Modern, aggressively righteous fundamentalists of all three faiths represent a retreat from God.

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>

> The Imam Mahdi is never mentioned in the Qur'an. Thus the Qur'an

> must take precedent over whatever hadiths say about the coming of

> the Mahdi, of which there are many. We also have to realize that

> many of these hadiths are confusing, at times contradictory, or

> just plain ridiculous. So which hadith is to be believed and how

> much faith should we have, notwithstanding the fact that the Imam

> Mahdi has no backing of the Qur'an? How can such an exclusion be

> the fountain of deep Shiite faith?...

>

> It is hypocritical of Muslims to deny other incarnations since they

> all believe Prophet Muhammad to be the last prophet, and yet wait

> for their own incarnation i.e., the Imam Mahdi, to usher the golden

> age of Islam. Why this collective hypocrisy that hundreds of

> millions have been so blind and oblivious for centuries? (The

> entire www.al-qiyamah.org site is about exposing such collective

> Muslim falsehood.)...

>

> They say that the mission of God's Messenger of the Covenant is to

> confirm existing scriptures, purify them, and consolidate them into

> one divine message. The Quran states that such a messenger is

> charged with restoring God's message to its pristine purity, to

> lead the righteous believers - Jews, Christians, Muslims,

> Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus, and others - out of darkness into the

> light (5:19 & 65:11). Shri Mataji has done exactly that. She has

> also declared that the Last Judgment and Qiyamat has commenced,

> also exactly as prophesied in the Bible and Qur'an. The www.al-

> qiyamah.org challenges the entire Ummah to respond to the same.

>

 

" People, such as the ulema, might be unable to understand the Islam

of a Sufi like Ibn al-Arabi. Muslim tradition makes Khidr the master

of all who seek a mystic truth, which is inherently superior to and

quite different from the God which is the same as everybody else’s

but to a God who is in the deepest sense of the word subjective.”

 

Karen Armstrong, A History of God,

Ballantine Books, 1993, p. 237.

Paperback: 496 pages

Publisher: Ballantine Books (August 9, 1994)

ISBN-10: 0345384563

ISBN-13: 978-0345384560

 

" Christian fundamentalists seem to have little regard for the loving

compassion of Christ. They are swift to condemn the people they see

as the " enemies of God. " Most would consider Jews and Muslims

destined for hellfire, and Urquart has argued that all oriental

religions are inspired by the devil. "

 

Karen Armstrong, A History of God,

Ballantine Books, 1993, p. 390.

Paperback: 496 pages

Publisher: Ballantine Books (August 9, 1994)

ISBN-10: 0345384563

ISBN-13: 978-0345384560

 

Amazon.com

Armstrong, a British journalist and former nun, guides us along one

of the most elusive and fascinating quests of all time--the search

for God. Like all beloved historians, Armstrong entertains us with

deft storytelling, astounding research, and makes us feel a greater

appreciation for the present because we better understand our past.

Be warned: A History of God is not a tidy linear history. Rather, we

learn that the definition of God is constantly being repeated,

altered, discarded, and resurrected through the ages, responding to

its followers' practical concerns rather than to mystical mandates.

Armstrong also shows us how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have

overlapped and influenced one another, gently challenging the

secularist history of each of these religions. --Gail Hudson

 

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

 

This searching, profound comparative history of the three major

monotheistic faiths fearlessly illuminates the sociopolitical ground

in which religious ideas take root, blossom and mutate. Armstrong, a

British broadcaster, commentator on religious affairs and former

Roman Catholic nun, argues that Judaism, Christianity and Islam each

developed the idea of a personal God, which has helped believers to

mature as full human beings. Yet Armstrong also acknowledges that the

idea of a personal God can be dangerous, encouraging us to judge,

condemn and marginalize others. Recognizing this, each of the three

monotheisms, in their different ways, developed a mystical tradition

grounded in a realization that our human idea of God is merely a

symbol of an ineffable reality. To Armstrong, modern, aggressively

righteous fundamentalists of all three faiths represent " a retreat

from God. " She views as inevitable a move away from the idea of a

personal God who behaves like a larger version of ourselves, and

welcomes the grouping of believers toward a notion of God that " works

for us in the empirical age. "

 

 

---------------------

 

" The central weakness of these religions today, as we pointed out,

lies in their growing irrelevancy for modern life. Once upon a time

they exercised absolute dominance, at least for their adherents. They

offered explanations which were received as authoritative. They

elaborated these explanations into socio-political institutions where

possible. Bit by bit, decade by decade, their hold on men's minds and

lives is diminishing. We find, on careful scrutiny, that it is

fundamentally their explanations which are found wanting. They

purpose a way to think and speak about man's world which man cannot

accept. He cannot accept it because in some cases it is out of tune

with what man knows as certainly as he knows anything; and in other

cases and concepts used in the explanations are unintelligible to

modern man. If unintelligible, they are inapplicable. They are

irrelevant.

