#comparative religion

[pathtopeace12]

The Desert Was Told to Sing

Halfway through Isaiah 42, the text does something strange. It stops talking about servants and law and justice, and it starts calling on places to make noise.

"Sing to the LORD a new song, his praise from the ends of the earth" (42:10).

And then it gets specific.

"Let the wilderness and its towns raise their voices; let the settlements where Kedar lives rejoice. Let the inhabitants of Sela sing for joy; let them shout from the mountaintops" (42:11).

A new song. From a named place.

Kedar.

Not a metaphor. Not a symbol. A person. The second son of Ishmael, listed by name in Genesis 25:13. His descendants became the people the Bible and the rabbis simply called "the Arabs." The Jewish Encyclopedia identifies "Kedar" as the standard rabbinic word for the Arab tribes. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia says it is through Kedar that Muslim genealogists trace the Prophet Muhammad's descent from Ishmael.

The text asks Kedar's settlements to sing.

So I keep asking myself: did they?

If you have ever heard the adhan — the Islamic call to prayer — from somewhere you didn't expect to hear it, you know it stops you. It is not background music. It is a human voice, unaccompanied, rising over rooftops or out of a valley, and it says the same thing every time it rises.

God is greater. I testify there is no god but God. I testify Muhammad is the messenger of God. Come to prayer. Come to success.

That sound has been climbing from the settlements of Kedar's descendants since the seventh century. Five times a day. From Mecca, from Medina, from every town and village across the Arabian Peninsula and then outward — Cairo, Istanbul, Jakarta, Lagos, London, Los Angeles. A new song, sung from the ends of the earth.

I am not saying that Isaiah was writing a description of the adhan. That would be an overreach, and scripture is not a coded message that resolves into one-to-one correspondences like a puzzle. What I am saying is that the text asks a specific people — Kedar's people — to sing a new song to the LORD, and a new song to the LORD is exactly what rose from those settlements when Islam came to them.

That alignment is worth sitting with.

The chapter doesn't stop at sound. It moves to scope.

The servant described at the beginning of Isaiah 42 is given a vast assignment. He will bring mishpat — justice, law, a binding way of life — to the nations (42:1). Three times in four verses this is repeated. Christian commentators have tried to pin down what mishpat means here, and they keep arriving at the same place. Adam Clarke called it "the law to be published by Messiah." Jamieson, Fausset and Brown called it "His true religion." A servant who brings a whole religion to the gentile nations.

Muhammad, peace be upon him, brought a religion and a law. Not to one people. To all peoples. The Quran says it in a single verse: "We have not sent you except as a mercy to all the worlds" (21:107).

I find it striking that the chapter gives us the servant's mission and the servant's geography in the same breath. A law for the nations — and the settlements of Kedar singing.

There is something else about the singing.

The verse says "a new song." Not the old songs. Not the psalms already known. Something that hasn't been heard before.

This matters because the adhan was, in fact, new. It did not come from the Jewish liturgy. It did not come from Christian hymnody. It arrived as its own form — a declaration, not a prayer, shouted from a high place so the whole town could hear. When Bilal, the first muezzin, climbed to the rooftop and called out over Medina, he was doing something no one had heard before. A formerly enslaved man, standing above the city, announcing in a clear voice that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is His messenger.

The rabbis had the shofar. The Christians had bells. The Muslims had a human voice, calling words.

A new song.

I want to be honest about what this is and what it isn't.

Isaiah 42 is not a prediction of the adhan. The "new song" is a motif that appears in the Psalms too (Psalm 96, Psalm 98, Psalm 149), and not every use of it is a prophecy of a specific future event. The Christian reading of this chapter is real and has centuries of tradition behind it. Matthew's Gospel quotes the opening verses and applies them to Jesus (Matthew 12:18–21), and no honest Muslim reader should pretend that reading doesn't exist or doesn't hold together on its own terms.

What I am doing is something smaller and, I think, more honest. I am reading a text that asks a named people — the descendants of Ishmael's son Kedar — to raise a new song to God, and I am noticing that they did. That song has not stopped rising since the seventh century. It is rising right now, somewhere in the world, as you read this.

