Does God = Allah

And if God didn't communicate a written document that 100% are wrong!
Or given the state of the documents after 100's of years nobody can be sure of all the details and are at least part wrong.What never ceases to amaze me is that all these documents reflect human thinking of various time periods. We have the premise of a being who is supposed to have created a universe that we know uses numbers like pi and e and has these relativistic phenomena and all sorts of complexity and then we he writes the manual there is a lot of political talk about who is right and wrong, gets into heaven, loses favor and although gravity and the various phenomena of the universe work all the time the book it's self is subject to all sorts degradation of signal, impostition of noise leaving proud humans quarreling over it's meaning with no way of settling the disputes short of death.Well, maybe that is the divine sense of humor?lfen

What is Allah? What is Jehovah? How could you prove them the same or different?To me it's obvious that Jehovah is the name of a concept as is Allah or Krishna.Now we have the classic lumpers vs splitters debate.Lumpers and splitters - WikipediaIs Allah the same as Jehovah.The answer depends on whether you are a lumper or a splitter. Denominations fighting for turf rights and converts are motivated to be splitters.lfen

You are asserting that God is concept? I wouldn't have thought you would believe that.lfenedit: "would haven't" to intended "wouldn't have"This message has been edited by lfen, 04-28-2006 09:36 PM

I first heard the term from my brother about debates about whether different skeletons of early homo where different species or just variations within species.Turns out lumpers and splitters are not just found in academic disciplines. The conflicts between these two approaches occur in lots of things, cuisine, dance, music, art, and on and on.Some folks seem to naturally focus on the underlying principles and other focus on the distinguishing details.lfen

I am also. One thing I like about the nondual advaita concept of God which is sometimes called Brahman and other times the Self, the Tao, or Totality is that it is approached through paths that are adapted to different temperments.These paths are assumed to be eventually transcended. Some people need to feel love and devotion to an image of God. Think Krishna or Jesus or even the Divine Mother, or Mary. Others are more intellectual and are interested in a God as a principle in the world.Ultimately the path takes the ego from it's confusion in forms to a realization of that which is real before and beyond all concepts.So in India a Sage like Shri Ramana Maharshi would be visited by Hindus, Muslims, Christians, aetheists, agnostics. He was fine with all of that. His function was not to provide content. Whatever content worked for a person, Jehovah, Jesus, Allah, Krishna was a conceptual path that worked. Ramana didn't judge the path but worked for the awakening of the individual.One of my purposes on this board is to find a way to make the understanding and acceptance of Ramana clear at least to contrast it to the path of denominations stating that their conceptual content is what is real and only their conceptual formulation is correct.

Bede Griffiths and Bernadette Roberts are two Catholic contemplatives who have an appreciation for the spirituality of the Hindu's and Buddhists while remaining within their own Catholic tradition.I think it is the contemplative tradition in Catholicism that is most capable of appreciating contemplative love of God in other traditions. In Islam this contemplative traditon is called Sufism. As for my personal views I think that all concepts ultimately fail. Lao Tzu opening in the Tao te Ching comes closest. I paraphrase to the best of my memory, "The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao. Nevertheless things have a mother. The true Tao is nameless but needing a name to speak of it I call it the Tao"I don't imagine we would be in complete agreement.As to Allah and God or Allah and Jehovah, YHWH etc. my view is that these are names and concepts that humans use to the best of their ability to address the fundamental mystery of exisence. With Ramana I am quite taken with the appropriateness of God's name being "I am that I am".From the Hindu perspective Jesus saying "I am the way" points to the way as being our fundamental being, "I am". From my point of view Christianity is not well sourced in it's roots. The origins are layered over by the interpretations of various egos. If there was a historical Jesus and I think there might but find no persausive evidence that there was, he could well have been a Jew who awakened to this fundamental identity with all that IS, the Self, or Brahman, or divinity. But he was killed before he could bring his students to understand what he was talking about, it being very different then the existing religions.Buddha had over 30 years in a supportive milieu to convey his teaching. Jesus would have had a few years in a politically oppressive and tumultuous milieu to attempt to impart his understanding.I've read a little about Sufi's, mostly their poetry but know little about Islam. While conceeding the functions of religions were and remains important I have to admit to being dissatisfied with organized religion.

