SPENTA MAINYU

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: "Ignorance is an affront."

YOU ARE IN DARKNESS.

god of islam 4

GOD OF CHRISTIANITY : FATHER  -- 'GOD INCARNATE IN MAN' FROM GALILEE : YSHUA

Christianity is the most difficult amongst the Abrahamic belief systems. The god is YHVH. The people is Israel and the gentiles. There is no divine(!) revelation. There is no codebook. In fact it is not a belief system but a cult.  Do you know why?  Who can quote another example of a belief system where god is the father; messenger is the son; a virgin impregnated by a divine(!) being is the mother; which all add up to a holy family called Trinity. The son comes down  to Earth as the 'god incarnate in man'  or  'god in flesh',  to pay for the 'original sin' of the mankind he gives his life; he is resurrected intact(!), bodily; and raised(!) to his father’s realm, the heaven; only to wait there until the judgment day, to come back down to the Earth to judge the living and the resurrected dead, and to establish the ‘kingdom of god’. This is the story around which an organized belief system or to be more precise,  a cultic system was built.

Begin with the supposed prophecies in the Old Testament, add to it the Egyptian stuff, a bit of Sabianism, Zoroastrianism,Buddhism, a great deal of the Mithraic cult, and other cults of the region and you get Paulinism which is known as Christianity.

The Old Testament is a book about the god,  but the New Testament texts are about a man, Yshua. He could be an invented character or a Jewish preacher from rural Galilee. He could be mythical or historical. It could well be that Yshua was a historical person recreated with additional characteristics and presented to us as the messiah. But this would make historicity meaningless because so many things were borrowed and put together from so many myths, legends and stories that even this historical person is lost beyond retrieval. So we have not much to do but to go by the collection of these writings called the New Testament which is about a ‘god incarnate in man’, a ‘god in flesh’. Until Paul interfered, the Yshua/Jesus movement had had the chance to develop into a coherent teaching with its roots in the past, probably for a very brief period. But Paul’s intervention has changed the whole scene completely. Paul was well versed in the cults of his times from Mithraism in the east to the Greco-Roman world which was his environment. He was living in Tarsus (south Asia Minor). Cult of Adonis in Byblus and Paphos; cult of Tammuz in Babylonia; cult of Osiris in Egypt; and the cult of Attis were his environment. In his immediate surroundings there were the celebrations for the ‘awakening of Heracles/Hercules’ in Tarsus. These concepts of cultic deities must have given him the ideas of the resurrected deities, born of virgin mothers etc. So in this Jew’s mind all the components of a new belief system were ready. All he needed was to write his first letter to create a new cultic system and a myth (For more information please check the pages on JESUS/YSHUA and BIBLE in this site). He has never known Yshua. Yshua didn’t have a book, a canon of his own. But through his writings Paul did introduce his own canon, which consists of seven documents:

• Romans, I & II Corinthians, Galatians, I Thessalonians, Philippians, and Philemon.

There are passages in the texts written by Paul where, almost as a throwaway remark, he puts Yshua and god together. These are the examples:

• “Blessed be the god and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Grace to you and peace from god the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”

• “For us there is one god and father from whom are all things, and for whom we exist, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and through whom we exist.”

This statement by Paul shows that in his monotheism;

• He combines the god (father) and Yshua (son).
• He is a Jew and a ‘god-and-Yshua monotheist’ (as if that is possible!).
• Yshua was thought to be the god’s long-expected act of mercy.
• Yshua was offering forgiveness to sinners, thus claiming that he had the power to exercise the god’s prerogative.
• Yshua had died not a redeemer, nor a messiah, but a ‘sinner’.

• If the story was left there, there would not have been Christianity. But as told by Paul  “a divine intervention took place and Yshua had resurrected(!).” 

Hence  Christianity. Paul’s efforts has ended up in Yshua being elevated to the position of divinity by the Christians of the day, 20 years after his death(?). Research on the New Testament, also, is said to show the divinity of Yshua arriving after his death. The Q source (Quelle - Check the page on YSHUA/JESUS in this site)  is accepted as what Yshua or the person called by that name, has taught.

• Includes no birth narrative or resurrection;
• Portrays Yshua as a teacher of wisdom,
• Contains no hint of a select group of disciples,
• Has no program to reform the religion or politics of Judaism,
• Has no dramatic encounter with the authorities in Yerushalim,
• Has no martyrdom for the cause.. much less a martyrdom with saving significance for the ills of the world,
• Has no mention of a first church in Yerushalim,
• Shows that neither Yshua nor the people of Q were Christians,
• Shows Yshua’s first followers had little in common with this cult of Christ.

