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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e5f1ce1 | But while these are all important determinants in explaining the tide of anti-Muslim sentiment that has washed over Europe and North America in recent years, there is another, more fundamental factor that must be addressed. It involves a 2010 poll showing that nearly a quarter of Americans continue to believe that President Barack Obama is himself a Muslim, a 10 percent jump from a similar survey taken in 2008. Among registered Republicans,.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| e461b8b | of observable and verifiable events in the past is a product of the modern | Reza Aslan | ||
| b843291 | Montanist Christians like Tertullian believed that Jesus possessed the same divine quality as God, but not in the same quantity as God. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 1c18509 | The clash of monotheisms occurs when faith, which is mysterious and ineffable and which eschews all categorizations, becomes entangled in the gnarled branches of religion. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 02497db | Modalist Christians conceived of the Trinity as representing God in three successive modes of being: first as the Father, then as the Son, and finally and forevermore as the Holy Spirit. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 6ac5777 | It has often been noted that the biblical stories recounted in the Quran, especially those dealing with Jesus, imply a familiarity with the traditions and narratives of the Christian faith. | Reza Aslan | ||
| e36e9fd | A la manana siguiente, cuando los romanos llegaron triunfantes a lo alto de la hasta entonces inexpugnable fortaleza de Masada, todo lo que hallaron fue una calma espectral: novecientos sesenta hombres, mujeres y ninos muertos. La guerra, finalmente, habia acabado. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 8b64e6c | creciente ira y el descontento entre los judios. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 8efa67a | Certainly, Muhammad understood that there were distinct theological differences between Islam and the other Peoples of the Book. But he saw these differences as part of the divine plan of God, who could have created a single Ummah if he had wanted to but instead preferred that "every Ummah have its own Messenger" (10:47)." | Reza Aslan | ||
| 73eda9f | must recognize that greater knowledge about Islam is not enough to alter people's perceptions of Muslims. Minds are not changed merely through acquiring data or information (if that were the case it would take no effort to convince Americans that Obama is, in fact, a Christian). Rather, it is solely through the slow and steady building of personal relationships that one discovers the fundamental truth that all people everywhere have the sam.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| e24cf96 | These abiding words of the Beatitudes are, more than anything else, a promise of impending deliverance from subservience and foreign rule. They predict a radically new world order wherein the meek inherit the earth, the sick are healed, the weak become strong, the hungry are fed, and the poor are made rich. In the Kingdom of God, wealth will be redistributed and debts canceled. "The first shall be last and the last shall be first" (Matthew .. | Reza Aslan | ||
| bead775 | Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world," he accused the British nation-state--his nation-state. "And your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters." | Reza Aslan | ||
| 0cd2304 | only the high priest can enter the Holy of Holies, and on only one day a year, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when all sins of Israel are wiped clean. On this day, the high priest comes into presence of God to atone for the whole nation. If he is worthy of God's blessing, Israel's sins are forgiven. If he is not, a rope tied to his waist ensures that when God strikes him dead, he can be dragged out of the Holy of Holies without anyone el.. | palestine temple | Reza Aslan | |
| 5a32393 | Nestorian Christians argued that Jesus had two completely distinct natures--one human, the other divine--while Gnostic Christians, especially those called Docetists, claimed that Jesus only appeared to be human but was in fact fully God. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 8a806b4 | Belief in a divine messiah would have been anathema to everything Judaism represents, which is why, without exception, every text in the Hebrew Bible dealing with the messiah presents him as performing his messianic functions on earth, not in heaven.) | Reza Aslan | ||
| 6e704cc | In recognition of his service, Rome named Herod "King of the Jews", granting him a kingdom that would ultimately grow larger than that of King Solomon" | israel | Reza Aslan | |
| 6827979 | Herod was convert,after all. His mother was Arab. His people, the Idumeans, had come to Judaism only a generation or two earlier. | israel | Reza Aslan | |
| 07d6c44 | The loss of Abu Talib's protection was certainly demoralizing, if not detrimental to Muhammad's physical security. But returning home after one of his painfully violent revelatory experiences, or after suffering another indignity from the Quraysh--his head covered in dirt, his tunic defiled with blood--and not having Khadija there to wrap him in her cloak and hold him in her arms until the terror subsided must have been an unimaginable sorr.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| c1b36f2 | That Jesus--the eternal logos from whom creation sprang, the Christ who sits at the right hand of God--you will find swaddled in a filthy manger in Bethlehem, surrounded by simple shepherds and wise men bearing gifts from the east. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 55da60d | sacred history is like a hallowed tree whose roots dig deep into primordial time and whose branches weave in and out of genuine history with little concern for the boundaries of space and time. Indeed, it is precisely at those moments when sacred and genuine history collide that religions are born. | Reza Aslan | ||
| dc5dec6 | Certainly the shahadah contained an important theological innovation, but that innovation was not monotheism. With this simple profession of faith, Muhammad was declaring to Mecca that the God of the heavens and the earth required no intermediate whatsoever, but could be accessed by anyone. | mohammad | Reza Aslan | |
| a564d42 | All these schools of though gradually transformed into legal institutions, the diversity of ideas and freedom of opinion that characterized their early development gave way to rigid formalism, strict adherence to precedent, and an almost complete stultification of independent though | religion | Reza Aslan | |
