Who is God?

Some time ago, in an article by Mark O’Keefe, he posed the question “Do all religious paths lead to the same God?”  The article was sparked by President Bush’s statement upon being asked whether or not Christians or Judeo-Christians worship the same God as the Muslims, and vice-a-versa.  To the shock of most Muslims, and of course to Conservative Christians nationwide, he said “I believe we worship the same God.”  Whether he made this comment then for political reasons or he regards this to be the absolute truth I leave to the eye of the beholder.

Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission said to that comment, “There is one God and his name is Jehovah and his only begotten son is Jesus Christ of the seed of Abraham and Isaac, whose mother was the Jewess virgin, Mary...Jesus, our savior, has made it clear that we must know his father through faith in him and him alone.”

Reverend Ted Haggard, pastor and president of the National Association of Evangelicals in Colorado Springs,

Colorado had said, “The Christian God encourages freedom, love, forgiveness, prosperity and health while the Muslim God appears to value the opposite.”

If they so vehemently disagree with Bush’s comment then who are we worshipping?  This association of worshipping a different God has been going around since the Crusades.  People were actually murdered for not worshipping the same God as another tribe or empire.  As the Sultans of Middle Eastern countries spread their propaganda of opposing the infidel Crusaders, the Kings of Europe who initiated the wars also wrote of the infidel Muslims.  By definition an infidel is one who doesn’t have a particular religious belief although when we open the dictionary the first definition we would get is “an unbeliever with respect to a particular religion, particularly Christianity and Islam.”  But, this is not about who is the infidel.  This is about who God is?

Relating back to the comments that were made by Mr. Land and Mr. Haggard I want to go to the origin of their argument.  Dr Robert Morey wrote a

book called Allah: Demonic or Divine.  In the book, he makes the claim that the Muslims do not worship the God of the Bible, but the God of pre-Islamic Arabia. Allah, the Moon God.  Archeological digs throughout the Middle East and Eastern Europe, particularly in Palestine, indicate that the Arabs along with the pre-Christian Byzantines worshipped the moon, or a moon god.  He relates this to the Crescent moon that has somehow become synonymous with Islam and the crescent’s appearances on the top of minarets and on the domes of masjids (mosques).  The theory is, plainly and without a lengthy explanation of the book, the Muslims worship the moon not the God of the Universe or at least not the God they have come to understand.

We obviously don’t worship the moon as God says in the Quran:

Among His proofs are the night and the day, and the sun and the moon.  Do not prostrate before the sun, nor the moon; you shall fall prostrate before the God who created them, if you truly worship Him alone (41: 37)

Cont’d on page 2