Are Allah and YHWH the same God?

I’ve recently been read­ing the writ­ings of Emir Fethi Caner (Pas­sion­ate Con­vic­tion, “Islam and Chris­tian­ity”, 187–204) and this is what he has to say on some of the ‘com­par­isons’ between Chris­tian­ity and Islam and their con­cep­tions of God. Often times Mus­lims or reli­gious plu­ral­ists will draw com­par­isons between words. ‘Allah’ is the Ara­bic word for God, YHWH is the Hebrew word for God, there­fore, Mus­lims and Hebrews wor­ship the same God, who is sim­ply denoted by a dif­fer­ent word. This is what’s known as equiv­o­cat­ing. Con­sider the ety­mol­ogy of Baal, which is derived from the root word for lord or mas­ter. Yet we read in 1 Kings 18:21, “and Eli­jah came to all the peo­ple, and…

Arguments from evil

One thing I never under­stood about the argu­ment from evil is how peo­ple came to view it as an argu­ment against the exis­tence of God, or at least against the exis­tence of a per­sonal and all lov­ing God. My con­fu­sion over this argu­ment isn’t sim­ply because if it’s for­mu­lated incor­rectly, you must assume what you’re try­ing to dis­prove (an objec­tive moral stan­dard with which to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between good and evil, nec­es­sar­ily requir­ing God). My con­fu­sion over this argu­ment is because ‘evil’ as a thing from which peo­ple argue, if they argue from nat­u­ral­is­tic pre­sup­po­si­tions, sim­ply doesn’t exist. Whether it’s gra­tu­itous evil and suf­fer­ing (ani­mal or oth­er­wise) or sim­ply bad actions. Epi­cu­rus was wish­fully think­ing, there…

Was Jesus who he said he was?

In between school and work (started a new job) I’ve been lis­ten­ing to a lot of Mark Driscoll and his ser­mon on the claims of Jesus is some­thing I would like to share. Watch and enjoy! At least I enjoy, because we’re sim­i­lar in personality.

Hosea 4:6 — Lack of knowledge is an understatement.

When I read the Old Tes­ta­ment two things strike me as imme­di­ately appar­ent. The first is that Israel was com­manded to wor­ship and keep the com­mand­ments of Yah­weh and Yah­weh only (Exo­dus 20, Deuteron­omy 5, Num­bers 33). The sec­ond is that by-and-large, they didn’t and as a result their nation was at first divided and then destroyed. When Israel was on the verge of enter­ing the Promised Land God laid down a few rules. We read in Exo­dus 34:12–14 (NASB): 12 Watch your­self that you make no covenant with the inhab­i­tants of the land into which you are going, or it will become a snare in your midst. 13 But rather, you are to tear…

Courses have begun…

…And time just seems to slip away. Some­one save me from this mad­ness! Any­way, I think I’ll address one of the other con­tentions of Mark’s arti­cle over the week­end, tomor­row at the ear­li­est. Until then, back to reading…

Did Jesus Exist?

I came across an arti­cle writ­ten by a man named Mark Thomas on the exis­tence of Jesus, you can find it here. This is some­thing of a reply to a few of his claims as I under­stood them. The arti­cle claims the fol­low­ing con­tentions: 1. Jesus had no earthly exis­tence i. No reli­able extra-Biblical ref­er­ences ii. The Gospels are unre­li­able his­tor­i­cal accounts iii. Jesus’ bio­graph­i­cal details were not known by Paul iv. Jesus was seen as a spir­i­tual sky-god by Paul and oth­ers 2. Scrip­tures were not taken as sacred 3. Chris­tian­ity was heav­ily influ­enced by sur­round­ing reli­gions 4. Prophe­cies were not ful­filled This post will most likely deal with only the first con­tention; that Jesus had…

William Lane Craig: Kalam and contemporary science

Some times I hear peo­ple crit­i­cize William Lane Craig for his lack of knowl­edge when it comes to sci­ence in gen­eral and astro­physics espe­cially. It’s a crit­i­cism I really don’t under­stand, I don’t think it’s valid at all. I came across a series of videos on Youtube where Craig fields ques­tions from pro­fes­sional  philoso­phers and physi­cists and again, I don’t see how peo­ple believe they can ‘get away’ with say­ing Craig isn’t informed…