It is an Abrahamic religion. Full stop. Those are the facts that we can all engage with here. Peoples believes do not change that fact, and yes, they are entitled to have them. The VAST majority of Muslims understand their faith as an Abrahamic religion. Much like a few people worshiping Trump doesn’t change the historical facts about Christianity. 
I don’t know what’s so “wrong” or difficult about that. It’s the truth.
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From where I sit, both Christians and Muslims are foreigners. And frankly, I do not see how them worshipping the same god or not would be a good thing or a bad thing.
I have never once said otherwise. In fact, I said it in my first post on this thread.
Yes, it is not wrong or difficult. As I said, I am simply not in the business of telling people what they believe. You are free to accept or reject their purported beliefs as you see fit. As an atheist, I neither accept nor reject. I simply observe. And what I have observed is that beliefs run the full spectrum even within the same religion. That is all that I want to say, and that is all that I will say on the matter.
because distorting Islam has lead to the deaths of millions of people at this point. There is a direct connection between a distorted view of Islam and mass slaughter of Muslims. It is Islamophobic.
Other than people who push patently false truth-claims based on their “Muslim friend” as @IAmAlsoJohn did… me neither.
I’m saying that individual beliefs do not change historical facts.
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And I’m saying that historical facts do not change individual beliefs. So let’s leave it at that. We have come full circle on this.
Honestly I think individuals often have ahistoric and even sometimes completely heretical folk-beliefs… quite commonly in all the major religions.
By way of example, I remember around the time of 9/11 my former MIL from OK was driving past a mosque with me alone. She said:
“Well good. It’s just you and me so I can ask. Those people… is it true they really worship the same God as us?”
I told her they did and she was baffled, legitimately baffled, that following the same God didn’t lead to peace.
She couldn’t see how it was possible because it went against all her other beliefs about Religion, the world, and how people work.
I assume there are lots of low-information believers in all faiths if you went literally door to door around the whole world. That being said the realities of their cultural and historic relationships are facts that are only up for dispute when facts don’t matter because Religion trumps all. Belief does not make truth no matter what they preach. This is why secular history is so damned important.
And, personally, this is why I hate religion even though doing so also means I hate some aspect of people’s lives whom I value and respect and so I sit with this cognitive dissonance daily as a non-religious spiritual practice.
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You seem to be missing the point. An individual can believe whatever they want, but the assertion that they aren’t worshipping the same god as someone else falls apart because it makes assumptions about someone else’s beliefs. Asserting such as a third party is even more ridiculous, and the idea that someone who shares faith with neither of the principals can make that call is yet more ludicrous and arrogant. As a direct logical result of no one knowing anyone else’s beliefs, we have to fall back on the historical facts at hand, which @Mindysan33 has detailed above.
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You know, I’m not racist – or at least I try not to be – and I don’t really care if someone is white or not. But I can still see the invective hiding in “these people aren’t even real whites”. You’d think you could be sharp enough to recognize the same when Christians make up the ahistorical claim that Muslims are not worshipping the same God. You are tolerating something meant to other people. 
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Exactly. The assertion that they are and the assertion that they aren’t both fall apart because they both make assumptions about someone else’s beliefs.
But I am not making either assertion. I am saying, and will continue to say, that beliefs run the full spectrum within a single religion.
The idea that this is just a xenophobic fantasy represents 1) an America-centric worldview and 2) a Christian-centric worldview. It gives no agency whatsoever to Muslims to choose what they want to believe, and I find that part to be ludicrous and arrogant.
Both Christians and Muslims make up this claim. It is not just for Christians to decide what Muslims supposedly believe. The extremists on both sides push the same idea. It is not just for Christians to decide what the god of Abraham means.
Why is this being framed as “Muslims believe in the Christian god” and not “Christians believe in the Islamic god?” Why is it “Muslims don’t believe in the Christian god” instead of “Christians don’t believe in the Islamic god?”
Because that is the framing used in the United States. The framing used in parts of the Middle East has the same message, but with different framing. Because it is an ashistorical lie, but it is one that Muslims have enough agency to spread as well.
Ah yes, because Islamophobia is specifically an American problem…and there’s definitely no equivalent xenophobia of Muslims trying to other Christians anywhere too. 