The full argument — with the commentary sources and the verse-by-verse reading — is written up on OneGodPath (opens outside Tumblr).

A sign doesn't need to close a case. Sometimes it just needs to be heard.

[pathtopeace12]

The Gentle One Sent to the Whole World

There is a line in the Hebrew prophets I keep coming back to.

"A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not quench." (Isaiah 42:3)

Sit with it for a second. A reed already bent, already splitting down its length, and the servant of God does not finish the job. A wick worn down to its last thread of smoke, the flame nearly gone, and he does not pinch it out. He leaves the small light burning.

I don't know a tenderer picture anywhere of how God treats the things that are barely holding on. It is a promise made to whatever in you is close to breaking. He will not be the one to break it.

This is Isaiah 42, and the gentle figure at the center of it is called only "my servant." God places His Spirit on him. Christians have loved this chapter for a very long time, and with reason: Matthew's Gospel takes these exact verses and lays them over Jesus, the one who did not turn away the bruised people who came to him (Matthew 12:18–21). If that is the Jesus you were raised with, I understand completely why the reed and the wick feel like his. I would not want to take that from you.

But here is the thing that keeps me reading.

The same chapter asks this gentle servant to carry something enormous. Three times in four verses it says he will bring justice to the nations, and that far-off coastlands will wait for his teaching, his law (Isaiah 42:1, 4). Not comfort for one village. A whole way of living, carried outward to peoples who were never his own.

Softness, and a mission the size of the world, held in the same few lines.

Then the chapter changes key. The quiet breaks, and there is suddenly a warrior in the text: "The LORD will go forth like a mighty man, he will stir up his zeal like a man of war... he will prevail against his enemies" (Isaiah 42:13). The one who would not snap a bruised reed is somehow also inside a story that ends in victory, out in the open, within history rather than beyond it.

And there is one more turn, and it is the one that catches somewhere under my ribs. The chapter names a place, and tells it to sing.

"Let the wilderness and its towns lift up their voice, the settlements where Kedar dwells... let them shout from the mountaintops" (Isaiah 42:11). A new song, it says, rising from a particular desert.

Kedar was a real person. The second son of Ishmael (Genesis 25:13). His name became the name of his tribe, and then, across the older scriptures, a byword for the Arabs. So when Isaiah calls the villages of Kedar to sing something they have never sung before, he is naming, by its family name, the Arabic-speaking desert.

I read that, and I think of a gentle prophet from the line of Ishmael, one who carried a way of life outward to the nations, who was mocked and driven from his own city and came back to it in the end, not with vengeance but with a kind of quiet victory.

The Quran tells all of this as one long thread. It has Jesus say to his own people that he brings "good tidings of a messenger to come after me, whose name is Ahmad" (Quran 61:6). Ahmad, the praised one. Muhammad, from the same root.

I want to be honest with you, because I've come to think honesty is its own form of respect.

None of this is a trap I'm laying. The Christian reading of Isaiah 42 is old and careful, and it came first. Matthew applied these verses to Jesus centuries before there was an Islam to read them any other way. The gentleness really does fit the Jesus of the Gospels. And every single thread here, taken on its own, has a reasonable answer. A servant sent to the nations can be Jesus reaching the world through the people who followed him. A desert can simply be poetry. A name can be coincidence.

What stays with me is not any one of them alone. It is watching the tenderness, the world-sized mission, the turn toward victory, and the Arabian desert all lean the same direction, in a single chapter, set down in ink centuries before the man they seem to lean toward was born.

If you ever want to sit with the whole thing at length, someone walked through the chapter slowly and gently (opens outside tumblr). But you honestly don't need the link. You can open Isaiah 42 yourself and read it top to bottom tonight, in whatever Bible is nearest.

And when you reach the reed, and the little wick still faintly smoking, notice how gently the whole thing begins. Whatever you end up deciding about who the servant is, that gentleness is the very first thing the chapter wants you to know about him. I think that is worth carrying with you for a while, all on its own.

