Easter and Passover Greetings

In the vein of the early Christian theologians, issuing tidings in the form of an Easter Letter I want to offer my apologies for having been offline from this blog for so long. Additionally, there were several kind and supportive comments waiting for my approval that I did not know about.  I could partly blame it on the fact that I was not emailed notification about these, but in reality, I have been handling the decline and death of both my parents over the last several years, followed by dealing with their estate matters, truly an all-consuming and demoralizing set of tasks.

So, with that said, I want to thank everyone for their support and to encourage everyone to like my public page on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Dr-Arik-Greenberg/203743062988065), or follow me on Twitter @DrArik.  You can also follow the Facebook page of the non-profit that I founded, the Institute for Religious Tolerance, Peace and Justice (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Institute-for-Religious-Tolerance-Peace-and-Justice/215402468497328), and see our page, (www.InstituteForReligiousTolerance.org) to view our recent and upcoming events and campaigns. Also, I have become integrally involved in the movement to unionize part-time and contingent faculty in higher education.  Please feel free to view the FB page of our movement at Loyola Marymount University (https://www.facebook.com/LMUnifiedAdjunctFaculty).

Here is to a wonderful rest of the year, committed to social justice and making the world generally a better place.

Happy Easter (Pascha) and Happy Passover to all of you. "Christos Anesti!" as the Greek Orthodox would say.

All my blessings to you,
Arik

An Open Letter to Marc Theissen and the ‘Torturers of Freedom’

The following is an open letter to Marc Theissen and the ‘torturers of freedom’ whom he blindly supports, aids and abets. I invite the reader first to view the website of this conservative apologist: http://www.marcthiessen.com/ But read with caution, and consider what it truly means to be a Conservative in the modern age and how that differs from times long gone. Mr. Theissen supports the torture meted out by representatives of the U.S. Government since 9/11, as being both necessary to ensure our freedom and security as well as being heroic.

Is it heroic to torment the body of a supine individual who cannot move or defend himself? Was it heroic for the Spanish Inquisition to torture and murder thousands of Jews and dissenting yet faithful Christians for their disparity of belief? Did this protect the sanctity of the Kingdom of God? Was it heroic for the Romans to torture our Christian ancestors for fear that their beliefs would cause the ruin of the Roman Empire? Was it heroic for the Nazis to torture Jews to ensure that their “filth” would not contaminate Germany and Europe any further?

Numerous people have died under torture by American hands over the last three decades alone, and these numbers are increasing. Can we be sure that these folks were indeed guilty of the crimes that they were being accused of or investigated for? Many have been shown to have been innocent. Even still, our Constitution - the document that guides us morally in our American experiment - is very clear about "cruel and unusual punishment". Our assent to the Geneva Convention is central to America's moral position as "the good guys". That we did not torture in previous wars and centuries is crucial to our identity as morally superior. Even if they had been guilty, has not torture been shown to create erratic and unreliable results? Perhaps we can say that the program of torture is not so much for the purpose of gaining intelligence but for two other reasons - very nefarious and devilish reasons - 1) to strike terror into the hearts of any potential adversaries, effectively creating an American junta in various countries and even in our own, in which the authorities may not be questioned or challenged. The loss of freedom is one step away. 2) To allow those personnel (be they military or spies such as the CIA) to exercise their blood lust, thereby funneling the Satanic urges of these erstwhile sociopaths into more "efficient", "acceptable", and “sociable” channels of behavior.

I did not ask to be the beneficiary of this evil. I did not ask to be protected by Devils and Demons. I do not wish to be kept safe in my bed while others, either in my back yard or a half a world away are twisted and gouged, nearly drowned or choked. Our children, nestled safely in their beds, while someone else is systematically deprived of sleep, food, medical attention, dignity, and legal counsel—guilty or innocent, merely “accused”—are not safe from the tyranny that is perpetrating these crimes against humanity; they are being nursed by its cold, dead teat and being weaned in a world where true conscience is rarely found.

