At 04:11 AM 1/2/2013, Jojo Jaro wrote:
That is where you are wrong my friend. A TRUE Christian will not
find a call to Idolatry beautiful. A muslim call to prayer is a
call to pray to a false god (allah the moon god) in front of an idol
(kabah - a meteroite stone.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
Is the call to prayer a call to idolatry? This brings up the Moon God
Allah argument, recognized immediately here, over six months ago, as bigotry.
The claim is that "Allah" is a Moon God, allegedly because it was a
name for a pre-Islamic god of the moon. That is arguing that the
referent of a word is controlled by its etymology. So if someone
says, "Hey, Dennis is a great guy!" they are praising Dionysius, the
Greek God. Idolatry!
No, Allah, *regardless of origin* -- and we don't care about origin,
we care about *present meaning* -- is God, and that's not in
controversy among Christians who speak Arabic, *except for those
afflicted by the present claims.* Very modern.
And we do not have an idol in mind when we face Mecca, and the verse
that commands this only refers to the *direction*. It does not
command worship of the Ancient House. It says to face "the direction
of the Sacred Masjid." (Mosque is not an Arabic word, Masjid means,
"place of prayer."
I once had a prayer carpet, given to me by a Pakistani Muslim to whom
it was a beloved object, and it had a picture of the House on it. I
had this carpet for years, but it always, when I used it, didn't feel
right. So, years later, because I knew it was important to him, he
had prayed with it all over the world, I gave it back to him. He was
insulted, it was part of an unfortunate sequence of events. This was
over thirty years ago, by the way.
We don't worship the House, we don't even worship the direction, we
merely face it, as best we know. We seek direction from God, and we
respond to what God has commanded.
Ka'aba does not mean a stone. It means cube, and refers to the
overall shape of the whole House. There is an ancient stone set in a
corner of the Ka'aba. It performs no central role in Islam. Because
there is a tradition that the stone was *reset* in the corner of the
Cube by action of the Prophet -- he didn't actually do it himself,
rather he arbitrated a dispute on who would be allowed to do it,
*before his mission* -- there are those who touch this stone, to
touch a place where Muhammad may have touched. That's a traditional
practice, and could be considered a kind of worship, but they would
never do this as part of the prayer, it would be forbidden.
We don't worship the stone. I do not recall *ever* thinking of the
stone while in prayer.
So, again, Jojo is just tossing mud. He's actually claiming that many
of my friends, people I've known well, who are Christian and who even
disagree with me on theology, greatly, are actually *not Christians,*
but only because they don't agree with Jojo. That is, in fact, such
an un-Christian position that I'm going to assert:
Jojo is not a TRUE Christian.
And that's been totally obvious for a long time. Jojo is not
following Jesus, he's not imitating Jesus, he's not teaching what
Jesus taught, he's not demonstrating what Jesus demonstrated, he is,
by pretending to be a Christian, *defaming* the Christian religion.
That he may be pretending this even to himself would only demonstrate
the depth of his denial.
(As certain Muslims do with Islam through their own extremities.)