[pathtopeace12]

The Argument Happens in the Third Person

A small grammatical turn in al-Fatihah, and what it shows about the question Muslims and Christians keep asking each other.

There is a moment near the start of the Quran where the grammar turns around.

The first chapter opens by speaking about God. Praise belongs to God, Lord of the worlds. The Merciful, the Especially Merciful. Master of the Day of Judgment. Three verses in the third person, the way you would describe a king to someone who has never seen him.

Then verse five: iyyaka na'budu wa iyyaka nasta'in. You alone we worship, You alone we ask for help (Al-Fatihah 1:5, translation of the meaning).

He becomes You. Ibn Kathir notes the shift in his commentary, and Arabic rhetoricians have a name for this kind of turn: iltifat, a turning aside. The servant finishes describing and starts addressing.

I keep coming back to that hinge, because of where it puts the argument I have spent a lot of time thinking about.

The question people ask is: do Muslims and Christians worship the same God?

Notice the grammar. They. Their God. The same one? It is a third-person question from beginning to end. It is a question about a description of someone who is not in the sentence.

That is not a criticism of the question. It is a real question and it has an answer, and I think the answer matters. I am only pointing at where it lives.

Because nobody prays in the third person.

A Muslim in prostration is not thinking the God of Islam. There is no room in that position for a comparative noun phrase. There is You, and there is the person saying it, and the floor.

And this is true on the other side of the road as well, which is the part I find worth sitting with.

The prayer Jesus taught his followers, as Matthew records it, opens by addressing God directly as Father in heaven, with the name hallowed in the second line (Matthew 6:9). Vocative from the first word. Not a description of God offered to an audience. A person turning toward Someone and speaking.

So a Muslim at Fajr and a Christian at morning prayer are both, grammatically, doing the same thing. Both have stopped talking about and started talking to.

The question of whether they are addressing the same One can only be asked by a third party standing outside both prayers, holding two descriptions up to the light.

Which brings the honest part, because I do not want this to sound softer than I mean it.

You cannot address someone while believing nothing about them. Every "You" carries a description folded inside it. When I say You in prayer, I mean the One who has no partner, no equal, nothing sharing His nature, no son. That content is not decoration around the address. It is what makes the address land where I intend it.

The Quran gives that content in the register of address rather than argument. God says to Musa at the valley: I am God, there is no deity except Me, so worship Me and establish prayer for My remembrance (Ta-Ha 20:14). First person, no intermediary, no second party in the frame. And elsewhere: worship Him and be steadfast in His worship — do you know for Him any namesake (Maryam 19:65). The Arabic word there is samiyy, one who shares the name, one who could stand in the same place. The question is asked and left open on purpose. There is no such one.

So the disagreement does not disappear when you notice the grammar. It relocates. It moves from which One is being addressed to what is carried inside the You.

A Christian reading this may feel I have undersold the position, and I want to name that rather than let it pass.

For a Trinitarian Christian, the doctrine is not a description laid over God like a coat. Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one essence, is held to be who God is, eternally, not an interpretation added afterward. Framing it as "same God, different description" may sound, from inside that faith, like I have already conceded my own conclusion in the wording. I understand the objection and I think it is a fair one to raise.

Here is where I stand, plainly. I hold that God is one in a way that admits no internal distinction, and I hold that a formulation which locates the uncreated within the created has crossed a line that cannot be crossed. That is not a small difference between us. It is the largest one there is.

It also has a single subject. The dispute is over Him, not over which him. If you want the vocabulary and the doctrine taken slowly and in order, OneGodPath has a page that takes the question from the word through to the doctrine (opens outside tumblr).

Al-Fatihah is recited in every unit of every obligatory prayer, which for a Muslim comes to at least seventeen times between dawn and night.

Seventeen times a day, four verses of describing, and then the turn.

The argument I have been circling lives entirely in those first four verses. I do not think it is a small argument, and I have not tried to make it one. But the surah does not stay there, and neither, in the end, does anyone who actually prays.

[pathtopeace12]

I Will Not Leave You As Orphans

On a Greek word, a Meccan surah, and the oldest fear there is.