The bottom line: I see the smug, smiling face of Marc Theissen, barely out of his diapers, still bearing the baby fat of his privileged youth, preaching to us from his Ivory Tower of safety that we should be grateful for the torture that is being committed in our name, for our “safety”. I remind this un-American buffoon that he must re-read the words and opinions of our founding fathers, such as Ben Franklin who counseled us that those who would trade a little security for a little liberty deserve neither security nor liberty. Perhaps one day, those like Marc Theissen and his ilk - the John Yoos and Jack Bybees of the world - will be deemed enemies of the state, while they protest that they are prisoners of conscience as they writhe and bleed in agony of the torture that is necessary to silence them for the sake of the safety and sanctity of our "free" state.

My America doesn’t torture. My America fought against the Nazis, against the Fascists and the Empire of Japan, all regimes that tortured and committed countless crimes against humanity without a second thought. And we won without having to resort to torture to meet our goals. This is what made us the good guys. I do not relish the thought of dishonoring my forefathers by resorting to torture, having erroneously convinced myself that the laws which governed their wars, and the morals that guided our founding fathers, are obsolete, not good enough for our modern world. Stand up, America, and count yourselves among the good guys. Do not emulate your enemies, or you will become like them. You will become them.

Belief, a delusion?

I pity those like Richard Dawkins and those like him who have no sense of faith and convince themselves – using only empirical evidence and corporeal senses – that belief in God is a delusion, irrational. It does not matter to me what your faith is. I do not believe that without faith you will go to Hell or be eternally punished. To me it is punishment in and of itself to be without a belief in a higher power.

I have no empirical evidence for the existence of God, but I know that I am not wrong. Through noetic means, through very ancient and inherent senses beyond the five that we count, through knowledge that is gained by observation of the world – the entire universe and its deeper and innermost working – through these senses, I have come to a deep and sublime knowledge of a God that surrounds us, binds us, and sustains us. It is not merely around us, nor is it merely our matrix, it IS us.

My primary misgiving is that I am not able to convey this in any intelligible words to those around me, that they will not be able to share in the knowledge I have gained in my search. It is easy for those who seek God to write seemingly empty words, talking about sublimity and ineffability and transcendence. Until one has truly experienced this, through noesis, gnosis, the direct experience of the Divine, it is nothing more than trite language, inspiring more boredom than interest. Once again, I do not worry that those who do not know this will be punished; it is punishment enough to be without God, to feel alone in the universe, without higher purpose, without a sense of unity with the Divine.

To say that God is in the clouds of a sunset is cliché. To say that God is in the experience of aging and seeing those around you getting younger is cliché. To say that God is in the love between spouses is cliché. To say that God is in the love of a grandparent is cliché. To say that God is in the experience of watching one’s parents become aged is cliché. To say that God is in the reminiscence of youth and the remembrance of sacred time, nostalgic and formative moments, more fiction than history, is cliché. To say that God is in the death of a friend, taken far too young – or in the deaths of two friends taken far too young – is cliché. To say that God is in anything, and is real to us in any way…is cliché. But it is no less true.

I hope that you, the reader, can find God a little bit more in your life every day. It is what will unite us more than anything else, more than any other common experience. I give you my brotherly love and wish you the presence of mind to breath in God’s breath at least once every day.

A Christmas Creed?

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to watch Disneyland’s Christmas parade (held nightly inside the park during the Christmas season), and was intrigued to hear Santa Claus inquire of the audience several times, shouting from the back of his sleigh like a tent-revival preacher, “Do you believe in the magic of Christmas?” While this is surely just a folksy expression of seasonal merriment mixed with shameless self-promotion by Disney, I cannot help but think that the ubiquitous appeal to “the magic of Christmas” is a popular expression of faith that has somehow missed the mark. Children everywhere are taught from an early age to believe in folk myths which are not at all supported by the doctrine of their religion, and are fully expected to discover their untruth, almost on schedule, much like a rite of passage. And adults are even enjoined to maintain some semblance of belief —in the “spirit of Christmas”—not so much to promote the charitable and pious spirit behind Christmas, so much as to buoy their purchasing proclivities through the holidays.

