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Monday, December 21, 2015

Baptized Hinduism


Some arguments I've seen in defense of the claim that Muslims and Christians worship the same God remind me of Hinduism. In particular, the Hindu doctrine of avatars, where the many gods of the Hindu pantheon are really just projections of one God, of one otherwise ineffable, unknowable Deity. On that view, Hindu polytheists all worship the same God, even when they worship different gods. 

God is like an actor who wears many masks. You don't know what he looks like without the mask. If you caught sight of him without the mask, he'd be faceless.

Indeed, there are character actors like Peter Sellers who admit that their offscreen persona lacks personality. That's why they can disappear into different roles.

The way some folks defend the claim that Muslims and Christians worship the same God is eerily similar to saying Allah, Yahweh, Jesus, and the Trinity are avatars of the same ulterior Deity.   

20 comments:

  1. Isn't it also similar to John Hick's pluralism where we all worship our own interpretation of the "ultimate reality"?

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  2. The difference is that no one I've seen in this discussion is engaging in anything like the kind or relativism or pluralism that you're talking about. Seeing two people's use of the word 'God' as referring to the same being says nothing whatsoever about whether they are engaging in proper worship of that being, and I have literally seen not one piece arguing that Muslim worship is perfectly all right just because they're worshiping the same God as Christianity. None. That doesn't mean there aren't any, but they're certainly not in the conversation I've been having.

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    1. I may be mistaken, but perhaps the allusion is to the Qur'an (Surah 29:46) itself:

      "Muslims! Do not argue with the People of the Book, except in a way that is best, except for them who commit injustice. And say, 'We believe in that which has been revealed to us and revealed to you. Our God and your God is one; and we surrender to Him.'"

      Of course, if one thinks a bit more deeply, then (at least in my understanding) Muslims would say it'd be shirk to believe in the Trinity and/or worship Christ as God.

      However, problem is, not everyone who argues that Muslims and Christians worship the same God necessarily thinks too deeply!

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  3. I think it should be obvious enough to actual regenerate, Bible-believing Christians that Muhammed was a false prophet, and the "god" he proclaimed is another god, other than the God of the Bible.

    Yet it may not be easy or simple for said Christians to mount sophisticated theological and/or philosophical arguments for their case.

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    1. As I've said many times, the first part of what you said should be utterly obvious to actually regenerate, Bible-believing Christians, and the second half simply doesn't follow. People proclaim all sorts of things about God within the pages of the Bible, and those statements are condemned within those pages, but they are quite often still taken to be statements about God.

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    2. So is it correct to say your position is (or is approximately) that Muhammed and the Koran speak falsely about the Triune One true and living God?

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    3. Yes, and that's what nearly every Christian I'm aware of who says they're the same God thinks.

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    4. Thanks. How far do you extend this application? For example, do you extend it to pagans and animists who say something like "the Great Spirit lives inside of this totem pole, and that elk, and this sacred rock, so we worship him in such and such manner," as well as to anti-theists who say something like, "there is no god, therefore I do not worship him"?

      Considering Islam, are these other types of claims also accounted as false statements about the Triune One true and living God of the Bible?

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    5. No, because there's no historical connection between them and the monotheistic tradition going back to Abraham and before. Muhammad explicitly said he was talking about the same being the Jews and Christians followed.

      Anti-theists certainly are talking about God when they say they don't believe in him. It's even meaningful to ask them what God they don't believe in. It's usually the Christian one, even if they say all of them.

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    6. Monotheism doesn’t necessarily select for TGotB, and Islam's connection to Abraham is dubious and propagandistic in my mind, which leaves Muhammed's claims in view.

      Joseph Smith, Jr. made similar claims. Do you believe Mormonism should be classified in the same way as Islam?

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    7. Yes, Mormonism is a specifically Christian heresy. It's got an even stronger claim that Islam, because it doesn't have a broadly Abrahamic historical connection but one with Christianity at a much more recent time.

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    8. Thanks for the continued clarification. So, from your perspective, the god of Mormonism is the Triune One true and Living God, they're just making false claims about the true God. Same with the Jehovah's Witnesses, correct?

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    9. When Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses speak about God, they are speaking about God. They aren't failing to refer the way a Greek pagan fails to refer when speaking of Zeus. They just believe a bunch of false things about God that contradict God's nature, just as I would if I believe Obama was from Krypton and had super-powers. I would still be thinking those things about him. So my president would still be him, not the fictional superhero I would be thinking he is.

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    10. Mormon doctrine states that the god of Mormonism used to be a man who lived on the planet Kolob and became a god by following the tenets of Mormonism.

      I'm no scholar on the Greek pantheon of gods, but at first blush Zeus doesn't seem extemely less like TGotB than the Mormon god.

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  4. But the Greeks weren't entering into a conversation and then saying things about a deity already being talked about and worshiped. The Mormons were.

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  5. Paul seems to suggest they were based upon natural revelation in his Areopagus discourse.

    There's only One True and living God, and all men know Him by nature and are without excuse, pace Rom. 1.

    It seems that you're not allowing the Muslims, Mormons, or Greeks to define their own terms about their gods.

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  6. There are two arguments. One argument is that something approaching monotheism tracks closely enough who God is to refer to him. That's the one Paul seems to be relying on in Acts 17 and Romans 1. The other is that names function differently than descriptive nouns. Names get their reference because of ties to how they were first used and how they have been used historically. Names don't get their reference because of how we think of the person or thing being named, or else people couldn't say truly that Superman is Clark Kent or that the morning star is the evening star. Even some scientific terms can survive total redefinition of what it turns out we were really referring to, e.g. heat survived the realization that there's no such thing as caloric. It just named something other than what we thought it did. Should we say that previous scientists are being denied the right to define their own terms by saying that heat was something other than what they thought it was? No, we recognize that they just misunderstood what they were referring to when they talked about heat. It gets its reference by whatever it is that they had tied it to with their acts of naming and the history of the term's usage.

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    1. With language so flexible it doesn't seem reasonable to me to deny the pagan animists were referencing the Triune One true and living God in their religious pronouncements, however misinformed.

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    2. Well, I don't think language is as flexible as you apparently think it is, then.

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