CP3S said:
I think this is where your lack of understanding of Christian doctrine is tripping you up. Christianity claims to be the fulfillment of Judaism, so a Christian can easily say that the Old and New Testament mesh, even though to a Jew Christianity is a total bastardization of their religion. To a Muslim, Islam is the correction of the previous two religions that fell into the hands of corrupt people who twisted and ruined them. But thank goodness the Kuran is incorruptible, so that won't ever happen again.
How can someone be objective and logical with that kind of attitude?
Islam can't be resolved with Christianity, not because Christianity came first, but because you'd have to throw out every part of it that made it Christianity and make it Islam in order to resolve it to Islam.
I believe I've stated the key difference between Christianity and Islam multiple times. I've often referred to the Abrahamic roots, which are grounded in Judaism (which serves The Old Testament, part of The Bible).
See, you're twisting the argument into Christians and Muslims believing/not believing the same things vs. having the same roots to the God of Abraham. They differ in their interpretations of this God. Whether or not they are the same God depends on your beliefs.
I think that is precisely where this discussion is at, and where the disagreement lies, you'd have to take the side of Islam (along with its caveat about corruption in the other two religions) in order to make the claim that the Islamic God is the same God as the Christian God is the same god as the Hebrew God. You'd have to take the side of Christianity to say that the Christian God is the same God as the Hebrew God, while the Muslim God is just a bastardization of that God as depicted by a false religion.
I'm not taking the side of Islam. Simply not taking the side of Christianity and seeing the common threads through each of the three faiths. If one doesn't discount Islam entirely, then that person understands that Islam refers to the teachings of Moses, Abraham, Jacob, Jesus, etc. quite frequently. The two religions are not completely disparate. Islam does say that the word of God was corrupt in previous faiths. Just like Christianity says the path to Heaven and salvation is only through accepting Jesus, Islam says the path to Heaven is only through accepting the true word of Allah. I can make that claim without having stakes in either religion.
The God depicted in the Koran is extremely different from the Christians' depiction of God.
They are both quite vengeful Gods, at the very least. The Trinity/Unity thing is the biggest difference among others. But again, this different interpretation of what God embodies doesn't necessitate Islam throwing everything out the window. That's simply not true because as I've stated over and over, The Quran draws on the stories/teachings of the many prophets in The Old/New Testaments. Your argument here, that the two religions are 100% incompatible, is not true provided that one is not a Christian (but doesn't have to be a Muslim) basing the compatibility solely on the Holy Trinity.
To support your argument that the Gods cannot be the same, you're using a belief system truncated after Christianity. Thus, you're concluding that Islam is a false religion and it can't be resolved with The Bible. I make no claims about which religions are true/false/etc. What I see is that each book develops a belief system based on the same prophets from the times before Jesus, then diverges based on whether God is a Trinity or a Unity.
I think what we are ultimately trying to convey, is that without accepting the teachings of Islams, you can't make the claim that all three religion share in a single deity.
Sure, just looking at the surface all three claim the same deity, but once you touch ever so lightly on the surface, things get messy.
My claim is that if one doesn't discount Islam from a Christian perspective, it's quite easy to see the common Abrahamic roots. I know things get messy and am not contesting that. But the problem is that each religion claims the other to essentially be misguided or false in at least aspects of how they view God (One or Trinity). When you start talking about all the ways that Christianity debunks Islam, you have to equally look at all the ways Islam debunks (or attempts to resolve) Christianity. This discussion has been slanted towards Christianity and I have provided the other perspective based on my modest understanding of each religion.