 

This lack of intelligibility and its consequent irrelevance affect

not merely peripheral elements of the religions but the very stuff

and matter out of which the religions are made. The garments are not

merely worn and outmoded. The bodies themselves are effete and aged,

beyond apparent hope of recall to youth and vigor... It must be noted

that very often this lack of intelligibility arises, not precisely

because the concepts are old, but because they reflect a mentality

which has been rejected by modern man, and because they no longer

correspond to the realities with which modern man must cope...

 

The dominance of each religion, besides being set by common problems

outlined above, suffers from particular strains and pains of its own.

Judaism and Christianity resemble each other on many points of pain

and setback; but Judaism suffers from internal polarization, and

Christianity suffers from a prolonged insistence on being what it

need not be. Islam is apart. Still trussed and strait-jacketed in

outworn ways and inept approaches to the 20th century world, Islam's

agony is what Christianity might be between 10th and 12th centuries

A.D.: total inability even to grapple with its circumambient world.

For while Judaism and Christianity are at grips with their world but

losing steadily, Islam has never even started, and is in danger of

cultural and civilizational mummification...

 

To state that a concept or an idea is unintelligible, is not to state

that the reality which men have tried to express in that concept has

no validity. Our concept of God may be unintelligible. God may,

nevertheless, exist. "        

     

Malachi Martin, The Encounter

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970, 275-76.

Paperback: 488 pages

Publisher: Dial Press (1983)

ISBN-10: 0385279043

ISBN-13: 978-0385279048

 

 

“Abraham, according to Christians, was a pre-Christian Christian.

According to Mohammad he was consciously and explicitly a Muslim. The

Jews naturally claim him as their own. According to Jews, salvation

is primarily in the Exodus from Egypt and the observation of the

Mosiac Law. Christians maintain that it was the beginning of

salvation and that this held until Jesus came. Then all was changed.

Exodus, Law, Promised Land, all these lost validity. Only the

sacrifice of Jesus gives salvation now; the Exodus, the Law, and the

Promised Land were mere symbols and foretaste of what Jesus brought

to men. The Muslims maintain that this was true until Mohammad came.

By that time, Christians had corrupted the Gospel, and Jesus'

sacrifice was useless. Now only Mohammad's religion and teaching can

give men salvation; both Moses and Jesus were really pre-Muslim

Muslims who failed to accomplish the God's purpose on account of

man's perversity and weakness.

 

According to Judaism, God chose the Jews and never changed his mind;

they have the true and unique revelation about man's destiny and

about God's nature; they know what Hell is, what Paradise is, what

goodness is. According to the Christians, God choose them, revealed

to them all he had originally revealed to the Jews (discontinuing

ethnic habits such as circumcision, for example), and gave them much

more besides. According to Muslims, these claims are farcical, and

blasphemous; Jews and Christians have a portion of the truth, but God

has now chosen the Muslims to whom he has revealed all he ever

revealed to Jews and Christians, in addition to much else besides.”

 

Malachi Martin, The Encounter,

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970, 188-89.

Paperback: 488 pages

Publisher: Dial Press (1983)

ISBN-10: 0385279043

ISBN-13: 978-0385279048

 

 

“Christianity within its own borders has specialized in self-

crucifixion, at first to quite a minor degree during the first 1500

years of its life, when heretics and dissidents and accused witches

and sorcerers were put to death, as Jesus was. Then, with the breakup

of its unity in the 16th century, Christians devised for each other

one Hell more horrendous and tortuous than another, indulging in a

300-year round of mutual recrimination, accusation, denigration, and

relegation by bell, book, and candle, to the filthiest categories of

human life. No branch of Christianity can be excused from this,

because all Christians have indulged in it.