In the end, it is almost as if the insistence of belief in the "sacraments" of Christmas has become somewhat like a Christian creed, more important than the piety that the historical Saint Nicholas tried to spread. And so in succumbing to this [speaking tongue in cheek of course], I urge you all to accept, memorize, and recite yearly this creed, much like the “Apostles’ Creed” that many of you remember from your Sunday school days. If you do not accept this creed, you will all be condemned to an eternity of stockings filled with lumps of coal. And if you do not believe in the magic of Christmas, you will all be damned to a life without Rankin-Bass animated television Christmas specials.

Christmas Creed

We believe in one Santa Claus, All-knowing,
Maker and bringer of toys,

And in Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer,
Who was born to Donner and Mrs. Donner,
Rejected by the other reindeer,
Traveled with his friends to the Island of Misfit Toys,
And suffered under the Abominable Snowman;
But returning to Christmas Town one foggy night,
Was redeemed by Santa,
And now guides the sleigh pulled by eight tiny reindeer, delivering gifts in only one night,
To those deemed worthy by Santa, who judges the naughty and the nice.

We believe in the magic of Christmas,
The residence at the North Pole,
Entry through the chimney,
The role of the elves,
Flying reindeer,
Frosty the Snowman,

And in the twice-checked list, infallible.

Amen

Happy Hanukkah

Here is my contribution on this, the seventh night of Hanukkah. Eleven months ago, a YouTube viewer made some very disparaging comments on an existent video about famous Jews in Hollywood. His handle was very telling in and of itself. His litany of names seems somewhat diverse and disjointed, chosen only because they were not (verifiably) Jewish. I quote:

IchBinEinDenier
11 months ago
"jews have nobody within even a 1000 miles of Pasteur, Goethe, Shakespeare, Bacon, Tennyson, Dickens, Gogol, Chaucer, Hawthorne, Twain, Leibniz, Newton, Darwin, Hutton, Galileo, Copernicus, Hawking, Edison, Hubble, Tesla, DaVinci, Michelangelo, VanGogh, Rembrandt, Bosch, Vermeer, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Bach, Wagner, Voltaire, Schopenhauer, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato,Hippocrates, Sophocles, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Ingersoll, Emerson, Paine, Jefferson, Franklin"
(Taken from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBBDdsrJC3s&feature=fvw)

First of all, a good number of these folks are obviously pre-Christian, so their presence on this list serves no purpose other than to collect a variety of non-Jewish names and artificially align them against Judaism. If this individual is trying to claim these thinkers for his or her own “race” – be that “Aryan” or “Anglo” or Christian, many of these just fall short of any set of unifying criteria.

Still, in taking his claim seriously (which I really should not), allow me to enumerate a goodly number of people of Jewish ancestry or identity who do indeed come within “1000 miles” of the good folk this buffoon has taken captive for his soulless argument.

There’s Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, King David, King Solomon, and every writer of every text of the Old Testament – all Jews. And every author of every text of the New Testament was arguably a Jew, too. There’s Philo of Alexandria, Flavius Josephus, Rabbi Hillel, Rabbi Akiva, Judah ha Nasi, Shimon bar Yochai, Isaac Luria (and a great number of other early and medieval rabbis whose names I won’t assume the common reader would recognize), Moses Maimonides, Baruch Spinoza, Abraham Abulafia, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Levi Strauss, Claude Levi-Strauss, Benjamin Disraeli, Boris Pasternak, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Harold Pinter, and a whole host of Nobel Laureates in the arts and literature, Hans Adolf Krebs, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman, J. Robert Oppenheimer and many others among the Manhattan Project, as well as a whole host of Nobel laureates in the physical sciences and mathmatics, Elie Wiesel, George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copeland, Philip Glass, Stephen Sondheim, Eric Zeisl, Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, along with most of the best and brightest of the global entertainment industry. All of these folks I have chosen for their seminal contributions to high literature, art, and lasting classics of Western civilization, along with science, mathematics and government.

