The attributes of God

Submitted by Sigmund Derman (United States), May 18, 2012 at 12:20

Who knows the attributes of God? The God of the Bible certainly ordered the killing of many people. Also, He directly killed many people. Does that mean that the Judeo-Christian God does not exist? I suppose that you can recognize only the God of the New Testament. If you wish you could say that the God implied or revealed in each separate book of the Bible was a separate God. I prefer to think of the God of the whole Bible as one God and different revealed attributes simply approaches to understanding that God. In that sense, I can look at Allah as another word for God with various attributes implied by the Koran and the other Muslim writings (such as the Hadiths). I think all of these works are imperfect or, at least, in need of filtering and interpretation and therefore everything that seems to be an attribute of God on the surface is not necessarily a true attribute.

It seems that you are saying that you want to judge the entity called Allah in the Koran and that you feel that the attributes revealed there are so different from what you think of as God that you cannot accept that Allah and what you think of as God are the same. That's reasonable too. You certainly are entitled to that belief.

But I do not think there is any proof of anybody's interpretation. It all is a matter of faith.

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