Does Allah = Moon God?

uh huh. and christian arabs call yahweh "allah." my point is precisely why you just rolled your eyes when you read that. it's a non-point."allah" means "God." period, end of story. calling sin "allah" means exactly as much as calling yahweh "allah" or ba'al "allah" or any other god "allah." all it means is "the god." so if you're going to to draw a linguistic parallel -- one not based on qualities and characteristics of the gods in question -- than you have to accept that sin = allah AND yahweh = allah.clearly, allah and sin have about as much in common as yahweh and allah. uh, yeah, except for the ones i posted. the ugaritic model is a pretty good one for the god we see in the early bible. ...have you read the bible? how do the israelites first find out about god, in egypt? moses tells them. god specifically instructs moses on HOW to tell them -- the difference is that moses sucks and public speaking, and so god PROVES himself (in the book). but throughout the bible god speaks through prophets. there's more than a dozen books in the section called "prophets." you have no shown anything besides the fact that sin might have been called "allah." that's not especially persuasive. ...you make the same claims they do, for the same reasons, with the same context. they're the same. took you long enough!now, on to the next part: where does the word for "god" come from? yes, it is. abram already knew of the lord when the lord came to him. people before -- pagans and idolators -- knew of the lord. yahweh was a member of a pnatheon in the local religions, not someone completely new. not under debate. yeah, no, it doesn't work that way. the burden of proof is on the person making the claim, not the person who says "where's your proof?"(and there are bits that call into the question the chronology of the bible, which you are well aware of. some of them are in the bible itself -- biblical scholars cannot agree on a date for the exodus) ok. and they're also wrong, as more MODERN scholars have shown. older ≠ better.

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we talked about this before, i still disagree. while the text is a hodge-podge of multiple sources, it's not a complete crap-shoot.

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"A complete crap-shoot" is way overstating Berlinerblau's position.But would you agree that there are enough examples to serve to falsify the notion that the Bible is the protected and totally accurately preserved texts as initially written?I think Berlinerblau demonstrates that the collection of books called the Bible have been like all ancient works subject to a number of factors.lfen

well, he seems to be saying that translators are more lost than they really are. oh, absolutely. in this thread, i actually documented a change that significantly alters the meaning of a verse.that said, after about 200 bc, the text seems to have remained mostly the same. the major redaction went on well before that (some claim by ezra), but even then they don't seem to have cared quite enough to make everything line up nicely. it's editted, but not into one single, sensible, consistent work. the confusion and contradiction is a sign of where it hasn't been editted not a sign that it has.i think berlinerblau has it backwards: we'd expect the text to be editted together, for religious reasons. there is idea of that happening with the new testament (an alternative to the q theory) that says that many of the places it agrees were edits. and we can find evidence of this in older documents. the problem is that with the old testament, the newer documents and the older documents largely agree. certainly.This message has been edited by arachnophilia, 05-02-2006 07:56 PM

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What are you going on about now? I said God did all the initiating. I see nothing in what you've said that contradicts that. I wasn't trying to persuade about anything. I was saying how I got persuaded away from the idea that the moon god was the inspiration for Islam. But in the same way I later got persuaded by rereading Buz's OP that there is some reason to think the moon god was that after all. Who cares? In a very distorted and shrunken form only -- if it had anything to do with an idol. It seems Abraham would have had to know something of the true God, yes, although if God was represented in the pantheon he would have been reduced to an idol and His true character lost to them.But Noah was still alive in the days of Abraham's father, if not Abraham himself -- I don't remember the timing for sure -- and Noah knew the true God, so certainly there was opportunity to know the truth of the invisible God without any idol at all to stand for Him, despite the obviously rampant polytheism. It is possible THAT is how Abraham knew of the true God and no idol was ever involved.THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE that Abraham had any dealings with the idol, or that the idol figured at all in his call out of Ur, while there apparently is historical evidence that Mohammed had dealings with the Allah idol -- whichever one it may have happened to be. Well the Bible stood as history for a couple of millennia and still stands as history to the enlightened ones. The debunkers are the challengers, the ones making the claims against the Bible, that makes them the ones who have the burden. You are right, I don't care what modern scholars say, it doesn't impact the truth of the Bible at all. When they have something legitimate and useful to say I'll hear about it through the proper channels. Now thanks to rereading Buz's OP I'm back to uncertainty about whether this was a moon god or not. The Satanic Verses certainly suggest a connection to the moon god too. But for now I'll leave it at a god in the Meccan pantheon that Mohammed thought should be treated as the one and only. It is trivia and priggishness to make an issue of their transliteration into English.This message has been edited by Faith, 05-02-2006 09:36 PM