But lastly, we have one more: Jesus of Nazareth. He was a Jew. He never renounced his Judaism, according to any verifiable source; he remained the scion of a Jewish reform movement and died under Roman law, being mockingly labeled “King of the Jews” on account of his affiliation. Without him, a Jew, there would be no Christianity, no Western Civilization. Without him, Europe would have remained a great wasteland of warring ethnicities, united only by their hatred for each other.

And by the way, I wouldn’t be surprised if more than one of those whom the commenter listed above co-opted for his litany of non-Jewish names had a Jew or two in the woodpile. Afterall, cream does rise to the top.

Happy Hanukkah!

True Friendship: Unquestioning Support or the Painful Truth?

In recent years, the U.S. military and paramilitary agencies such as the CIA have increasingly engaged in questionable levels of human rights abuses, such as torture and unlawful detainment. This has been authorized by the former administration of President George W. Bush, and in some respects has been upheld by the Obama administration, either by not recognizing the existence of, and abolishing, CIA black prison sites, or by refusing to prosecute various officials of the previous administration who were complicit or originators of these unholy doctrines.

I have heard it said that we must support our military in whatever they do, that they are the ones making the sacrifices, that to criticize anything they do is to undermine them. This, my friends, is the road to tyranny. To blindly support everything that the military does, regardless of its righteousness, is not to support it, but to support the erosion of its morality and to bring about its eventual downfall. Many world powers throughout history have effectively become a military junta, because of its armies going unchecked and out of control.

It is easy to appear as a hero when one is surrounded by other well-armed men of war. It is easy to go along with the crowd and to commit injustices in the name of might. It is easy to be swept up by a mob mentality and to commit atrocities. True heroism lies in the ability to stand apart and do what is right, regardless of whether you are supported by the mob or not. As Mark Twain once said, “It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.” It has often been wisely said that the best friend is the one who points out your faults. This is indeed the hardest of things to do. Very few have ever done this, in all of history.

But among those few may be counted some of the finest and most well-decorated military leaders of all time. First of all, I speak of Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, who wrote a book called War is a Racket, citing the greed and misconduct of the military industrial complex that were behind the inception of World War I, and other countless wars prior to that. One can even read the text of his book online nowadays: http://lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm One of the most decorated Marines of all time, let alone any U.S. military figure, he was mocked for his beliefs and his words fell upon deaf ears during his lifetime, passing from this world just prior to WWII, perhaps the “last good war”, a rare exception to his theory, proving the norm.

I speak also of Major General Antonio Taguba, a retired U.S. Army general officer whose 34 years of faithful service were cut short when Pentagon officials asked him to retire, giving no reason but the hint that it was due to his 2004 report, which was highly critical of the Bush administration’s support of torture. Shortly before his dismissal, the general learned that his report was being investigated, and he stated "I’d been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia." (The New Yorker, June 25, 2007) Maj. Gen. Taguba continues to stand up for the rights of the oppressed, having been critical of the regimes that sought to silence him so that they may continue to profit from their sadism. His more recent report to Physicians for Human Rights is here: http://brokenlives.info/?page_id=32

I speak also of former Commandant of the Marine Corps, Retired General Paul X. Kelley, who served as the highest ranking Marine and commanding general of that body from 1983-87. In 2007, he co-authored an op-ed article for the Washington Post in which he sharply criticized the Bush Administration’s use and endorsement of torture as something that not only harmed our moral ground as Americans but in pragmatic terms put the U.S. servicemen at risk of retaliation for generations to come. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/25/AR2007072501881.html General Kelley is someone with vast military experience and must be considered a voice of political and tactical reason, one who cannot be accused of antiquated idealism unfit for our modern times of global terrorism. He has seen the world and is no unrealistic naïf. And he is to be commended for his vociferous defense of democracy, in the face of villains wrapping themselves in the flag.