 

No body of Christians ever answered the insults of other Christians

with Christ's answer: “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what

they do?” They all developed special vocabularies replete with

violent words such as “heresy,” “heretic,” “extirpation,”

“condemnation,” “excommunication,” “outcasts,” “unclean believers,”

“vice-mongers.” Each one devised its special defenses against the

other: social ostracism, civil war, discrimination, calumny, legal

non-existence. Rome was the Red Lady of the South. Luther was the Pig

of Germany. Protestants were the sons of vipers. Jews were the “race

of the devil.” Muslims were “benighted and error-ridden barbarians.”

No body of Christians ever tried to conquer the world with humility

and patience and love, and no body of believers ever tried to fan the

flames of faith, in the heart of man by being authentically believers.

 

The Jews, in retaliation for their pain and their sustained exile,

contributed to the sea of hate, distrust and, in some cases,

deformation of truth. They invented multiform expressions of

contempt, condemnation, loathing, and utter rejection of Christians.

They even modified some of their traditional beliefs because the

Christians had borrowed them in their original form and, in their

repugnance from all things Christian, they wanted no resemblance to

subsist between their faith and that of the Christians. They returned

hate with hate. They, also, cannot be excused and considered totally

guiltless. They preached truth and justice, yet they violated both in

order to maintain their religion and their Jewishness. Christians

preached love but practised officially sanctioned hate, intermingling

their loveliest psalms of compassion for their dying Savior with the

expressions of extreme disgust for the Jews...

 

Muslims preached mercy and compassion, but they practised none or

very little, assigning both Christians and Jews to the lowest rung in

Allah's consideration, and historically meting out to both a

treatment which rivals any cruelties of man in known history. Down

through the ages, this procession of the crucified one has come:

formed, maintained, and augmented by Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

Each one has prayed with its armies to its god that the armies of the

opponents be destroyed. There is no palliating or explaining away the

sin of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

 

The three religions failed in another significant way. None of them

attacked slavery or race prejudice or other flagrant inhumanities of

man to man from the very beginning of their existence. The Arabs of

today sanction slavery as spontaneously as the Popes of the 19th

century sanctioned the creation of castrati choirs for Papal masses,

as readily and blindly as the Protestant ethic of the white American

sanctioned the serfdom and degradation of the Negro race until the

second half of the 20th century. Each religion has practiced the art

of climbing on the bandwagon: only when lay and secular reformers,

sometimes lacking any formal religion whatever, raised such a hue and

cry that men's consciences were stirred, did the religions begin to

turn their huge resources toward reform. The Catholic Church in

Germany and Italy acquiesced in Nazism and Fascism at least in the

earlier stages of the ideologies. Russian Orthodoxy acquiesced in the

despotism and sadism of Czarist times. Greek Orthodoxy sanctioned the

corruption of the Byzantine court and is today bitterly nationalist

in Greece's disputes with Turkey. No Protestant Church and no Jewish

Synagogue ever officially condemned and attacked the Ku Klux Klan

before 1945 in America, though individuals did. Judaism,

Christianity, and Islam have practiced the double standard in this

matter...

 

Thus the three religions have not been witnesses to the truth. All,

it is true, have developed an exalted vocabulary, and a very

impressive manner of announcing their own grandiose claims. All three

have excelled and excel in words, as distinct from actions. All three

have an impressive ritual and have refined psychological approaches

to man. Yet the witness of words, mere words, has never changed men's

minds, nor has mere theological subtlety helped men to be better men.

The witness of the three religions have been faulty, at times

perniciously false and erroneous. The three of them have witnessed to

the uses of hate for the love of a god. And all three have disposed

of the lives and happiness of millions of human beings without any

real feeling for human suffering or any genuine concern for the

concrete realities of life.

 

It is clear, first of all, that today all three religions lack any

authoritative note for man. They have, as yet, each one of them,

sufficient number of adherents to give the impression of continuing

strength, and this glosses over for them and for the outside world at

times their terrible weakness. For each of them, when scrutinized

closely, is blackened with sufficient failures to prevent any

thinking man from believing in them. And, above all, all three

persevere in making a claim which cannot possibly be valid and true:

that they are, each single one, the true religion.

 

Each one of them, however, hides from the ultimate test of its

validity and truth behind a wall of unknowing and expectation. All

three chorus that only on the “Last Day,” when the “End” comes,

when “God” decides, will it be clear that the “other two” and all

others besides were false, and it (the claimant) was all along the

true community of the one “God.” ”

 

Malachi Martin, The Encounter,

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970, 329-32.

Paperback: 488 pages

Publisher: Dial Press (1983)

ISBN-10: 0385279043

ISBN-13: 978-0385279048