Amongst the collection’s most important components, parts of the sermon on the mount; and other Q1 passages are closely related to Yshua’s moral teachings, and Q1 was preserved as the only Gospel until the period of the Jewish War (66-73A.D). What is called Christianity, should in reality be called Paulinism. Because Christianity is not based on the message of Yshua anymore. The doctrine as we now know it, rests in all its main points on the totally different teaching of Paul.

• Yshua in the form he is presented to us pursued the creation of an immediate link between god and mankind, he has never wanted to set up bureaucratic channels to go through.

• The followers of Yshua in those days didn’t think of Yshua as a god; he was just a kingly figure that will liberate them and reinstate the old tradition of Judaism.

• The claim that he was resurrected is the central point of the faith, because at that point Yshua the man ended and we entered the carefully organized stage of the Christian Church with the mythically glorified Christ playing the ‘star’.

• Paul’s understanding of Yshua, and his specific inventions have ended up with a dogmatic belief system far away from the teachings of the Jewish preacher and the messenger from Galilee - Yshua.

According to Paul, “all are under the wrath of god from the start; and are lost without exception; all are without hope and without god; for Satan has power over all. There is a judgment of damnation by god against everyone without exception.” This wrath of god (which also applies to the newborn babies) according to Paul can only be averted by the death and the blood of Yshua, and only the death and the blood of Yshua can atone for the original guilt (Colossians 1:22)  “..and without shedding of blood (there) is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22). By adopting this idea of vicarious sacrifice of the first born son, which is rooted in the primitive culture of the prehistoric Semitic religions, Paul turns Yshua’s teaching of salvation upside down, and opposes his reforming ideas; instead of the original  joyous eu-angelion, the Pauline message of threats was developed. Paul teaches that the human individual is unable to attain salvation and atonement before god by any good works of his own, or by any change however good (Romans 3:24, 3:28; 9:11; 9:16; I Corinthians 1:29; Galatians 2:16). “For by grace are ye saved through faith. it is the gift of god.” Thus the precondition for the action of god’s grace is the acceptance of the Pauline teaching on grace; which means membership of the 'Church of Paul'.

Here are the three baits employed by Paul to catch the incognizant people.

Believe in Paulinism and;

• Become immortal (do not fear of death, have a god-like existence).

• Absolve yourself of your sins (so have a chance to live in the realm of gods in afterlife ).

• Release your inner tensions (don’t think about sex anymore, mankind did it once and Yshua did pay  for it, didn’t he?).

One of the things - in addition to resurrection - which makes Christianity especially complicated is the doctrine of Trinity: Father, son and the holy spirit. How can a god be one and three at the same time? The answer: One god is revealed in three persons. Father, son and the holy spirit are “three persons in the same substance” and as such are united - but yet separate (please check the pages on the SUPREME BEING in this site). When one tries to explain the trinity by attributing a divine character to god or defining the three different  personalities as three different manifestations of god, the endlessness and incomprehensibility of god comes to an end. This is the problem facing Christianity.

After this inevitable summary we are left with concepts like the father; son, holy spirit; trinity; three in one; lord Jesus Christ; messiah; redemption; salvation; St. Paul; 'god incarnate in man'; 'god in flesh'; 'original sin'; Immortality etc. These are the products of the sick mind of Paul,  which are also pieces of a fairy tale for the credulous people. Therefore we must move on to a much firmer territory.

The later monotheists, especially Christians in the western world were influenced mainly by the Aristotle’s idea of god, which could be summarized as follows:

• There was the ‘unmoved mover’ at the top.
• It was a pure being; eternal, immobile and spiritual.

• It was pure thought,; thinker and thought at the same time, engaged in an eternal moment of contemplation of himself, the highest object of knowledge.

• In contrast to ‘it’ matter is imperfect and mortal, therefore there could not be a material element in god.

• Each movement must have a cause that can be traced back to an antecedent, that antecedent to another antecedent, eventually ending up in a ‘single’ source.

• The unmoved mover is the source which causes all the motion and activity in the Universe.

• This Unmoved Mover activates the world by a process of attraction, because all beings are drawn towards the 'being' itself.

Why is  man different?  Why is he in a privileged position?  Because human soul has the divine gift of intellect. By having this intellect he becomes akin to god; he has some of the qualities and attributes of the divine nature, and because of this divine capacity of reason he is above the plants and animals. Man is a microcosm of the Universe, and it is his duty to become immortal and divine by purifying his intellect. Wisdom (sophia) is the highest of all human virtues, and when man contemplates he imitates something which the unmoved mover does all the time. So man becomes divine(!).