All three of these, and others whom I do not have room here to mention, are the true heroes, fighting for freedom, justice, and democracy. It is they who deserve medals to acknowledge their valor and bravery. Not bravery against an enemy with a gun, but an unseen enemy that strikes from within, an invisible spirit of disgrace and cruelty, the very enemy that our forefathers sought to safeguard against when they wrote our Constitution and gave our nation its first living breaths. It is they who are the true moral beacons, calling our military to remain an example to other nations, each person an ambassador of their nation to the rest of humanity. It is they who insist that we can and must do better.

The admonitions that I proffer here can also be said of any other force or entity that we support, be it those in our own police forces, or those in other allied nations, such as Israel. We have heard of police brutality and corruption in various departments around the nation, throughout the years. One always hopes that it is kept at a minimal level, but often it is kept hushed by cover-ups, as if to snitch on a fellow officer were more of a crime than to harbor corruption in one’s conduct, one’s precinct, and in one’s heart. To “rat out” one’s fellow officer who has done wrong is considered to be a greater betrayal than taking graft, “throwing down” a weapon or other falsely planted evidence upon a suspect, or to commit other forms of brutality and iniquity. Major General Taguba’s statement quoted above, about feeling as if he were serving not in the Army but in the Mafia, seems apropos here, when a code of silence – omerta – is more important than “to protect and serve”.

Internationally, we see many pro-Israel partisans stating that to criticize anything that the State of Israel does is tantamount to a betrayal of Israel. But I say that to support unjust actions, illegal or immoral, just because one is your friend or ally, is not to be much of a friend, but rather an enabler and an accomplice. The true friend tells his addict compatriot that he will no longer help him buy drugs or cover for his thievery to support a deadly habit. A true friend tells their pal that they will not cover for him beating his wife or molesting his children. A true friend rebukes you when you are wrong, but helps you rebuild your life when you are in prison for those crimes.

That is what we must be, as a nation, as a culture. If we are to remain the true moral authority that we claim to be, and that we rightly called ourselves long ago, we must refrain from doing wrong ourselves, and must remain beyond reproach. We must hold our law enforcement to the highest standards of the law. We must hold our military to the highest levels of conduct whether in combat or in recreation (which means no shooting civilians for sport!). And we must hold our allies to the same high moral standard. If Israel sins, then we as a supposedly “Christian” nation must not foster the ill behavior that had frequently plagued Israel in her ancient existence, the very iniquity that the Hebrew scriptures tell us were the source of Israel’s periodic punishments and falling out of favor with God. As Israel’s supporters, we must be her most honest, and at times sharply critical, friends. Israel’s importance to us is surely rooted in our corporate and national belief in her Biblical right to exist and in her mandate as God’s chosen people. If this is in fact our belief, then attendant to this is our responsibility to help Israel to abide by God’s laws, namely those of justice to sojourners and neighbors, fairness to the oppressed, and compassion for her cousins, the Palestinians.

As a Jew, the child of many generations of oppressed people, I must strive to prove myself among the righteous, the ones who hold themselves to a higher standard of behavior. And that includes being truthful to my friends, even if it is dangerous to tell them the truth.

Do Muslims and Christians Worship the Same God?

Do Muslims and Christians worship the same God? Muslims claim that they do. Most Christians recognize that they do. Some Christians, however, do not agree. Let's take an honest look at their points before we come to a decision.

I have come across a number of websites maintained by fundamentalist Christians who deny that Christians and Muslims worship the same god. That is to say, these Christians believe that Allah is not the same as God the Father in Christianity, but some other deity, perhaps the so-called "monkey god" so callously referred to by national Tea Party leader Mark Williams. On the basis of a variety of comparisons between how Allah is described in the Koran and how God is described in the New Testament, these Christians make their claim that the two are not one and the same. But these differences are extremely pedantic and are rooted solely in minutiae of doctrine, not in the essential descriptions of the Deity. What strikes me as odd is that these same observations and concerns about the nature and description of Allah would similarly hold true for the Hebrew god Yahweh, as described in the Old Testament, yet modern Christians do believe that God the Father is indeed the same god as the one presented in the Old Testament-the Hebrew Bible-and is the same deity worshiped by the Jewish people. Yet by this same token, the concerns these Christians have about the nature and description of Allah would disqualify the Jewish god from being identical. This is not addressed by them.