There is a word in the fourteenth chapter of John's Gospel that most English Bibles quietly soften.

The King James has Jesus say, on his last night with his disciples, "I will not leave you comfortless." It's a gentle line. It sounds like reassurance offered to people who are sad.

The Greek word is ὀρφανούς. Orphans.

I will not leave you as orphans.

That lands differently. An orphan in that world was not only a child who had lost a parent. A fatherless child had no protection and no standing. Nobody was obliged to them. They lived on whatever kindness happened to come their way, and kindness was not guaranteed.

These were grown men he was speaking to. Fishermen, a tax collector, others. They had left their work and their households to follow him, which meant that whatever standing they had once had, they had traded it for him. He was, in every practical sense, the thing holding their lives in place.

And he was telling them he was going.

So he makes them a promise. Someone else is coming. He calls the coming one the Paraclete, a word English has never managed to settle: Comforter, Advocate, Helper. He says the Father will give them another one (John 14:16), and that this one will teach them (14:26).

Whatever else that promise is, it is first an answer to a fear. Not a doctrinal statement dropped into a lecture. A man reassuring frightened people that they were not about to be abandoned.

I want to put something beside that, and I want to be honest about what I'm doing. What follows is not an argument. I'm not going to try to prove anything with it. It's a resemblance I've never been able to stop noticing.

There was a stretch, early in the Prophet's mission, when revelation stopped coming.

He had been receiving it, reciting it, and then nothing. Days of nothing. A narration from Jundub ibn ʿAbdullah, recorded in both Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, connects this period to the revelation of a short Meccan surah, and describes someone taunting him during the silence, suggesting he had been left.

You can feel the shape of what that must have been. Not an argument he needed to win. A silence he had to sit inside, while people who had watched him from childhood decided out loud that he had been dropped.

The surah that came is called Ad-Duhaa, the morning brightness. It opens by swearing an oath by the light of the forenoon and by the night when it settles. Then:

"Your Lord has not forsaken you, nor has He become displeased." (translation of the meaning, Ad-Duhaa 93:3)

And then, three verses later, this:

"Did He not find you an orphan and give you shelter?" (translation of the meaning, Ad-Duhaa 93:6)

He was one. His father died before he was born. His mother died when he was six. The man being addressed had lived the exact condition that the word in John 14:18 names.

And notice how God comforts him. Not by telling him he was never left. By naming the leaving, plainly, and then naming what came after it. You were an orphan. You were sheltered. The evidence that you are not abandoned now is what already happened to you once.

Then the surah turns, and this is the part I find hardest to read quickly:

"So as for the orphan, do not oppress him." (translation of the meaning, Ad-Duhaa 93:9)

The comfort becomes an instruction in the space of three verses. You were sheltered, so shelter. Whatever was done for you is now owed by you. There is no room left in that arrangement for self-pity, and none for feeling chosen in a way that costs nothing.

So: two scriptures, some six hundred years apart, and the same word sitting at the centre of both moments. In one, a teacher tells his students on his last evening that they will not be left as orphans. In the other, God addresses an orphan and tells him he was never left.

I find that striking. I have also decided not to make it into more than it is. A resemblance is not a proof, and I would rather hand you something true and small than something impressive that falls apart when a careful reader looks at it.

The actual disagreement lies elsewhere, and it is worth naming clearly.

Christians read the Paraclete as the Holy Spirit. John 14:26 says so in words that leave little room, and Christians who read it that way are reading their own scripture closely, not dodging a difficulty. Anyone who tells you otherwise has not sat with the text.

Muslims read a verse in Surah As-Saff, where Jesus tells the Children of Israel that he brings good news of a messenger coming after him whose name is Ahmad (61:6), and understand the promise as pointing to a man. That is where I stand, and it is a reading with real weight behind it, not a modern invention. If you want the passages, the reasoning, and the objections that press against it, the whole case is set out at length, including the parts that cut against it (opens outside tumblr).

But that is the argument, and the argument is not why I wanted to write this.

