There is a lot of that going around here. Any statement that begins with “Muslims believe” or “Christians believe” is making assumptions about others’ thoughts and beliefs. I at least had the decency to use the word “some.”
Of course historical facts matter to us. But the simple, sad fact of the matter is that they do not matter to everyone. Should they matter to everyone? Of course! But that is not the reality.
So what are you arguing, that we’re supposed to not say historical facts just in case someone who doesn’t believe in them shows up? Gott in Himmel, I can’t even tell where you disagree with us any more, only that you are very adamant we are doing something wrong in saying true things.
NO. Only one side of this discussion is hanging their hats on knowing others’ beliefs. The other is citing historical fact, independent of belief.
I am saying that Muslims believe many different things. I do not understand how this is any more controversial or offensive than the assertion that all Muslims believe the same thing. Perhaps nobody intended to make that assertion, but it is the logical conclusion of the rejection of my statement that “Muslims believe many different things.”
I assure you, I am not playing the devil’s advocate here. I truly believe that Muslims believe many different things and that they have every right to believe many different things regardless of what Christians or atheists or even other Muslims may say.
Their beliefs may be right or wrong or a mixture of both, but I am not going to have that argument with them. I will aruge with Christians and Muslims who want to ban abortion, but I will do so from a humanist perspective without trying to explain their own faith to them.
Which NO ONE argued in the first place! So yeah… you are kind of playing devil’s advocate here. You are arguing against something no one even said…
You are arguing with us… drop the straw Muslim here, please.
And I’m so happy that you reserve your arguments for me and Mindy instead, even though we’re not really wrong. 
You’re conflating the fact of how a religion is formed and it’s fundamental tenets with belief. None of us are declaring what anyone believes. What @anon61221983 has been saying from the beginning (and @chenille and I have backed her up about) is that Christianity, Islam, and Judaism share the same god. This is a fact, independent of any belief by anyone. This is also the topic of the discussion. If you’d like to have a different discussion, then start a different topic. But in this discussion, the belief of individuals or groups of individuals is functionally irrelevant, and bringing belief into the discussion is where you and other contributors derailed it.
Very well. Without paying any attention to what anyone does or does not believe, yes, everything that @anon61221983 and @chenille have said is true and correct. Judaism, Christianity and Islam do in fact worship the same god, and this is backed by scripture and thousands of years of history. The theological underpinnings of all three religions sprang from the God of Abraham, and although the religions themselves have gone down separate theological paths, the central god is still shared in common between them as a fundamental pillar of faith among all three. The vast majority of Muslims knowingly worship the same god as Christians, and this has been the case throughout history, where Jews and Christians were given special privileges not afforded to Pagans within Muslim societies as People of the Book.
There are currently some ignorant Christians and ignorant Muslims who reject all of the above, but that is a matter of belief and so beyond the scope of this conversation. I apologize for wading into the murky waters of personal beliefs in a conversation about the facts of the Abrahamic Faiths. I was trying to take a sociological approach to a theological debate, and that only led to confusion. I did not mean to say that facts are wrong or unimportant; I merely wanted to say that we should not simply ignore personal beliefs, especially when they lead to conflict. I did not intend to propagate any of these beliefs.
If we are sticking strictly to facts, then there is really nothing else to argue because the facts laid out by @anon61221983 and @chenille are undeniable facts about the three Abrahamic Faiths. Modern tensions between Jews, Christians and Muslims are largely artificial and based on more recently added mutual misconceptions, of which the idea that they believe in different gods is one unfortunate example.
Whether and to what extent Muslims and Christians actually believe these misconceptions is beyond the scope of this conversation, but it is unfortunate that these beliefs are still propagated among both communities.
In the future, I will try not to draw attention to these beliefs (even in the context of explaining how a single religion can have a spectrum of contradictory beliefs) because, as @anon61221983 said, these believes have been leading to enormous loss of life.
As for what people actually believe in their heart of hearts, I will try not to speculate.
As for Judaism, Islam and Christianity, I think that they are all really beautiful religions that have brought many wonderful and meaningful things to humanity, and it breaks my heart to see conflict between them in spite of their many core similarities.
You do know that sociologist deal in facts, right? A sociologist dealing with a particular sect would not leave the historical facts out of her investigation of that sect, rather she’d work to contexutalize them against the broader history of that sect and larger religion…
BTW, much of the modern study of history employs similar sociological methodology. They don’t ignore facts though.
Those tensions and conflicts are virtually indistinguishable from the tensions and conflicts within each of those religions.
Bingo. Catholics and Protestants had bloody conflicts for centuries, as did Shia and Sunni Muslims. That doesn’t imply they worshipped different deities, or even that they believed they were worshipping different deities. It just means they had different ideas about the proper ways to worship their shared deity.
The devil is no fool-- he is represented by learned counsel, at least until the practice was banned in 1983.
It’s yawehs, all the way down.
… they shoulda sold it to Microsoft in 2008 
I’ve thought some more about this, and everyone is right except me. The creator God as revealed to Abraham is definitely the same deity claimed by Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. The difference is in the characteristics attributed to that God. For instance, Jesus was pretty clear how he felt about stoning adulterous women to death, the exact issue in the original article. He seemed to feel we shouldn’t do that, and I’m pretty confident everyone else here feels like that’s not something we should do, either.
