God is One
Evidently the NY Times said Jews and Muslims worship different deities… then it corrected itself. This annoyed Mollie Z and the other Conservative Christians over at GetReligion who have spent a long time saying what Jews and Muslims really believe seemingly without Jewish or Muslim input (save for one writer).
One comment nails the issue:
Again, I’m puzzled about the scope of opinion that the NYT is expected to accommodate. In an article about Jews and Muslims, isn’t unanimity between Jews, Muslims — and, though I’m not sure it matters, mainstream historians and linguists — sufficient to declare the issue closed? Does it matter that some Christian readers have reservations about the corrected title, and if so, why?
I think my earlier analogy is on point. What would you think of a paleontology story that suddenly veered out of Kenya to mention that the Indians of our Pacific Northwest have a story about Raven and Coyote that doesn’t have room for Homo habilis? It’s an interesting fact, perhaps, but it’s not, by any reasonable stretch, a fact about East African fossils. And neither, I submit, is a trinitarian opinion about Semitic monotheism a fact about this story.
In her comments, Mollie *seems* to go so far as to insist she doesn’t worship the same God as the Jews! (My understanding of this has been that Christians claim to have a “better understanding” or “Deeper Revelation” into who God is, but that all of three religions worship the same God.)
Category: teh internets
Discussion: You came too late to this party
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I had much more fun reading the first correction on the NYT page. I began to wonder if they got anything right on the Muzak article! Had quite a laugh over that.
The NYT might have been better off not making a correction as to whether the same god or not was worshipped. They offended one crowd by saying different gods and then offended the other crowd by saying same god. It is a debate one cannot win because it all hinges on whether, in order to have the same god, one must believe alike or not. Thus some Protestants used to accuse the Roman Catholics of believing in a different god because their belief-system was different. Mind you, the RC’s used to return the favor!
There is no right answer as to whether Jews, Muslims, and Christians worship the same god. We need to work on understanding each other’s belief system and stay away from simplistic declarations of same god or different gods.