<p>Accepting all the theological arguements stated in this thread at face value, the one gaping datum that strikes me, though I have little knowledge in Christianity, is that "Man is fallen and evil." And of course, this is not a moot point, but a fundmental axiom that appears to be self evident to believers of the faith as I understand it, and from which all else derives. But, to construct an entire belief system on this premise seems, to me, quite pessimistic. It's kind of like our justice system declaring accused persons guilty until proven innocent in court.</p>
<p>all these religous stuff...bunch of poos</p>
<p>everything is so confusing. that's why i don't like religions. so confusing. and everyone fights about religous stuff. stuff that might not even be true.</p>
<p>And i'm not aiming this at christianity.. (sorry but christians are VERY defensive of thier religion and like to bash other religions..especailly on cc)</p>
<p>Balla4Lyfe--I love that! "Stop all this pointless agony." LOL.</p>
<p>I second or third C.S. Lewis. "Mere Christianity" was thoughtfully written with all those little nitpicking questions in mind. </p>
<p>I'm a Christian who is studying more of Islam (not to convert, but out of interest). I find it FASCINATING that Abraham is the key to the three faiths. I read on one Islamic site that Esau (Jesus) is considered to be a Muslim--everything he says is in line with the teachings of the Koran.</p>
<p>I have a question for Muslims. I was never able to find the answer to this on any of the several Islamic sites I visited. Was Mohammed able to remove the Satanic verses? I mean, do Muslims believe all traces of those verses have been removed?</p>
<p>The reason Jesus is our redeemer and died for our sins is because he is God's child.We who are christian are only adopted children of God .God sent Jesus to earth because he knew how hard it was to live by the old covenant which he had with Abraham.So he sent us Jesus because he knew that no normal human was or is perfect .Jesus isn't exactly a scapegoat but more of a new covenant.</p>
<p>I can't stand the idea of people bashing other peoples religions I can't say who's is right and who's is wrong I can't pass that judgement because I am just a human being.Now I will be happy to share my views with anyone willing to share theirs but I know I'm not going to "bash" your beliefs.</p>
<p>Questions about Islam:</p>
<p>Are the Hadith and Sunnah together in one book? Also how are these books viewed in relation to the Qu'ran? Thanks.</p>
<p>OK, let's work from the assumption that Jesus' death saving everybody works because of a "new covenant." More than anything else, it just seems like a divine fiat, working becuase God says it does. If this is true, then all the problems I brought up earlier still stand.</p>
<p>the Hadith are the sayings of the Prophet Muhammed (PBUH) and the Sunnah are accounts of how he behaved or acted told by his companions. anyways, about a hundred or so years after the death of the Prophet (PBUH), people began to record on paper what the Prophet had said and these were put down in books. I think the most famous one is by Imam Bukhari.
As to how they relate to the Quran, i can say that Hadiths and Sunnah are are accepted as true by virtually all Muslims. hope that answers your question. :)</p>
<p>Why don't you post this on the parents' forum? You'll probably get much better answers.</p>
<p>"If morality is defined as whatever God says it is, then that leads to a whole string of problems. For example, it makes morality a tautology, and therefore meaningless, and since God, by definition, can't be immoral, then it means he has no choice."</p>
<p>First, let me introduce a definition of morality. Badness is, as in Dante, a perversion of the Good. It does not have reality in itself and is not capable of being pursued for its own sake - it is like darkness, the absence of light. Goodness, the Light in John, is what is real and true and pure, while badness is a pursuit of falsehood. God IS absolutely, he cannot partake in what is not. To say he cannot rather than does not is perhaps misleading. If morality, choosing what is good, is dependent on knowing what is good (because no one would choose badness), and God is all-knowing, then God chooses to be moral (as God's will is also infinite).
