Of course it's the same deity; the difference is in the believers

Submitted by Stan Goodman (Israel), Oct 1, 2006 at 01:20

I probably ought to ignore your sarcastic response, but instead I'll refer you to the title of my comment (repeated on this one). The point was that the Hebrew God was coopted by Muhammad for his needs (reducing inter-tribal warfare based on hostile competition between tribal deities). The Deity is the same deity, name and all. His Islamic believers are nutcases, including the Prophet himself, as you know from your studies of the Quran. To be more charitable, they ..... see Him differently. The Muslim PERCEPTION of the Deity is very different from that of either Judaism or Christianity.

You, perhaps, are confusing perception with substance. Without that confusion, by the way, the question posed by the estimable Mr Pipes disappears. I am a Jew; I have been told that Christians serve the same God as I do. I can tell you that Jews and Christians do not see this God identically, for reasons having to do with history ancient and modern, and with the deplorable quality of Biblical translations to European languages (e.g. English). That does not make the two visions of the Deity into two distinct Deities.

I make no comment about the validity of either of the two visions. An analogy is the anecdote about the two blind men who were asked to describe an elephant by feeling the different parts that each could touch. Since I am sure you know the story, I wont repeat it here, but will only ask: "Do the resulting radically different descriptions mean that the elephant has a split personality?" I gather that you can extrapolate from this to "all men are Muhammad". That is a psychological matter, and is off-topic.

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