Israel does not attack the palestinians. Instead, the arab world attacks Israel. ISrael defends.Moreover, the religious right in ISrael is very weak. Israel does not possess the territories because it seeks to fulfil relgious destiny, but because the Arabs relentlessly attack, and refuse, over and over and over, a palestinian state. They refused several times before Israel was born; it wasn't even a consideration during the years after Israel was born (1948) until Israel won the territories (1967); and they refuse even now - always pretending for western ears that it's about a fair deal, but honestly saying in Arabic that it's about a religious and political mission to destroy Israel: PERIOD. (Israel is a western liberal democracy, with all the sensibilities of ouselves. It is us. Israelis are us. Their thoughts, feelings, culture, politics, justice system, and their aching desire for peace, are all us. It is the Arabs who are different. Nowhere is equivalence reasoning more less fitting than to the ME, and to no people it is more cruelly unjust than to Israelis.Is Allah G-d? In the technical sense, yes. But he is a much different conception within Islam than Judaism or Christianity. This is reflected in the different culture. It is also reflected in why the enlightment came to the west, and democracy followed, whereas in contrast the Arab world so resistant. It is more than noteworthy that democracy did arise in Asia. The culture there was not inimical to democracy.To understand this better, if indirectly, consider this book review:Page not found | National Review

Edit: removed unneccesary contentThe topic is about Allah being derived from a moon god.This message has been edited by SuperNintendo Chalmers, 05-02-2006 10:32 PM

Faith, you wrote this, and it sums the fact of the matter very well:"This involved a known direct transformation of an existing religious system and its main god into the new concepts of Islam. An existing Allah was turned into the Allah of Islam.The Biblical God did not derive from anything existing at all, and your supposed connections between cultural forms and the Biblical God are entirely your own invention. There is no evidence of any such connection.No existing God was turned into Jehovah. Jehovah makes all the moves in the Bible. He is not the creation of men. He chooses men, and He guides them to His own chosen ends.By contrast, in Islam Mohammed does everything, transforms the existing polytheism himself, and carries Allah along with him.}"There is simply no question that the concept of Allah as represented in the koran is much different than G-d as we know him in Judeo-Christian theology.

Off-topic and totally false.

Good thing you're here to police the board.As for whether that's off topic...If Allah is a different concept than the judeo-Christian G-d, then the logical question is: from where, then, did this concept arise? By implication, the answer may well be former gods, like a moon god, of faiths that preceded Islam in that part of the world.

the thing is the judeo-christian god arose in the same way, so playing the double standard of saying that allah has pagan roots so its not the creator god but a pumped up pagan god is wrong
moses basicly found god almost in the same way if you want to consider the story in exodus true{aBe:just to add to this, the only reason this seems to come up, is because the person arguing that allah is the moon god and can't be the creator god with the title allah is belief, not fact}This message has been edited by ReverendDG, 05-03-2006 12:03 AM

The judeo concept of G-d is, as Faith pointed out, entirely different from the various concepts of god and gods that preceded it. Monotheism in itself was radical, and that's only the start. This is true whether you take the anthropological/secular view that faith evolved, or believe that the Judeo G-d was a radical and sudden occurence, resulting from G-d making himself known.Allah, and Islam, therefore, are, in fact, conceptually backward, no matter from where this concept of G-d arose. Even if it's true that Allah relates to a moon god is not salient. What matters is that he is very different from any pecedent moon god. Clearly, he is some kind of derivative of the Judeo-Christian concept of G-d, merged with one man's - Mohammed - megalomania, and his quest for immortality.

nor have you provided a good reason that islam is any different, or that their claim is less valid. you keep SAYING you have, but you haven't. perhaps i just missed it? feel free to point me in the direction of your historical evidence. ok, let's take a look at the op.

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Historically, "Allah’ was not invented by Muhammad or revealed for the first time in the Qur’an. In fact, the word ”Allah’ ...