What stays with me is smaller. A group of men in a borrowed room, about to lose the person their lives were built around, being told they would not be left without anyone. And a man alone in Mecca, decades into a silence, being reminded that he had already been found once when he had nobody.

Neither book leaves its people to that. Whatever you conclude about who the Comforter is, both of them are refusing the same thing.

[pathtopeace12]

The Qur'an Names Four Books. Two of Them Don't Exist Anymore.

What the missing books explain about how Muslims actually see the Bible.

There is a verse in the Qur'an that quotes an older scripture, and you can go and read the thing it's quoting.

Al-Anbiyāʾ 21:105, translation of the meaning: And We have already written in the Zabūr, after the reminder, that the earth shall be inherited by My righteous servants.

Psalm 37:29: The righteous shall inherit the land, and dwell upon it forever.

I sat with that the first time I noticed it. The Qur'an points at a book, says here is what We put in it, and the line is sitting there in a text Jews and Christians still open on any given Saturday or Sunday.

Now, before anyone gets excited. A critic reads that as borrowing rather than confirmation, and that reading is available and I'm not going to pretend it isn't. The verse doesn't settle anything by itself and I'd be embarrassed to argue that it does. What holds my attention isn't the apologetic value. It's the posture. The Qur'an is not behaving like a book that wants the earlier ones discredited.

Which brings me to the thing I actually wanted to write about.

The Qur'an names four earlier scriptures.

The Tawrāh, given to Mūsā. The Injīl, given to ʿĪsā. The Zabūr, given to Dāwūd, named three times (An-Nisāʾ 4:163, Al-Isrāʾ 17:55, and the verse above). And then a fourth thing, which almost nobody talks about.

The ṣuḥuf. The scrolls, or the pages. Al-Aʿlā 87:18–19: Indeed, this is in the former scriptures, the scriptures of Ibrāhīm and Mūsā. An-Najm 53:36–37 asks whether a man has been told what is in the scrolls of Mūsā, and of Ibrāhīm who fulfilled what he was given.

Nobody has these. Not Muslims, not Jews, not Christians. There is no manuscript, no fragment, no disputed edition, no scholarly debate about which recension is earliest. They are simply gone.

And here's what gets me. We know a little of what was in them, because An-Najm goes on to say (53:38–42): that no bearer of burdens bears the burden of another, that a person has nothing except what he strove for, that his striving will be seen, that he will be repaid in full, and that to your Lord is the end of all things.

That's it. That's what survives of the pages Ibrāhīm had. Five or six lines, quoted inside a later book, about a thousand years of prophets downstream.

I think about that more than I expected to.

Because it reframes the whole conversation Muslims and Christians keep having about scripture. When a Muslim says the Bible as it stands today isn't identical to what Mūsā and ʿĪsā received, that is not a complaint aimed at Christians. It's the same thing Muslims say about books they would give anything to have. Revelation, in the Qur'anic picture, is something God sends repeatedly into human history, and human history does what it does with it. Most of it doesn't survive. That's the baseline condition, not the accusation.

Which means, if you follow it honestly, that the Bible is the best-attested item on that list. Not the worst. There is more of it, in older copies, in more manuscripts, more carefully studied by more scholars, than anything else the Qur'an names outside the Qur'an itself. Whatever you make of the transmission questions, the Torah and the Gospel are in a completely different situation from the pages of Ibrāhīm, which are in no situation at all.

I don't think that gets said enough by people on my side of this.

The precision that does matter is a narrower one, and it's worth stating carefully rather than as a slogan. When a Muslim affirms belief in the Tawrāh and the Injīl, those words are pointing at what Mūsā and ʿĪsā received, which is not automatically the same object as the Old Testament as currently bound or the four canonical gospels plus the letters. That's a distinction about reference, not an insult, and OneGodPath draws that distinction more carefully than I can here (opens outside tumblr).

And since I'm being careful: the Zabūr and the Psalms aren't a clean equation either. Muslim tradition has long identified them, and I've written as though the identification holds, but the Psalter as Jews and Christians have it is a collection assembled over a long stretch by many hands, with only a portion carrying Davidic headings. Saying the Zabūr is the Psalms is a reasonable identification. It isn't a one-to-one mapping and I'd rather say so than let a tidy sentence stand.