The framing is partly because of how this thread started. If it had started with a Muslim claiming Christians worship a different God, then that’s what we would be correcting. That said…I honestly can’t say I’ve ever heard one say so outside IAmAlsoJohn’s second hand account. One of my closest friends is Muslim. He’s interested in theology and I’ve talked to him about their views on Jesus and so on. I can confidently say he would be baffled if I told him that Allah and God meant different things, especially since the Christian God is called Allah where he lives.
In fact I’d go so far as to say that’s part of what makes this a distinctly western thing – it is based on a linguistic difference that Arabic speakers do not have. You keep skipping over that part, huh?
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It’s the opposite of that. It’s asserting individual’s rights to their own beliefs while recognizing, while those beliefs are unknowable to anyone else, the history of the religion is separate, knowable, and factual.
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That’s some real ignorant shit… Also, I’m pretty sure the Jack Chick tract was not written by a Muslim, so…
Well, you know us… we’re all racist, misogynistic, ultra-religious, neo-confederates down here!!! /s
The VAST majority of Muslim leaders in history have put them in the People of the Book side of things. Whatever groups like Islamic state is going shouldn’t be our understanding of actual basic facts about the religion, which has been around for quite a long time prior to those assholes cropping up… We REALLY need to stop the most extreme of any group dictate HOW we understand them. It’s really dangerous to do that, because it leads to things like… oh, I don’t know, decades long wars that kills hundreds of thousands of people for no good reasons?
They do worship the same god. You do know that not even all Christians agree about the Trinity, right?
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Although Arabic is the liturgical language of Islam, it is not spoken by even a simple majority of Muslims. But I am not talking about the words, I am talking about whether Muslims believe that their Allah is the same as the Christian Allah, and while the vast majority almost certainly do, there are also going to be some that do not. Just as many Christians would probably answer “No” in a survey asking “Do you believe that Muslims worship the same god as Christians?” Not all Christians and not all Muslims are well educated about the history and theology of their respective religions.
Yes, I never said otherwise. I just said that that is not the same as what people believe now.
Sometimes people just believe things about their own religion that are just plain wrong. But who are we to tell them that?
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I don’t see what’s wrong with correcting beliefs born out of simple ignorance, especially when they are regularly exploited for xenophobic purposes. Allah is the Arabic word for God, and Muslims and Christians even recognize most of the same prophets. What is so wrong with saying so? Does ignorance suddenly become something we should respect when it’s about religion? No wonder the bigots like to start there, then.
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Which does not at all contradict the historical fact of the development of the Islamic faith, which is rooted in longer history of Abrahamic faiths.
Muslims themselves understand their own history and their connection to the older Abrahamic religion. That is a fact. That some make other claims doesn’t change that fact.
So, only some Muslims, who believe that they’re not part of a longer history get to speak for ALL Muslism?
Some people (some Muslims) believe it’s not the same god. That is very much a minority view, and very much contradicts facts. they are entitled to that belief, but that doesn’t make the history wrong…
Yes… THOSE ARE THE FACTS… I mean… Again, do we let Trumpers dominate our understanding of Christanity as a whole? Of course not!
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FFS, look at the beginning of the thread. This discussion started around the name of “god” for Christians and Muslims, which @Mindysan33 asserted are the same god, regardless of which Abrahamic religion is followed. That is fact, regardless of individual beliefs.
Inserting your interpretation as a third party into those beliefs is not only ahistorical but borderline flaggable by the community guidelines, in terms of assuming to know others’ thoughts and beliefs. It is unnecessary to know someone’s individual beliefs to know the history of their religion and it’s relationship with other religions. Moreover, no one can say their own god is not the same as someone else’s, since they cannot know that person’s own beliefs.
We aren’t. These purely hypothetical people are making assertions about not their own religion but someone else’s, and that is incorrect. They can’t know that. And making those assertions have nothing to do with their beliefs but rather an attempt at separation from the other person.
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There is nothing wrong with saying so, but it is not easy to persuade someone with deep-seated beliefs. You may not win over many extremists with the facts.
No, it is not a matter of respect. It is more just a matter of live and let live. Arguing with people about their deep-seated beliefs is something that I tend to avoid.
Yes, exactly. This is the conclusion in a nutshell.
And yet you didn’t seem to have any problem going after my and Mindy’s belief that historical facts matter. I didn’t think I was trying to persuade any extremists today, but here we are.
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