Smilarities And Differences

Again, which "three religions" are you talking about? There are a huge number of religions in the world. According to one survey there are eighteen with more than one million followers. The top three are Christianity with 2.1 billion, Islam with 1.5 billion, and Hindu with 900 million. However, the 1.1 billion secular/nonreligious/agnostic/atheistic people outnumber the Hindus and would rank #3 if we were a religion.

I'll take a wild guess and assume you thought Judaism was #3. It's actually #11 with 14 million. There are nearly twice as many Sikhs, and almost forty times as many Buddhists.

 

Judging by Tresbien's other posts, he appears to be a Muslim, presumably one of "the three religions" he refers to in the OP. Therefore he must already have his own ideas about this question and he's asking it rhetorically. In this case he should start the discussion by stepping forward now and sharing his ideas with us.

 

One of the differences among the three branches of Abrahamism that has become very important recently is the direction of their focus.

Islam focuses on the reward or punishment of the afterlife. To an Islamic fundamentalist, dead children are not a major tragedy because they've just gone off to a "better place" where they'll be happy. I won't say much more about Islam because it's the Abrahamic faith that I am least familiar with, like most Americans.

Judaism focuses on this world. Even the most fundamentalist Jews (a term that's not in common use but it describes the ultra-Orthodox such as the Chassidim) believe that Heaven is aeons away. Their corpses will lie in the ground and rot until some day in the far future when their god decides to take them all back. As a result they believe they must live their lives so that the people who live with them and the people who live after they're dead regard them as honorable contributors to the prosperity and happiness of all. To a Jew, barring the resurrection of Hitler, there is virtually nothing worse than dead children. If there is any way to appeal to the more sensible citizens of Israel to rise up and bar their leaders from launching the shoah they speak of (if the implied comparison to the architects of the original shoah isn't sufficient) I suggest it is to force them to contemplate living the rest of their lives, knowing that the entire human race for several generations into the future will judge them personally for murdering Palestinian children.

Christianity has been called "very much a religion of this world," and compared to the fringe of Islam that is in the news today I suppose it is. Most Christian churches, after all, put a strong emphasis on doing good for others. Not just the immense favor of introducing them to the words of Jesus, but actually providing food, shelter, medicine, education, etc., to make the years they spend on this planet more pleasant. But unlike the Jews, the Christians don't look for the approval and blessing of other humans--not particularly other Christians, not very much at all other Christians who don't belong to the same church, and most especially people who are not Christians and therefore don't know what's right and wrong. Only their god can judge them. So, guided by their priests, they try to do what they believe their god wants. Most of the time this isn't too different from what any of us wants other people to do. But every few generations their view of the will of god gets terribly twisted and they can match the worst non-Christian leaders in history, atrocity for atrocity, in the name of their god and their savior.

 

Now THAT would be a good question and a fair question, even in the Religion subforum with its looser rules.

Trey: in your O.P. you asked for a discussion of the similarities and differences among "the three religions." We asked you to clear up the ambiguity of what you meant by "the three religions" since there are a lot more than three religions. You specified that you meant the three branches of Abrahamism.

I subsequently responded to your request with a post describing what I see as differences among those three religions.

Since then you have not continued the discussion. All you have posted is some evangelical material about Islam, which the Moderator had to delete. Then you came back with a less aggressive but nonetheless one-sided discussion of ONLY ISLAM. Not only are you not comparing the three religions, but you are ignoring my own post on the subject.

The Comparative Religion subforum is NOT for evangelism. Perhaps that has not been made clear to you. We have our limits and that goes way beyond them. There are a zillion websites where you're free to preach until your keyboard collapses. This is not one of them.

In any case, the basic rules of discourse apply here. If you define a topic, everyone is required to stick to it, including YOU.

 

The topic is plenty INTERESTING. And in today's world a scholarly discussion of the differences among major religions is always BENEFICIAL. But look at your topic:

You have not guided this thread into a discussion of the topic, and that's why it's not working. If you honestly don't know much about any of the Abrahamic religions except Islam, that's fine, because the question in your O.P. would be a perfect way to expand your knowledge. But all you've done is to post a long, evangelical treatise about Islam. It's argumentative by nature. And goes into far too much detail in areas where you have no idea whether it agrees or disagrees with Christianity and/or Judaism, and therefore you have no idea whether you're advancing your own topic.

Surely you at least know something about Christianity and Judaism. I'm not a believer in any religion and I never even heard of religion until I was seven years old, but even I know, for example, that Muslims consider both Moses and Jesus to be actual historical figures rather than metaphors, and regard them both as prophets. I even described what I consider to be the most important difference among the three faiths from the standpoint of contemporary politics and world events: the degree to which the practice of each religion focuses on worldly life versus the afterlife, and on approval by humans versus approval by a god. One learns these things simply by talking to thoughtful, articulate Christians, Jews and Muslims and by reading the news.

This is your discussion, so you have to lead it! Start off by telling us what YOU see as some of the basic similarities and differences among the three religions, even if you think your knowledge of the subject is limited. Not by telling us how much you love Islam!

If a half dozen members had jumped in and kick-started this discussion, then you could just sit there and read it. But that hasn't happened, so it's up to you to make it happen. At the very least, it's your responsibility not to stifle the discussion you said you wanted, by trolling your own thread with evangelical treatises. If I were you I'd delete that last big post, or ask the Moderator to delete it if your time limit has expired. I think it discourages other members from participating.