So where does that leave a person.

Holding a book, mostly. Believing that God spoke more times than we have record of. Believing that the record we have of some of those speakings is partial and that the record of others is gone entirely, and that this is not a scandal but simply what happens when something eternal is handed to people who die.

There's a strange comfort in it. Muslims are asked to believe in scriptures we will never read, on no evidence except that a later book says they existed. Which means the faith was never resting on manuscripts to begin with. Not for the ṣuḥuf, anyway. Not for the Zabūr as Dāwūd had it.

Whatever else was written on Ibrāhīm's pages is lost. What came through, across all those centuries and into a language he never spoke, is that nobody carries anybody else's weight, and that you get what you actually reached for.

I find it hard to want much more than that from a book I'll never see.

[lightwithin12]

The Quran's Story of Jesus Begins With His Mother Being Told to Eat Something

A quiet passage in Surah Maryam, and what it shows about how Islam

She is alone, she is in labour, and she says she wishes she were dead.

That is in the Quran. Surah Maryam, verse 23. In a translation of the meaning: the pains of childbirth drove her to the trunk of a palm tree, and she said, I wish I had died before this and had been a thing forgotten, out of sight.

Mary. The mother of the Messiah. That is what she says.

What comes next is the part I keep returning to, because it is not what you would expect a scripture to do with a moment like that.

There is no rebuke. No reminder of how honoured she is. No speech about the weight of the child she is delivering.

She is told not to grieve, and that her Lord has placed a stream beneath her (19:24). She is told to shake the trunk of the palm toward her, and it will drop fresh ripe dates (19:25). Then, at 19:26: so eat and drink and be comforted.

The Arabic there is qarrī ʿaynan. It is an idiom for comfort. Literally it says: let your eye be cooled.

Water. Food. Rest your eyes.

That is the response to a young woman giving birth to Jesus. Practical instructions to somebody frightened and hungry.

I think about how easily that could have been left out.

The birth of the Messiah is the kind of event a text usually inflates. Light, choirs, kings arriving with gifts. The Quran holds the camera on a girl under a tree who cannot stand up, and on a handful of dates falling into her lap.

Her fear is not only physical, either. The same verse tells her that if she meets anyone, she should say she has vowed a fast of silence to the Most Merciful and will not speak to any person that day.

She is afraid of what they are going to say about her. She is right to be. When she brings the baby back, they say it outright: you have done something unheard of, and your parents were not like this (19:27–28).

She does not argue. She points at the child.

And the first thing recorded from him, among the things he says about himself, is at 19:32: that God has made him dutiful to his mother, and has not made him a domineering, wretched man.

His mother's name is under attack, and his answer includes that he is good to her. Before anything about miracles. Before anything about the road ahead of him.

This is why, when a Muslim says he honours Jesus, it is not a diplomatic sentence.

I want to be plain about that, because I know how the line sounds from outside. It can read like the polite thing you say to a Christian guest before getting to the disagreement.

It isn't. Belief in him is not optional for me. The Quran closes Surah al-Baqarah at 2:285 with the believers affirming faith in God, His angels, His books, and His messengers, making no distinction between any of them. Reject one and you have not held the position at all.

A person who says he is Muslim and denies Jesus has denied something the faith is built on. There is no version of Islam where he is a footnote.

And when I say his name I do not say it bare. I say ʿalayhi as-salām after it, peace be upon him, the same as I do for Musa, for Ibrahim, for Nuh. It is what we do for prophets. It is a small habit and it says a great deal.

There is a hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari (3442) where the Prophet ﷺ says that he is the nearest of all people to the son of Mary, that the prophets are brothers from one father, and that no prophet came between the two of them.

That is kinship language. Not respect at a distance. Family.

Here is where I owe the Christian reader honesty rather than a soft landing.