I would like to address a number of contentions raised by two of these websites in particular. I will list them individually and give my responses.

On the website, http://www.apologeticsindex.org/i07ab.html, the following claims are made:

The god of Islam, Allah, is most definitely not the God of the Bible. Allah is presented in the Koran as an autocratic ruler who is aloof and arbitrary (Sura 5:40). Allah is unknowable whereas the God of the Bible is knowable (2 Timothy 1:12). Allah is impersonal, unlike the personal God the Scriptures reveal (1 Peter 5:6-7).

Allah is capricious (Sura 2:284), whereas the true God is trustworthy. And Allah is never anywhere presented as a god of love—which is the essence of the nature of the true God (1 John 4:7-16).

It has been mentioned by many theologians over time that there is a highly noticeable difference in how God is presented in the Old Testament compared to that of the New Testament. The claim was often made that the God of the Old Testament was an angry and wrathful God, sometimes even prone to seemingly capricious fits of destruction (Gen 6:13) and merciless commands of genocide (1 Samuel 15:3). This even led some early Christians, namely Gnostics, to surmise that the two are simply not one and the same, that the God of the Old Testament was a diabolical figure merely pretending to be the true God, the father of Jesus Christ, in order to enslave us. The more mainstream Christians quickly sought to suppress this speculation, reasserting that while the personality of God in the Old Testament may be presented differently than in the New Testament, Christians certainly do believe that they are one and the same. By the criteria in question listed above, might we not still say that the God of the Jews is a different deity than the God of the Christians?

To say that the Christian God is knowable, but the Muslim god is not, is open to interpretation. By "knowable" what do we mean? In John 1:18, we are told that "no one has ever seen God...the only Son has made him known." But to what degree is God knowable? Could it be that we can know of God and about God, yet still he remains a mystery to us? The Apostle Paul states, “For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man's spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God” (1 Cor 2:11). Ultimately, the Gospel of Matthew tells us that “no one knows the Father except for the Son” (Matt 11:27). Could it be that the Koran describes Allah in the same way? The author of the short article quoted never cites a Koranic scripture to support his claim that Allah is unknowable. Interestingly, the early Gnostic Christians described God as the unknowable God, echoing both Platonic and Stoic beliefs which influenced the Gospel of John=s description of the Father that were necessarily crafted for pagan audiences.

The first website also states:

Allah is unitarian (Sura 4:48) whereas the God of the Bible is trinitarian (2 Corinthians 13:14). Here is what the Koran says about the God of the Bible (Sura 4:171): "Believe in Allah and say not "Trinity." Cease! It is better for you! Allah is only One God. Far is it removed from his transcendent majesty that he should have a son."

That the Bible is Trinitarian is patently incorrect. The doctrine of the Trinity was a fourth century AD doctrine crafted as a compromise between different competing theologies, rooted in second and third century attempts to identify the exact nature of Christ and his level of divinity. Any passage mentioning three elements or people can certainly be retrospectively interpreted as referencing the Trinity; it does not mean that Trinitarian doctrine is either organic to, or even endorsed by that scripture. Modern Catholic scholars recognize that the scriptures do not sufficiently support the idea of the Trinity, which for them is proof of the importance of post-canonical and extra-biblical prophecy and doctrine. Without which, doctrines such as Trinitarianism would be unsupportable if simply relying upon scriptural evidence. That is to say, Catholics believe that revelation outside of scripture is available to us for guidance, while Protestants tend to deny this, historically claiming a position of sola scriptura, or exclusive reliance upon scripture for the development of doctrine. It is common knowledge that Jews do not believe in the divinity of Christ or the Trinity as a valid description of God. It is also common knowledge that neither do Muslims do not believe thusly. Why is this doctrine trotted out as a proof of the non-identity of the Muslim and Christian god, yet it is not currently seen as proof of the non-identity of the Jewish and Christian god?