Let me try to help by answering your question directly with some more of my very limited knowledge of the subject.

• Do they believe in the same God? Yes. I don't think there's any question about that. Christians quibble over whether he's a "trinity" or a single being, but he's the same god. After all, there is a continuity over time from Judaism to Christianity to Islam, and they all rest on the same core beliefs, which none of them have truly rejected.
• Do they believe in the same prophets? Christians and Jews both regard the Old Testament as sacred and even Muslims treat it with respect, so there's no question that they all regard Moses as a prophet. Muslims regard Jesus as a prophet but, AFAIK, think his role has been superseded by Mohammed. The core beliefs of Judaism were established long before Jesus allegedly lived so Jews have mixed feelings about him, but they all agree that he is not THEIR prophet. The same can be said about both religions and Mohammed: he is not their prophet. The more fundamentalist Christians believe that Mohammed's teachings border on blasphemy, but that is not the universal position of Christendom as a community.
• Do they believe in the same angels? To the extent that they all accept the accounts of a supernatural universe in the Old Testament as literal history rather than metaphor, yes they do. They all refer to Gabriel and Satan (a former angel) in their discussions.
• Do they all believe in the same holy books? Jews and Christians believe in the Old Testament as the word of their god and as rules to live by, although when there's a conflict Christians supersede it with the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament. You know better than I how Muslims regard the Old Testament but AFAIK they at least regard it as history and a good source of basic advice for living right. The halal laws for food preparation are very similar to the kashruth, and in fact many markets in America sell food that satisfies both. This shows that they both have their roots in the Old Testament Book of Leviticus. I believe the Ten Commandments (the foundation of Mosaic Law) are revered by all Abrahamists. -- Jews reject the New Testament as prophecy but they study it as history, and only a fool of any faith (or lack of faith) rejects the common-sense entreaties attributed to Jesus about how civilized human beings should treat each other. Even communism is an offshoot of the New Testament: Its founding principle, "To each according to his need, from each according to his ability," is a quote from the Book of Acts. I believe Muslims respect the New Testament and do not reject Jesus's teachings, but again you will know more about that than I. -- Neither Jews nor Christians regard the Koran as holy. Each congregation and each individual member of Jewry and Christendom is more or less free to draw their own conclusions about the truth in Mohammed's words and the potential conflict with their own scriptures.
• Do they believe in the same hereafter? Basically, yes. People who live good lives go to heaven and people who live bad lives go to hell. But the details are different. Christians and Muslims believe that happens more or less immediately upon dying, although Catholics believe in Purgatory, which is a waystation where people who were not quite irredeemably evil can repent for an appropriate period of time before being admitted to the Pearly Gates. Jews believe that dead people remain dead, with their souls in a state of dormancy. At some unspecified time in the very distant future, their god will reawaken the souls, reanimate the bodies, and take the good ones to heaven while sending the bad ones to hell. This explains why Orthodox Jews do not allow cremation or organ donations, because they will need their bodies some day. It also explains why Jewish culture focuses on being judged by one's fellows rather than by one's god: a bad person will be cursed by other people during his lifetime and by generations to come after he is dead, whereas it may be millions or billions of years before he is punished by his god.

 

Although this is true, it is not a defining tenet of Jewish philosophy except perhaps in a theology course. As I mentioned, Jews do not place a lot of emphasis on preparing for the afterlife, which may not start until a billion years in the future. They believe that their god judges them here and now: in their mortal lives on earth. They must follow the teachings of Moses, which are in essence the Ten Commandments, in order to be judged worthy by their god. Other "covenants" with the deity have accreted to these obligations over the centuries, all of which must be kept.

Jews believe that they have broken the Covenant (the Ten Commandments) as well as the subsequent lower-case covenants. This is the reason that they, their god's "chosen people," have been singled out for so much grief and abuse, from the tribulations documented in the bible to the Holocaust and beyond.

This is a communal feeling about a communal experience, which is therefore both a cause and an effect of the Jews' historical separation from neighboring ethnic groups. On the one hand it's a little unfair to welcome into the tribe an outsider, whose family will henceforth suffer a constant rain of calamities that their ancestors did not invite. On the other hand it's more than a little unfair for a Jew to marry a Gentile woman, so that his children will automatically not be Jewish and will be spared from those calamities. (Although Hitler did not spare those children and I've never heard a Jew comment on what seems to be a certain biblical justice in it.)

Jews have made guilt a fine art. Each one carries the responsibility for the sins of a hundred generations of ancestors, and every time he opens a history book or a newspaper he is reminded that his god intends to punish him cruelly and personally for those sins.

The Jews, when they wax philosophical, consider themselves bad people who deserve everything that happens to them. They don't have to wait until they die to find out whether their god approves of them. They know that he does not because of the things he does to them during their mortal lives. Remember, their god is the fire-and-brimstone god of the Old Testament who flooded the world because he didn't like the job he did on it the first time and who turned people into pillars of salt for a short lapse in will power. Not the decaffeinated god of the New Testament who sent The First Hippie with instructions to forgive everybody.

In America today there is a thriving business among psychotherapists and other counselors, who meet with groups of Jews and try to heal them of "Jewish self-loathing."

This has absolutely nothing to do with "the hereafter." Judaism is about the past and the present. Jews say this is why it's so hard for them to have a dialog with Muslims: "All Muslims care about is Heaven!"