I know that from inside your tradition, what I have written may look incomplete in a specific way. For a Christian, loving Christ and worshipping him are not two things that can be separated, because the love is the worship. A Jesus you admire but do not adore can look, from where you stand, like a Jesus who has been made smaller. Centuries of careful thought sit behind that, and it is not a position anyone should wave away.

So let me say what it looks like from where I stand, without pretending the gap is narrower than it is.

The Quran says at 3:79 that it is not for a man to be given the Scripture and wisdom and prophethood by God and then turn to people and tell them to be servants of him rather than of God. That is presented as something a prophet would not do, could not do, because it would undo the thing he was sent for.

I cannot give him worship. Not because I hold him lightly. Because he spent his life pointing it somewhere else, and following him means going where he pointed.

That is the whole of it. Everything else the Quran says about him is affirmation.

He will come back. That is part of what I believe, and it means I am waiting for him too. Whatever else divides me from the Christian reading his gospel this morning, we are both looking down the same road.

But when I think of him, I do not start with the arguments.

I start with a young woman under a tree, in too much pain to stand, being told that there is water under her and that if she pulls the branch down, something sweet will fall.

Eat. Drink. Let your eye be cooled.

That is where my scripture begins the story of Jesus, and I have never wanted to begin anywhere else. If you want to see how the rest of it is held together, OneGodPath spells out what Muslims actually hold about him (opens outside tumblr).

[briannapuppet]

I heard some Christian types talking about how it's good for people who've lost hope to find religion. But then they were like "young people need to join a church, get married and start having kids."

I think if that still worked more people would do it simply to survive.

As a devout demonolator I couldn't agree more that faith can dig you out of a hole, and I'm even tolerant of their worship of the warrior/storm god YHWH. I was an ancient Hebrew living after the bronze age collapse I'd want a tough sky beard daddy too, maybe.

But the story of how "monotheism" spread is basically the story of how empires used a particular kind of religion as a radicalizing tool of conquest, colonization and social control.

Monotheism was an innovation, because in the pagan era religion was pluralistic and there wasn't really a be-saved-or-damned narrative. You might think your enemy's gods were evil and weak, but they were the same class of entity. You might desecrate their temples, but the religion you were forcing on your new vassals lead to syncretism more often than erasure (Athena/Minerva, Aphrodite/Venus/Ishtar, Hermes/Mercury/Thoth).

Instead, you're erasing their culture because you're trying to save them. Bombs with fucking rainbows. And it ain't no accident that all of the religions that succeeded replaced the divine feminine erotic and divine maternal with a cloistered household laborer and breeder in service to a patriarch.

And maybe the sad truth was that, for the so-called homo sapiens sapiens, this innovation was inevitable and someone was going to do it and that someone would win every meta, right up until the point when you couldn't afford to keep women out of the workforce and the energy supply stopped growing exponentially.

Well, now both those things have happened, and the comphet meta is losing ground. It's scaling so poorly that even relatively functional atheist governments can't bring it back. Meanwhile, over here, Apocalyptic Christianity isn't exactly the glorious crusade they were hoping for.

And so like, not to sound all Age of Aquarius, but maybe the polytheist meta is coming back. Heck, maybe YHWH's angels are more Seraphim Sisters than GuitarSpear (I wouldn't know personally, non-fallen angels aren't nice to me), we can educate people about how Judaism came from a polytheist Canaanite religion of which their god was not even big daddy, religion can become about fun things like sacred prostition and experimental parapsychology again, and all of this chaos is the work of vainglorious manlets.

[pathtopeace12]

There Is No One You Have to Go Through

On mediation, and on why the closest a Muslim ever gets to God is face-down on the floor.

When a Muslim wants to speak to God, nothing has to happen first.

No appointment. No clergyman. No sacrament, no confessional, no ordained person whose presence makes the conversation valid. You can be in a car park, in a hospital corridor, halfway through a shift. You turn toward Him and you talk.

I want to sit with that for a minute, because it looks like a small administrative detail and it isn't. It follows directly from what Muslims believe about who God is.

And it's where a lot of the Trinity conversation actually lives, once you get underneath the vocabulary.