The second website, http://www.allaboutreligion.org/muslim-god-and-christian-god-the-same-faq.htm, also makes the same claim that the lack of Trinitarian theology is in part what disqualifies Islam from being recognized as believing in the same god. Yet, by contrast, the identity of the Jewish god with that of Christians is still maintained. Witness the following statements about the differences in theology being crucial:

Christianity is based on God sending His Son, Jesus, to atone for the sins of mankind (John 3:16-17). Jesus is part of the triune God, come in the flesh (Emmanuel means God with us) to earth for this purpose through His crucifixion and resurrection. (No other deity can claim this.)The Quran's Surah 17 111 says: "Praise be to Allah, who begets no son, and has no partner in (His) domain. . ." Surah 4 171 says: "O People of the Book! Commit no excesses in your religion: Nor, say of Allah aught but the truth. Christ Jesus the son of Mary was (no more than) an apostle of Allah and His Word. . ."

Once again, the refusal of a religion to recognize the triune identity of God is not grounds for claiming that it is a different deity entirely. If it were, Judaism would be excluded as well. Many modern Jews often take a similar view of Jesus of Nazareth in describing him as a good man and possibly a prophet, but neither the son of God nor a part of God. The Jews have always and continue to assert the unity of God—“Hear O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one!” (Deuteronomy 6:4).

The first website continues:

“In addition, the Muslims despise Jews, but the Christian Bible says that the Jews are the apple of God's eye and that whoever blesses her will be blessed and whoever curses her will be cursed. (Genesis 12:2-3)”

I answer this by saying that not all Muslims despise Jews. In fact, most do not despise Jews any more than Christians despise Jews—perhaps less! Throughout the Middle Ages, there were many Muslim governments under whom the Jews enjoyed religious freedoms and prosperity. Not least of these was Muslim controlled Spain. Don’t forget who ejected the Jews from Spain - the subsequent Christian monarchy of Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella, not the Muslims of the previous regime! And moreso, it was not too long ago that conservative Christians were taught that the “perfidious Jews” were “Christ-killers” and that they were damned to hell for the sins of their forefathers, and that Jews had lost the mandate of heaven on account of their blood libel. For more information, see the following interesting website http://www.romancatholicism.org/popes-jews.htm#_The_Jews_are
which preserves a whole host of anti-Semitic statements from church fathers throughout the ages—not to highlight their error but to endorse their beliefs! Evidently, some of these scions of Christian anti-Semitism have their descendants in those who compiled this website.

In the early part of the twentieth century, many Nazis and their sympathizers the world over believed a variety of untruths about JudaismCthat Judaism was integrally related to Marxism, the latter being fundamentally rooted in Jewish doctrine; that the Jewish people were spawns of the devil (an idea inspired by an racially biased, anti-Semitic interpretation of John 8:44); some even denied that the Jews were in any way the descendants of ancient Israel, preferring a racially motivated eugenic myth in which the white, Aryan race were the true descendants of Israel, and not the Jews.

The second website has numerous statements about the differences between Christianity and Islam. A few are as follows, accompanied by my comments:

Another important distinction is that throughout the Quran, the teachings are to destroy all others outside of Islam in the name of Allah. In comparison, the Christian God is a god of love. Jesus tells us in Luke 6:27-28: "But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, Bless them that curse you and pray for them which despitefully use you." In addition, the Muslims despise Jews, but the Christian Bible says that the Jews are the apple of God's eye and that whoever blesses her will be blessed and whoever curses her will be cursed. (Genesis 12:2-3)