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*buzzer sound* sorry, by your arguments, linguistic commonality is not enough. the "historical evidence" buz post is ENTIRELY circumstantial naming convention similarity. you said it yourself -- it's not enough that "yah" in ugarit sounds like the "yah" in the bible.is there any other "historical evidence" i should look at? maybe, perhaps, something that does amount to people calling their god "god?" evidently, not you. but for claims of monotheism from polytheism, it's nice to note when proper names of gods become the general word for god. sure, that's fine. i think that's a fairly reasonable reading of the text. islam contends the same thing. while it's possible that allah was worshipped as part of a pantheon, it was in a shrunken and distorted form only, and his true character was lost on pagan arabs -- and jews and christians. oh, please, don't make me calculate this out again. i did once, and it's really a pain. we'll leave it at "i forget." it's a stretch -- and a poor apolistic "what if?" stretch at that. abram lived in ur, and it's not like he was the first generation son of noah. had the godly monotheistic tradition been passed down, i doubt god would have had to call abram out of ur in the first. something was lost between noah and abraham, and it was lost at babel. well, depending on whether you like genesis 11 or 12, it might be terah that left ur. but abram was called in 12. but no, there is no evidence that terah was a polytheist -- and there's no evidence that he was not. but considering the social context (ur, babylon) and considering that abram's covenant was a NEW thing.and the first commandment to have no other god is delivered to moses, not abram. millenia of belief ≠ fact. belief is still belief.and honestly, if the original authors didn't view it as history, neither should we. kings is a history. chronicles is a history. they have names, and dates. genesis is a collection of traditions, regarding names, eponymous ancestors, and lacks any dating method besides genealogies. (and you know what they say about those) ie: filtered through the pulpit.no, this is not a modern problem. the dating issues date back to the very attempt to figure the age of the earth. you run into problems when you check 1kings 6's reference to the time since the exodus with the books of joshua, judges, and samuel. it doesn't line up. there have been threads here on this. and the gnostic gospels suggest some weird stuff about jesus, too. can we judge a religion based on its heretical manuscripts? (or what salman rushdie thinks? *rimshot*) no, there was a god in the meccan pantheon called "god." and according to you, that proves nothing. otherwise, the christian "god" would also be the same, especially since arabic-speaking christians call him the same name. but you adamantly deny that yahweh and allah are the same (which i am not arguing at this time) -- so why must two other gods be the same based on name only? it denies the tradition surrounding the commandment to not take the lord's name in vain, which jews take very, very seriously. they would not see their vowel-additions as "trivia" but common knowledge.again, people who speak hebrew know this. jews know this. it's their text, and their language. it's the christian scholars who seem to be in the dark. claiming a mistake to be "inspired" is about linguistic equivalent of calling a programming bug a "feature."it wrong, and nearly everyone in the academic bible-study world knows it, and knows why, and knows about what it should be. the problem with religion is that people get attached to their traditions. translators make mistakes. they don't always know cultural contexts.you just have to admit that the tradition is more important to you than accuracy.and uh, it's not priggish. it's the name of god. it is insulting and rude to continually call someone by the wrong name. can you really know someone all that well if you can't even get their name right?

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honestly, i've been to a few meetings of my school's middle east and national security (means) organization.i want to preface this with a statement, because some are going to find what i say controversial. i do not mean to be or sound anti-semitic. i am not, and i have a deep respect of judaism and the jewish people. i'm learning hebrew, because i want to know more. that said, please be aware that this is friendly criticism.i live in an area with a very high jewish population. at these meetings, and sometimes in class, i hear a lot of similar views. "it's not an israeli problem, it's a palestinian problem." they like to pretend that israel does nothing.people who live in israel have a very different opinion on the matter. at one point, my hebrew teacher basically rolled her eyes at a student spouting his crazed take on zionism (and how palestine doesn't exist and they're all blood-thirsty monsters), and told him he didn't know what he was talking about. and most people here do not -- you can't, unless you've lived there. my teacher was born there, and served two years in the air force there (as all israeli citizens serve in the military). and she has a much, much more realistic grasp on the situation.and neither side is without blame. palestine denies israel exists, and actively tries to destroy it. israel denies palestine exists, and certainly does a lot of things to muck them up, often in the name of "defense." (the wall comes to mind) can you say, with a clear conscience, that you are absolutely positive the whole "promised land" thing has nothing to do with it? see, this is the bit you have no idea about. israelis are NOT us. they are israelis. and israel (like us) is a very diverse country. they have the oldest religions in the world, and the newest high tech city in the world. they have people from all over the planet... and a good percentage of israelis are arab.for a long time, both israel and palestine have wanted peace (in the opinion of my professor, the israeli) and both have been working towards it -- they just don't want to do it on the other's terms. but hamas -- a radical minority until recently -- has change that by getting elected.speaking of radical minorities, and how israel is more foriegn than you might imagine, did you know there is a radical sect of judaism that supports hamas? yes, especially -- no, because of -- their position about the destruction of israel. see, the really orthodox jews know that israel will not be a country until the messiah comes. what, he's not here yet? israel shouldn't exist.can you think of any person in this country who would think that way of the united states? makes perfect sense in israel.anyways. this is way, way, way off topic. and i don't really feel like talking about it that much.

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as per buzsaw's continued direction, not under debate in this thread (even if buzsaw himself brings it up, apparently)

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