A comparable analogy is reason. To say that 2+2=5 or that you can have a hill without a valley screams against our logic. 2+2=5 is not as suitable as 2+2=4, it isn't true, wrongness doesn't have a separate reality, it just doesn't partake in rightness. God does and does not have a choice between the two answers in the same way. </p>
<p>This leads to "... makes God into a dictator, and I don't see why I should have any obligation to him, or morality for that matter." This problem is brought up in Plato: whether God loves goodness because it is good, or it is good because God loves it. Practically, however, saying God is a dictator because he declared 2+2=4 instead of 2+2=5 falls apart. It is not a question of your obligation to an arbitrary rule as valid as any other God might have chosen, but a question of your nature. Men, in God's likeness, cannot comprehend a different reasoning or a different morality. God is the Light all men live by, and cannot choose to live by any other. Morality is not defined as whatever Stalin does, so there goes that argument. It is defined according to your nature, your conscience, and you cannot argue against it. </p>
<p>Your original question is very interesting and my answer is only tentative. One of the answers of course, is Lewis's, which I think was summarized here already. I don't completely agree with him, and I think he seems to have doubts about his own argument. Even the scene in Narnia, when Aslan is basically "crucified" is moving, but dependent on some "deep magic" that is never explained.</p>
<p>I'll put forth instead the understanding I first found in Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm. "God despises everything, apparently. If he abandoned us, slashing creation loose at its base from any roots in the real; and if we in turn abandon everything - all these illusions of time and space and lives - in order to love only the real - then where are we? Thought itself is impossible. We are precisely nowhere, sinking on an entirely imaginary ice floe, into entirely imaginary seas themselves adrift." She begins with two worlds: there is God, who does not partake in either matter or time, and ours, temporal and spacial. If there is no connection between them, if God is "a holy fire burning self-contained for power's sake alone," "then the accidental universe spins mute, obedient only to its own gross terms, meaningless, out of mind, and alone. The universe is neither contingent upon nor participant in the holy, in being itself, the real, the power play of fire. The universe is ilusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by its sun - but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses." If God, the infinite, has no part in the finite, then we have no hope of partaking in the infinite.</p>
<p>"Faith would be that God is self-limited utterly by his creation - a contraction of the scope of his will; that he bound himself to time and its hazards and haps as a man would lash himself to a tree for love... Faith would be, in short, that God has any willful connection with time whatsoever, and with us. For I know it as given that God is all good. And I take it also as given that whatever he touches has meaning, if only in his mysterious terms, the which I readily grant. The question is, then, whether God touches anything. Is anything firm, or is time on the loose? Did Christ descend once and for all to no purpose, in a kind of divine and kenotic suicide, or ascend once and for all, pulling his cross up after him like a rope ladder home?"</p>
<p>The Incarnation of God, both finite and infinite, is God's connection to the world. This is an incomplete understanding, but the idea is that now God has a hand in things, now the infinite has entered our world.</p>
<p>My understanding of its connection to sin is very Dantean. I will take as given that happiness is dependent on being virtuous. Inferno begins with Dante trying to climb the mountain of virtue to Paradiso. He can't. There are people who get very close by their own efforts, but if perfect knowledge requires perfect knowledge, and as humans, we cannot partake in perfection (an infinity of sorts), then by our own powers we can never be perfectly virtuous or happy. Christ's harrowing of hell, in which the virtuous pagans were freed from hell, shows this significance, without God reaching down, we can never be lifted up. (You hardly get off scot-free, however).</p>
<p>How are the Hadith and Sunnah organized? Are the individual Hadiths and Sunnah considered to be one work, are they considered holy? Sorry for all the answers i just want clarification.</p>
<p>questions* i mean</p>
<p>Your analysis of God's "choice" to be good is dependent on the assumption that there exists a morality external of God (that is, God does moral things, as opposed to morality is what God does). However, based on the previously established proposition that Jesus' death saves humanity only because God says so, it follows that God dictates morality, rather than the other way around.</p>