Let me put the Christian position properly first, because it deserves that and because the popular Muslim version of it is often unrecognisable to the people who hold it.

Christians pray directly to God. Constantly, freely, without a priest standing between them. Anyone who tells you otherwise has not spent time with Christians. The letter to the Hebrews tells believers to come to the throne of grace with boldness, and that word is doing real work — it means confidence, not permission-seeking.

The doctrine underneath is about how that confidence became available.

Paul writes to Timothy that there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2:5). I notice that the sentence begins where I begin. One God. We are not as far apart at the opening as people assume.

What follows is the divergence. In Christian theology, humanity's situation required something. Sin had opened a distance, and that distance was closed from God's side, at cost, through the Incarnation. The access is real. It was also purchased.

That's a serious answer to a serious question, and I don't think it comes from anywhere ugly. It comes from taking sin seriously and taking God's holiness seriously at the same time.

The Qur'an answers the same question, and its answer is that the distance was never the kind of thing that needed a bridge.

There is a verse I return to often. The pattern in the Qur'an, when people bring a question to the Prophet, peace be upon him, is consistent — they ask you about the moon, about wine, about orphans, about fighting — and each time the response comes with the word qul. Say. Tell them. The Prophet is instructed to relay the answer.

Then, in the middle of that same chapter, people ask about God Himself.

And when My servants ask you concerning Me, indeed I am near. I respond to the call of the caller when he calls upon Me (2:186, translation of the meaning).

No qul. The instruction to relay simply isn't there. The question is asked through a messenger and the answer arrives in the first person, unrouted. Even in the grammar, nobody is standing in the middle.

I find that arresting every time.

So the practical shape of Muslim life follows. There is no priesthood in Islam. An imam leads prayer and often teaches, but he holds no power you lack, no access you don't have, no ability to forgive on God's behalf. If he is away, someone else steps forward. That's the whole of it.

When a Muslim sins, he does not confess to a person. He turns to God directly and asks. Nothing has to be transacted first, because from an Islamic view nothing was ever blocking the road.

Call upon Me; I will respond to you (40:60, translation of the meaning). The verb is an imperative. It's an instruction to just go ahead.

Now the honest part, because I don't want to make this sound cost-free.

The Incarnation offers Christians something Islam does not offer, and I think Muslims should be able to name it without flinching. It offers a God who was hungry. Who was tired. Who wept at a friend's grave and knew what a splinter felt like. There is enormous comfort in that, and the comfort is the point of it.

If Islam says God did not become human, has Islam given up nearness?

I don't think so, and the answer isn't a clever argument. It's a posture.

Sujud. Prostration. Forehead, nose, palms, knees, feet on the ground. The lowest position a human body can take, and the most undignified one, which is exactly why it's there.

Abu Hurayrah reported that the Prophet, peace be upon him, said that the nearest a servant comes to his Lord is while prostrating, and that one should make supplication then (Sahih Muslim 482). The Qur'an gives the same instruction in three words: prostrate and draw near (96:19, translation of the meaning).

So the closest a Muslim ever gets to God is not through a person or an event or a bridge. It's on the floor, in a position that removes every trace of your own importance, talking to Him with your face in the carpet.

Nearness, without likeness. That's the trade Islam makes, and I don't experience it as a loss.

This is where it connects back.

Much of the architecture of the Trinity exists to hold something in place — the conviction that God entered creation, and that He had to, because the gap was otherwise uncrossable. Take away the necessity of that crossing and a great deal of the structure has nothing left to carry.

Which is why the disagreement isn't really about arithmetic, and never was. It's about whether anything had to happen before you could speak to God. OneGodPath has a fuller side-by-side of both positions if you want them laid out properly (opens outside tumblr).

I believe the answer is no. Nothing had to happen. He was near the entire time, and He said so plainly, and He said it without asking anyone to pass the message along.

There is something I think about when I put my head down in prayer.

That the position I'm in is the one a person takes when they have nothing to offer and no leverage and no case to make. No credentials. No representative. Nothing between me and Him except the admission that He is God and I am not.

And that this, of all postures, is the one described as closest.