Jar's saying "the map is not the territory" comes from Korzybski. Korzybski was talking about remaining conscious that when using language, concepts, or maps we are abstracting from the thing as it is.If a map of the earth were accurate to every detail it would be an exact duplicate of the earth. The value of maps is that they are abstractions. They have a functional level of detail. The user defining the function hence there are for the earth different projections for flat maps depending on the function. This dependence on authority is a feature of mainstream religion and society. I understand how secure this belief is for you but it has no security for myself (and though most likely in the minority I'm not the only one). There are differing traditions that people depend on. You are mainly concerned with three that I don't find very persuasive:Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. You are asserting that there are three Gods, Jehovah, Jesus, and Allah being worshipped by the three religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam?For me there is only one totality though it is variously conceived, misconcieved, understood, misunderstood etc. Although an advance over the polytheism they replaced I think the near eastern religions have generally a primitive understanding of God. I know you disagree. I just want to point out that one can take arrogantly critical positions without being a fundamentalist. Although I imagine it helps!lfen

The ego is a concept and all it knows are concepts. But we only think we are ego and when we discover who we are we can know more directly. So I would say that the only way the ego can know God is through concepts but as we aren't ultimately limited to the ego we aren't limited to one way of knowing God. Do I misunderstand your story if I state that in the course of your coming to know God your understanding of him changed, developed, progressed? I think conceptualization developes and some conceptualizations are more accurate than others. Ultimately one must go beyond conceptualization to direct knowing. But that path of contemplation has never had broad appeal but I think religious teachers could respect it rather than attempt to maintain power by insisting of control through dogma.lfen

I don't know about Judaism but I'm guessing the crucial points are how to get to heaven which both Islam and Christianity claim to have exclusive rights to.I don't think any of the three maps are particularly accurate. They do share important points. A recognition of a singularity that is of over arching significance. People live out these maps and don't want to exchange their map for another map so they are all successful in terms of human community. Some members of each group follow these maps to the point of awakening to what Is, so each map can lead to awakening which is what interests me.lfen

No, but it's too complex this early in the morning to explain. For one thing you are the map and you can't drop yourself. But what I am saying is that Awakening is the dropping of the map.The Buddha used the analogy of Buddhism as a raft to take a person across a river to get to the other side (nirvana). Once reaching the other shore it would be unneccesary to carry the raft, it has served it's purpose.The point is not that maps are unnecessary it's just a caution to avoid confusing levels of abstraction. A human vocalization in a language is just a symbolic reference. "God" is a three letter word. The reality is nameless and to fall to quarelling about God's name is to have mistaken the "thing" I prefer "process" for the sound that refers to it.People have preferences. I would prefer people chose Buddhism but most choose another religion. I think that these religions have positive and negative possibilities. I'm not wild about Islam but I think muslims do sincerely turn to the deepest source as they understand it. Well, I've actually spent some time attending Al Anon and I think the notion of a higher power, though not acceptable to everyone, is a way to understand this.lfen

intrinsic to the CONCEPT of God, yes. Not intrinsic to God.lfen

I am the territory so I would say yes I would have to be intimately familiar with it as it is me. Except that intimacy is overlayed and hidden due to my getting caught up in and mistaking myself for concepts I have about myself instead of remaining with the fundamental Isness of being.lfen

There are many problems with all the maps. Not only among themselves but with other sources, historical, scientific, archeological evidence.These maps are early attempts by human beings living on the same earth in the same universe to understand their relationship to the whole. It's very big territory and the books were written at a stage of very early knowledge.The maps are functional for their cultures, what anthropology studies: marriage, customs, laws, kinship and they are setting their cultures in terms of the entire universe as they knew it. They just didn't know how big it was or how diverse.They are all early approximations of the same territory. They are not talking about different species of humans, or different planets, or different universes. It's one and the same totality. It's just a very long term challenge for us to map it.But they are all talking about the source and ultimate nature of themselves, being, the universe and the source.lfen

You are thinking very either/or black/white here. People have always functioned with maps that contained errors. Some of the errors didn't matter to their lives much such as the earth centric model of the universe. Other errors could be accomodated. Some were fatal. Those mushrooms that looked so like the mushrooms we had last week turn out to be a poisonous variety that closely resemble them. We didn't notice the difference. If we survive or somehow pass along that knowledge then our map is improved. Have more faith! Maps can have errors and you still arrive. You discover a bridge is washed out or a river has changed course. You make corrections. Sometimes we do throw maps out as we did with the geo centric model of the universe. Other times we modify the map as Einstein did with some of Newtons equations about motion.Map making is an ongoing activity. At this moment I understand the literalist fundamentalist mentality to be one that feels so insecure that it demands absolute maps as reassurance. But in fact there is no evidence of absolute maps. What humans do is mapping, it's ongoing correcting developing activity.There is a faith rooted in being that is able to accept a degree of mystery and unknowness. This faith is not in positive assertions and assurances of authority or maps but in the actual experience of being itself.It just struck me that skeptics have more faith than believers. And it is perhaps the different levels of faith that makes it so difficult for them to communicate. Yes, and by the evidence all three are wrong. No surprise there. Abraham, Isaac, and Jesus may never have existed as actual human beings. This appears to be more a fight over concretized ideas about legitimacy. This was typical of the thinking of that time and is still appealing to many people to this day.lfen