In this book, Karen Armstrong compares the concept of God in Judaism, Christianity and Islam as it appears in the Old Testament, New Testament and Quran. She offers examples of great perversion, debauchery and violence from Jewish Scriptures that make up the image of a God, Who is radical, petty and hopeless. She expresses the inherent confusion and contradictions from Christian Scriptures that make up the mystery and absurdity of Trinity. She notes that representation of Allah in the Qur’an is more Merciful than that of Yahweh in the Old Testament. Furthermore, belief in Allah is explicitly more clear and simple through the Qur’an than belief in the Trinity through the New Testament.
Quran stresses not just Allah’s encompassing mercy, but also the themes of repentance and forgiveness. The theology of the Quran is fairly straightforward in comparison with the Old and New Testaments. The Old and New Testaments came into being over thousands years of change, editions and deletions. They are wrought with human dialogue, corrupt emotions and inept logic.
The Quran came into being as 20 years of revelation to the Prophet Muhammad (saws) from the year 610 to the year 632. So, there is much greater consistency in the portrayal of the Nature of Allah. He is more moral than YAHWEH and more exact than Jesus. This provides a kind of appeal, a kind of fascination which is free from complication, conflict and falsification.
The Quran corrects much of the Old and New Testaments. YAWEH is obsessed with a small race of people who disappoint Him and even defeat Him. Allah addresses all human beings in a loving, awe-inspiring, logical oratorical preaching and rhythmic eloquence, which is the Qur’anic recital. The listeners of the Quran are called to change thinking and their lives and move forward in a moral way.
Jesus is not the son of Allah, and actually there’s a scene in the Qur’an in which Allah and Jesus are speaking and Jesus explicitly repudiates any notion that during his life on earth he ever claimed such as a blasphemous thing. No, he is not the son of God. God had no son, or spouse, and no one is His Partner in His Powers or His Attributes.
For the most part, this book was shocking, the various beliefs in God around the world are utterly disappointing; historical views about God from ancient Greeks, Romans, to Jews, Christians and post-modern Philosophers are nothing short of disgusting and absolutely offensive. The book became twisted, messed up, disparging with every page. I had to stop reading for my own good. I felt my heart was darkening; I felt horrible. I completely get why people are cynical about God in our age. I would be too if I grew up reading the kind of debased stories and vile logic some philosophers and so called scholars of religion have regarding God.
I am so glad I read this book before Ramadan, so I can re-read, rediscover and fall in love again with the God of the Qur’an.
No comments:
Post a Comment