| 0c158a8 | From the Islamic perspective, however, the attacks on New York and Washington were part of an ongoing clash between those Muslims who strive to reconcile their religious values with the realities of the modern world, and those who react to modernism and reform by reverting--sometimes fanatically--to the "fundamentals" of their faith." | Reza Aslan | ||
| a4845cd | there can be no a priori moral framework in a modern democracy [...] | religion | Reza Aslan | |
| 26d55e4 | Like most people born into a religious tradition, my faith was as familiar to me as my skin, and just as disregardable. | religion | Reza Aslan | |
| 09a0363 | Like so many prophets before him, Muhammad never claimed to have invented a new religion. By his own admission, Muhammad's message was an attempt to reform the existing religious beliefs and cultural practices of pre-Islamic Arabia so as to bring the God of the Jews and Christians to the Arab peoples. "[God] has established for you [the Arabs] the same religion enjoined on Noah, on Abraham, on Moses, and on Jesus," the Quran says (42:13)." | Reza Aslan | ||
| e986d04 | Jesus, on the other hand, was America. He was the central figure in America's national drama. Accepting him into my heart was as close as I could get to feeling truly American. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 00d2931 | Consider this: Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost exclusively for the crime of sedition. The plaque the Romans placed above Jesus's head as he writhed in pain--"King of the Jews"--was called a titulus and, despite common perception, was not meant to be sarcastic. Every criminal who hung on a cross received a plaque declaring the specific crime for which he was being executed. Jesus's crime, in the eyes of Rome, was striv.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 228b65b | RELIGIONS BECOME INSTITUTIONS when the myths and rituals that once shaped their sacred histories are transformed into authoritative models of orthodoxy (the correct interpretation of myths) and orthopraxy (the correct interpretation of rituals), though one is often emphasized over the other. Christianity may be the supreme example of an "orthodoxic" religion; it is principally one's beliefs--expressed through creed--that make one a faithful.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 5d2f357 | Whatever sartorial choices a woman makes are hers and hers alone. It is neither a man's nor the state's place to define proper "womanhood" in Islam. Those who treat the Muslim woman not as an individual but as a symbol either of Islamic chastity or secular liberalism are guilty of the same sin: the objectification of women." | Reza Aslan | ||
| b88b61c | As the Quran suggests over and over again, and as the Constitution of Medina explicitly affirms, Muhammad may have understood the concept of the Umm al-Kitab to mean not only that the Jews, Christians, and Muslims shared a single divine scripture but also that they constituted a single divine Ummah. | Reza Aslan | ||
| e16ec20 | throughout the first two centuries of Islam, Muslims regularly read the Torah alongside the Quran. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 7dda056 | The bedrock of evangelical Christianity, at least as it was taught to me, is the unconditional belief that every word of the Bible is God-breathed and true, literal and inerrant. The sudden realization that this belief is patently and irrefutably false, that the Bible is replete with the most blatant and obvious errors and contradictions--just as one would expect from a document written by hundreds of hands across thousands of years--left m.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| a866a0e | Athena was originally worshiped as a flat piece of olive wood that was washed and bejeweled, wrapped in garments, and carefully tended by a cadre of her priestesses.16 | Reza Aslan | ||
| ccb5432 | Montanist Christians like Tertullian believed that Jesus possessed the same divine quality as God, but not in the same quantity as God. Modalist Christians conceived of the Trinity as representing God in three successive modes of being: first as the Father, then as the Son, and finally and forevermore as the Holy Spirit. Nestorian Christians argued that Jesus had two completely distinct natures--one human, the other divine--while Gnostic Ch.. | Reza Aslan | ||
| b95d48d | Because the concept of the Trinity is not explicitly mentioned in the New Testament (the term was coined by one of the oldest and most formidable church fathers, Tertullian of Carthage, early in the third century C.E.), it was neither widely adopted nor universally construed by the early Christian communities. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 9ebd640 | 874 The occultation of the Twelfth Imam, or the Mahdi | Reza Aslan | ||
| 7ec05d3 | God is, in other words, wholly Other: the Mysterium Tremendum, to borrow Rudolph Otto's famous phrase. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 3bb7490 | The Ka'ba, like the Pyramids in Egypt or the Temple in Jerusalem, may have been constructed as an axis mundi, sometimes called a "navel spot": a sacred space around which the whole of the universe revolves, the link between the earth and the solid dome of heaven." | Reza Aslan | ||
| 3f69032 | In contrast, paganism among the sedentary societies of Arabia had developed from its earlier and simpler manifestations into a complex form of neo-animism, providing a host of divine and semi-divine intermediaries who stood between the creator god and his creation. This creator god was called Allah, which is not a proper name but a contraction of the word al-ilah, meaning simply "the god." | Reza Aslan | ||
| 6f5dd22 | While the details of the Amirs' religion have been lost to history, most scholars are convinced that by the sixth century C.E., henotheism had become the standard belief of the vast majority of sedentary Arabs, who not only accepted Allah as their High God, but insisted that he was the same god as Yahweh, the god of the Jews. | Reza Aslan | ||
| a27c084 | Thus began the long process of transforming Jesus from a revolutionary Jewish nationalist into a pacifistic spiritual leader with no interest in any earthly matter. That was a Jesus the Romans could accept, and in fact did accept three centuries later when the Roman emperor Flavius Theodosius (d. 395) made the itinerant Jewish preacher's movement the official religion of the state, and what we now recognize as orthodox Christianity emerged. | Reza Aslan | ||
| 707cbec | In fact, the Quran proposes the unprecedented notion that all revealed scriptures are derived from a single concealed book in heaven called the Umm al-Kitab, or "Mother of Books" (13:39)." | Reza Aslan | ||
| a4110d8 | the city that had served as the religious, economic, and political capital of the Jewish nation for a thousand years, was, by the time Pompey strode through its gates, recognized less for its beauty and grandeur than for the religious fervor of its troublesome population. | Reza Aslan |