The faith section of the site has a good article dealing with our friend Jack doesn’t it?

Chick-0-Meter!! I** love** it!!!:thankyou::flowers::curtsey:

 

[Hereswith]

Mohammad revered Jesus. Thus, I believe that he probably thought that he would have rescued Jesus off the cross, or would not have let Him go there in the first place. To think that He was even executed would have been too much for him to have conceded and a shameful situation (missing the whole point of the crucifixion and its purpose for him personally). He almost certainly miss-understood the meaning of the sword in the Bible too, as he would have heard it from the monk and not out of Scriptures.

I think “revered” is a strong word. He had no concept of Christ as the son of God. He thought of Christ as his own equal - a “prophet” with a direct line to God.

Interestingly, the Muslim faith claims to be an earlier faith than Christianity, and yet Christians are named by the term ‘Christians’ in the Koran. If it was earlier than Christianity then Christianity wouldn’t have been in their book, neither would Jesus or Mary; so it debunks the theory that their faith came before.

This is particularly silly, since Mohammad didn’t live until 600 years after Christianity began. Math apparently escapes them.

 

[Hereswith]

Don’t know where you got that idea. muslims trace their relgious belifes back to abraham. Muhammed Claimed to have brought back the original faith in the one god.

What Mohammad claimed and what is reasonable and accurate, are often two very different things in my experience.

I have to agree that the concept of GOD as the Muslims understand it, is very different from the concept that Christians have. So in that sense, the God of Abraham doesn’t have much to do with Islam. Saying it is so, didn’t make it so.

 

[Contarini]

What Mohammad claimed and what is reasonable and accurate, are often two very different things in my experience.

I have to agree that the concept of GOD as the Muslims understand it, is very different from the concept that Christians have. So in that sense, the God of Abraham doesn’t have much to do with Islam. Saying it is so, didn’t make it so.

I know plenty of other Christians who have very different ideas about God than I do. I may even say rhetorically to them “that’s not the God I worship.” But I don’t literally mean that we worship different beings.

The only reason to treat Islam differently in this regard is that they don’t believe in the Trinity. And as already stated, the example of the Jews blows this argument out of the water.

Edwin

 

[Contarini]

This is particularly silly, since Mohammad didn’t live until 600 years after Christianity began. Math apparently escapes them.

There are plenty of reasons to think that Muhammad had a weak sense of chronology (such as the reference to Mariam Jesus’ mother as the “sister of Aaron”). But this isn’t one of them. The claim is that “Islam” is simply the worship of the One God, and thus predates either Jewish claims to special divine favor or the Christian belief in Incarnation and Trinity.

Edwin

 

[ALLGIRLS]

To get this thread back on track (there’s already a thread floating around debating if Muslims worship the same G/god as we do):

Doesn’t Jack Chick also claim that the CC invented the JW’s, LDS, and Masons? I’m sorry, but I can’t even stomach looking at his tracts, so I’m not going to search for them. I do recall reading that though, and thought it was hilarious, since they’re all groups are are opposed to Catholicism.

In Christ,

Ellen

 

[Hanael]

. I do recall reading that though, and thought it was hilarious, since they’re all groups are are opposed to Catholicism.

In Christ,

Ellen

Muslims are not opposed to Catholicism, at least not the majority. Muslims consider Catholics People of the Book along with Jews. Their only thing regarding Catholics and Jews was that Jews and Catholics did not have the full story and were not complete religions. Muslims even acknowledge Jesus as a prophet just like they recognize all of the other prophets in Judaism and Catholicism, but they feel that Muhammed was the last and final prophet of God.

Anyway, back on topic. I’ve never heard that and I think it’s pretty funny.

 

[StrawberryJam]

I ran into some weirdo the other day who said “the catholic church created Islam” something about the arabs needed a messiah so the pope creates mohammed…

which makes me laugh it seems silly that the pope would create another relgion.

just wondering, has anyone else ever heard of the above assertion?

is it some sort of weird UFO conspiracy, or is it some sort of charge that has a little more “merit”… need to know if I should simply ignore it, or is it a “valid” topic for debate…

Number one: I never heard of the above assertation.

Number two: The merit of the argument or lack of needs to be examined upon the claims of the one making them. You give us no reason to even examine this, as no claims or basis for them are made here, not surprisingly- since you oppose the claim.

If your opponent has not given you any basis for the claim, there is no need for you to ask anyone here to help you. You could simply ask them for their basis. Once they give you one, come back and I will try to help you sift through the list of logical fallicies tossed around as “truth statements”. However, when I do so- I will ask you to apply the same logic to your “truth statements”

 

[Holly3278]

I ran into some weirdo the other day who said “the catholic church created Islam” something about the arabs needed a messiah so the pope creates mohammed…

which makes me laugh it seems silly that the pope would create another relgion.

just wondering, has anyone else ever heard of the above assertion?

is it some sort of weird UFO conspiracy, or is it some sort of charge that has a little more “merit”… need to know if I should simply ignore it, or is it a “valid” topic for debate…

Well, I would ask them to provide me with the name of the pope who created Muhammad. I would them ask them to provide me with proof that this pope actually did such a thing.