THE OMNIPOTENT GOD OF ISLAM : ALLAH

Now we are about to enter the domain of Islam which is visualized by its believers as the culmination of the divine revelation, the last belief system which was introduced by the last of the prophets, the Hagarene Messenger ('Muhammad'), after whom there would be no other.

The Jewish god is male. Christians and Muslims also worship a male god in fact supposedly the same god. The name given to the god of Islam is Allah. This name was known to Arabs and to the peoples of the region long before Islam. The probable etymology is the contraction of ‘al-ilah’. The Aramaic (Mandaean-Sabian) words ‘alaha’ or ‘aloho’ are proposed also as possible origins of the name. Hebrew word el (and its plural elohim) is another probable root which derives from the Semitic root alah which could be translated as ‘the great power’. The word which describes this holy, miracle-working omnipotent power is thought to have been derived from the same source as the word for god. In the Hebrew original of the Old Testament the name of god is given as either ‘elah/eloh’ (singular) or ‘elahim/elohim’ (plural). ‘IL’ is used to denote el-lah. EL, il, alaha, elah, elahim, eloh, elohim are the names of god in the Semitic language. “Some scholars say that the root of the word for the god of Islam, Allah, is the Aramaic alaha,” writes the Encyclopedia of Islam. This proposiition seems to be the right, because the Hagarene Messenger ('Muhammad') has announced that he was going back to the unadulterated religion of Abraham, which was the Sabian faith. The character called Abraham is the Hebraicised version of the original person, Bahram the Mandai. Bahram was a Mandaean. Mandaean tongue was eastern Aramaic. Syriac is accepted as a branch of Aramaic. The word Allah is Syriac, and may have its root in Aramaic aloho. So the name of the god of Islam is not Arabic, it comes from a non-Arabic root.

The word ‘god’ appears in some inscriptions found in Safa (a place near Mecca). The words al Lah/el Lah, hal Lah appear together with the name of one of the idols in Nabataean, but the word al Lah appears alone in the Safa inscriptions. The origin of Allah, according to people of Kufa is ilah. According to Basrans it is lah. The assumption is that, in order to magnify ilah, el is added. The ‘l’ of el and ‘I’ of ilah became too heavy to pronounce; ‘i’ is dropped; and the resultant word became ellah. The same applies to Lah. To exalt the word, most probably, el was added and the final word became el-Lah. Some Islamic scholars say that the word god is general than el Lah/al Lah of the Arabs who reportedly “had the habit of calling each one of their idols as al lah in addition to its name”. A similar usage could be seen in relation to Teng-ri of the central Asian Turks and Tanrı of the Turks of our time, both of which have their origin in the Sumerian word for god - dengir, dingir which is not the name as such but a general appellation.

With the arrival of Islam, suddenly Allah became the name of the greatest god. Since the word Allah is the name of the greatest god, and there is only one greatest god, it has no plural. From the standpoint of Islam the other gods cannot be called Allah or ‘elah/ilah’. Allah is the ‘greatest name’ because it belongs to Him.

The concept of al Lah/el Lah among the pre-Islamic Arabs was amazingly similar to the concept of Allah in Islam. Kuran is at a loss as to why such a correct understanding of god had not led the infidels to accept the new reality. These pre-Islamic Arabs believed that el Lah/al Lah;

• Is the ‘the creator of the world’,
• Is ‘the one who brings rain’,
• Is ‘the one who gave life to everything on earth’.

The only thing which makes Kuran feel uneasy towards them is the fact that though they knew god as;

• ‘The One who created the sky and earth’, they did not end up with the conclusion that He was the only one to worship.

According to Islam;

• Allah is first and last because he existed before everything and he will exist after everything ceased to exist.
• Everything will end, only Allah is permanent.
• Allah is above everything.
• There is none higher than Allah.
• Allah is in everything.
• Allah is closest to everything.

Here is the all inclusive formula in Islam:

In this short story of human mind’s progress towards the concept of an omnipotent creator  and His belief system, we can see that everybody has borrowed from each other as they wished and needed. Check the attributes of the sole god of Islam, the omnipotent universal god of creation, you will find there is nothing original in how they visualised their supreme overseer. The attributes that different peoples had in relation to their particular concepts and images of god have culminated in an aggregate understanding of the highest entity, up there somewhere. That's all.

Muhammad