Does God = Allah

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It has become the generic term, but it was originally the name of a minor god at Mecca, the Moon God.

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No, that's a fabrication.

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Also, if it is not a name, then why do English-speaking Muslims say "Allah" instead of "God?"

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Because they're more used to using the Arabic form of the title ? Because Arabic is the holy language of Islam ? Either seems a reasonable explanation.
s

But it is also fundamental to Christian belief that their God is the God of the "Old Testament" - the Christians may disagree with Jews on the nature of God but they insist that they are talking about the same entity. Christians insist that their God is the God who Abraham worshipped, who gave the law to Moses and who inspired the Jewish Prophets. Likewise Moslems insist that they worship the God who did all those things.So there is a sense in which Jews Moslems and Christians claim to worship the same God, and if that sense is not accepted then Christianity - at least as the vast majority of Christians believr it -is false.l

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So there is a sense in which Jews Moslems and Christians claim to worship the same God,

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Yes, this is claimed but not true nevertheless.

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Yet at the start of the post you agreed that this sense is true - that Christians do worship the God of Abraham, Moses and David. Either Christians, Jews and Moslems DO worship the same God in this sense or Christianity is false.

The quote function was disabled to avoid excessive quotes. If it is too difficult to remember what you said only a short time before, too difficult to scoll a little waty up the page and too difficult to click the link to the previosu message then I woudl say that the lack of a complete quote is the least of your problems.In reply to your message, I would add that if your understanding of the entity you worship is crucial to identifying WHICH entity you worship then you have some serious problems. The worst is that the Christian God is suppsoed to be beyond human understanding. Thus if your argument is correct it would be impossible to worship Him - you would always be worshipping an idol - your own image of God, not the true God.

But if God is beyond human understanding you can't have a true image. Any image you have will be false.

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They deny that Allah was originally the Moon God, although it's one of the best attested historical facts. Do you have convincing evidence for this?

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If it is so well attested you would think that peope claiming it could prodcue some of the evidence. This assertion seems to be on a par withthe claim that there was better historical evidence ofr the existence of Jesus than for the existence of Napoleon (and yes I once saw someone claim exactly that).As I rememeber all this is based on one article and the only historical fact which plays a major role in the argument is that Al-Lah ("The God") was a title of the Moon God named Sin. And then the argument switches to claiming that AL-Lah is the name of the Moslem God and not a title at all. If the claim is based, not on direct historical evidencem but on an argument which relies on equivocation it can hardly be said to have any historical attestation.

If God is beyond human understanding, even God can't give us a correct image of God.

But it is your idea that errors in understanding the nature of God amount to worshipping a different God. I didn't suggest that. But if God is beyond human understanding we can never have a correct image of God, so such erros are inevitable.

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El was the generic term for God in the Middle East in the time of Moses, which fits with the fact that most peoples had a general if often distorted concept of a Creator God over all gods, but it also got shrunk down to particular gods thanks to fallen nature and demonic activity.

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That term dropped out of use as time went on. The God ofthe Jews specifically gave His personal Name and was no longer known as El.

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You don't say when it dropped out of use. However we know that it was still in use in the time of Isaiah, and Christians still keep Isaiah's specific usage alive today - in the name ImmanuEl.
a

If faith's claim that this is a well-documented historical fact were true then why is the "best" source you can find a sectarian one ? Why not a respectable academic source.Well having got to page 7 without seeing even one pro-source that looks at all reliable (although Jack Chick came up early on !) I have to say that sensible use of google does not appear to back up the view that there is anything solid and reliable here.The counter-arguments on the whole seem to be rather better than the pro-arguments (the explicit Quranic condmenation of moon-worship itself is solid and hard to refute).-->http://

I would say that the explicit refusal to worship the sun or moon clearly indicates that the Islamic God is not a moon-god.If your story were true then there should be strong links between the concepts and mythology of the two Gods. How about showing some of that instead of making assertions ??

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This is unrelated to whether El has any part in the name "Allah" -- completely different language.

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But it is not a completely differnet language. It is a related language. Even if it were not words spread between languages by cultural contact. Morer - the only source for the argument we are discussing - states that the terms are linked. So you are arguing with your own source.r

So far as I can tell Morer is the only source. His claims are repeated by Christian anti-Islam websites. And that is it. Nothing else.