Frasch Ideas—Examine, Inquire, Explore

Muslim vs. Christian (or vice versa)

• Posted by Theresa on October 18th, 2006 filed in Believe It or Not

“Christians believe they have the truth. Muslims believe they have the truth. Each will tell the other that hell is their destiny, that eternal torture awaits those who refuse th embrace to truth. God is a righteous judge, they both say, and will recompense the unbelievers.” (From ex-christian.net)

I saw this video this morning entitled The Truth and it reminded me of a few things.

One of the things it reminded me of was reading the book Palace Walk with my book club. What caught my attention was how similar the Muslim characters were to Christians in their language, in how they viewed God in their every day life and in how they spoke to God. If they both can’t be right then maybe they are both wrong.

The other thing it reminded me of was my “Grandma Louise” (my dad’s step-mother). Grandma Louise is a ex-Catholic Jehovah’s Witness. In my late teens I switched from being Catholic to being a born-again Christian. Grandma was happy I was finally out of the awful Catholic Church but now I was in another dilemma. She took it upon herself to try to set my family straight (but only when Grandpa Tony wasn’t around because he did not like talk of any religion at all).

I remember having a conversation with her after Grandpa had died (and after we had had a conversation in which we agreed that she was never going to convert me and I was never going to convert her, so let’s just leave it alone) she was telling me about her church service. It was then that I realized how similar we were as well. They sang worship songs in their service, they had a sermon, it was very similar to my own services I attended. It changed my view of the JW’s. Up till then I had thought them the enemy. I thought all they did was sit around and plot how to be more effective at your front door in converting you to become a JW.

After that I didn’t view them as the enemy…just misguided .

Not too long ago I went to a funeral at a Mormon Temple. I was struck by the same thing there - how similar their service was to the ones I had attended. There was a mixture of “scripture” from the Book of Mormon and the Bible (more Bible than not). They sang hymns. They used a little different language (testify instead of witness), but overall there were far more similarities than differences.

So what does this all mean? God wasn’t (isn’t) very clear in what REALLY is the Truth? His angels have really messed things up by giving different messages out? None of it is true? All of it is true?

What do you think?

If you have a comment you can email me at ideas at totheresa dot com until I get the comments fixed. I tried this morning, but no luck yet.

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