First of all, no support is given for the author's assessment of Islam's destructive intent. On the contrary, the author conveniently forgets Christianity's frequent attempts to supplant all other religions, a view endorsed by scripture, whether currently upheld or not. Witness the Gospel of John 14:6, in which Jesus states "No one comes to the Father except through me." Witness also what is said in the Book of Acts regarding the sole authority of Christianity: "Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). Do my Jewish readers really think that the current trend in conservative Christian support of Israel and Judaism has no strings attached? Do you really think that the most staunch, fundamentalist Christians believe that at the Judgment Day, Jews will be allowed to persist in their unbelief in Christ? Do you really think that they conceive of an escape clause that is available to the Jews, while all others are required to proclaim faith in Christ? It wasn't too many generations ago that many Christians sought the destruction of the Jews as part of their religious beliefs, as witnessed by the above website listing the vitriolic and vehemently anti-Semitic views of various popes and Christian fathers. The culmination of this was the Holocaust and the attendant silence of the European and American people leading into World War II. The modern ecumenical and interfaith movements which seek to establish peace and understanding between Judaism and Christianity, as well as other religions, have come about very late in the game.

Another point is made by the author of the second article online.

Acts 4:12: "Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved."Whereas, the Quran states:Surah 23 102, "Then those whose balance (of good deeds) is heavy -- they will attain salvation. . ."

He seeks to point out that because Christianity has a different conception of the path to salvation, this disqualifies the god of Islam from being identical to the God of Christianity. By that same token, once again, Judaism—which does not believe in salvation by way of faith in Christ, but rather a preponderance of good deeds—is not disqualified.

The overarching theme here is that these particular Christians writing this sort of polemic against Islam simply do not want to see Islam as in any way connected or comparable to Christianity. When in fact, Muslims claim to be descended from Abraham (by a different lineage from the Jews), they revere Moses and Jesus as prophets of the Hebraic line, common ancestors all. They are monotheists whose name for God, “Allah” is a cognate (i.e. from the same etymological root) as two Hebrew words for God—“El” and “Elohim”. They revere the same prophets of the Old Testament and hold the same Biblical stories to be true and fundamental for their history.
If one were to make a claim that theological doctrine and one’s name for God were to disqualify one from being seen as worshiping the same god, then Anglican Christians would be seen as worshiping an entirely different god than Italian or Spanish Catholics. In fact, at one point in European history, this was for all intents and purposes the case: the Protestants and Catholics considered each other to be heathens whose proclaimed reverence for the same God did not qualify them to be called Christians at all. Many wars were fought in Europe, sparked by these simple theological differences. Even today, many fundamentalist Christians do not consider Catholics to be Christian at all, but an entirely different religion. By this same token, Mormons—whose specific conception of the Trinity does not coincide with that of other Christians—could be said to be worshiping an entirely different god! And many conservative Christians often make the false claim that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is not a Christian religion! And the Jehovah’s Witnesses—whose belief in the subordination of the Son to the Father and who reject the divinity of Christ—could be seen as having a theology much closer to Judaism than Christianity, and have been described by many of the same fundamentalist Christians as not being Christian at all. By this token, despite their insistence upon the inerrancy of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, they might therefore be said by those polemicizing Islam to worship an entirely different god than the one the “true Christians” behold!

Bear in mind that one of the early polemics against Trinitarian Christians, by both Jews and other Christians, was that the doctrine of the Trinity was tantamount to polytheism, and therefore idolatry. After claiming to be monotheists from the beginning moments of Christianity, how could one now claim that there was not one God, but three? And yet, somehow, Christians were able to maintain that their claim to monotheism was not disqualified by the mystical belief in the unity of God and Christ, something entirely alien to, and insupportable within, the Jewish faith from which Christianity derived.

So, to conclude, do Muslims worship the same God as the Christians do? You bet they do! If one can claim that the Christian god is the same god worshiped by the Jews, and not a Trinitarian perversion that disqualifies Christians from this claim, then all three Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—all worship the same God, albeit with different doctrinal trappings.