<p>Moving on to your refutation of my comparison of God with Stalin, your argument fails because morality is a construct of God (based on previous reasoning), invalidating your statement that "It is defined according to your nature, your conscience, and you cannot argue against it. " Clearly, if morality is defined as whatever God does, then it is just that, and not intrinsically good. I do not see how I have any obligation to morality in this scenario, just as I cannot imagine having an obligation to the laws of a dictator.</p>
<p>I understand your point about how Jesus' purpose is to "bring humanity into the realm of the infinite," but that does not answer my question. Why is it that sin can be transferred like money? This proposition seems ludicrous to me, since suffering isn't a generic quantity like cash. Each person's sin is unique, and responsibility cannot simply be shunted onto another's conscience, omnipotence be damned.</p>
<p>I apologize for not addressing your arguments sequenitally, but to deal with the analogy of reason with morality, I would argue that you make my point here. If God dictates that "2+2=4," then he cannot choose to make 2+2=5. Assuming, for the sake of the argument, that your analogy holds, if God's divine fiat dictates morality, then he cannot choose to be immoral. However, since we have stipulated that morality implies a choice to act morally (for example, a dog can't be moral or immoral), then God cannot be moral, since he has no choice in the matter--he just is, but by definition, he also isn't, making him simultaneously moral and amoral, which is a contradiction (hope that makes sense). If my reasoning holds, then the Christian conception of morality is logically inconsistent.</p>
<p>If morality is defined by God's actions, as suggested by Christianity, then it makes the very concept of a moral action meaningless, since it is only blind obedience to God, by definition. If this God exists, then I hate him (thankfully, I am relatively sure that he does not, as explained above and for other reasons. Also, I would hate any God who interacts with humanity on any level, but for different reasons that are beyond the scope of this thread).</p>
<p>uvajoe: The Prophet Muhammed (pbuh) had many companions that surrounded him always because he was the Holy Prophet and hence they took him as their role model. And they compiled most of the sayings (hadith) and doings (sunnah) that the Prophet (pbuh) did. And the holy book is the Quran, it's the #1 source that Muslims go to find answers. Then you have the Hadith. The companions noted what the prophet said and did, and that's how it's organized. Usually it's in one book, the most notable by Bukhari. </p>
<p>Enjoi, I think you're talking about Abu Talib, and unfortunately I don't know what will happen to him since he never converted to Islam but was still good. It makes me wonder what happens to the other people in the world like that ..who are good but don't convert. This lady told me that people like that who know of the facts but don't convert are still punished, but it seems kinda harsh, I still don't know the real answer.</p>
<p>GD please explain your last statment about hating any GOD.</p>
<p>Yea, i know what the hadith and sunnah are, i'm jsut curious how they are orginized, i mean is there a book entitled "Hadith" and another "Sunnah", how many authors are there, are they read in conjunction with the Qu'ran, etc. I already know what they are, but i have never actually read them first hand, so i am not sure how they are organized or viewed.</p>
<p>I believe you should only answer this question if you actually KNOW about christianity. I friggin' hate it when people who dislike Christianity try to answer these kind of questions. </p>
<p>OP, please understand. there ar emany different kidns of christianity!!!! There are some forms that people don't even CONSIDER to be christianity, but they really are. </p>
<p>IN GENERAL, JESUS WAS SACRIFICED AS THE PERFECT SACRIFICE.
~ NEVER SINNED
~ SON OF GOD (OR REALLY IS GOD, depending on who you ask)
~ YAH YAH WHATEVER</p>
<p>HE DID THIS BECAUSE BEFORE JESUS, YOU HAD TO BE PERFECT. You had to have little to no sin, etc. That means a lot of people went to hell and God didn't want that anymore.</p>
<p>I typed it like a crazy person. PLease excuse that... :P</p>
<p>you know what I don't like it went people try to answer questions about christianity when they don't know anything about too.</p>
<p>Oh, hey you know what. In some christian religions, they don't even believe in hell. Go figure.</p>
<p>But of course, most of the christian religions don't like these other christian religions. For shame.</p>
<p>So this is a warning. When you ask a christian question and get a christian answer, its usually biased to their own christian beliefs. The truth is, there are many ways to interrpret the bible.</p>
<p>yes there are many ways to interpret the bible that's why you have to read it, ask about it, and then pray over it.</p>
<p>aren't most things you ask a person biased</p>