Froggie, Your rhetorical question about why God does not make his existence obvious is one the hardest. God’s elusiveness bemuses and irritates people like you and occasionally depresses people like me. My only explanation is that such a revelation would deprive us of the ability to choose to believe – a choice which is as much an act of love as a cerebral exercise. The revelation would be overwhelming, and I believe God does not impose.

Pericles,

You say, “unless you are aware of something, you cannot know it. Surely it doesn't get any easier than that?” Granted, tautologies are easy :)

You use the word “axiomatic” about the necessary link between experience and knowledge. This is my point:- this axiom is where your thinking begins. You believe the axiom to be true, but the truth of the axiom is not experienced:- it’s simply apprehended. It seems that it needn’t be experienced, because “it is axiomatic”. It seems so obvious that you don’t even like having to say it.

Because it’s “obvious”, it seems a good place to start. This is all I’m saying: you have a starting point. You didn’t have to, you just did. You might have started with God. Or, as that is not appealing (or seems prohibited by the approach you’ve actually taken), you might have started with yourself, as the relativist does:- “I’ll believe what I want and no-one can contradict me, neither the God people nor the evidence people”.

“Man in God’s image”, another tough one. The core beliefs about God are that God is a person and that “God is love”. I believe these are our core characteristics. They enable us to relate to God, which is impressive, and to relate just as impressively with each other. “Image of God” is an excellent pedigree – we are extremely “high born”, so to speak – and so it becomes a good basis for insisting that people be treated with respect. It gets equality and justice underway. As for “coping”, I’m not sure what you’re driving at, but I’m sure you’ll tell me.

Pax,

Now don't be silly Froggie - I wasn't trying to convert you. The “you” in my posting was rhetorical. Should you ask for instance what do Germans mean by a particular sentence I would try to translate/explain it to you without expecting you to learn German or even to become a German.

Questions raised on this OLO, as I understand them, rhetorical or not, are dealt with (you seldom get a clear-cut answer) in order to exchange opinion (sometimes even facts), which in case of topics dealing with religion most often involve personal experiences with a particular religion or world view, by an “insider” or an “outsider”. Your rhetorical questions do not surprise me: as a mathematician I have been used to similarly motivated questions, rhetorical or not, on what mathematics is all about, and what it is good for in everyday life, by “outsiders”, people who for this or that reason have problems with maths. And it is equally impossible to satisfy them with a simple answer they could accept.

Nevertheless let me try again for those who might still be interested. If I write a programme properly, it CANNOT not do what I wanted it to do; if I teach a student how “to do maths” he/she CAN misunderstand me, and not do what I want him/her to do. In this sense I prefer a God who created us not as automata running a single programme, but as human beings free not to see and not to do what He wanted us to see and to do. This freedom, we now understand, is built into the creation by making it a self-evolving, not pre-programmed, Universe, life and man. Scientists, reading the “Book of nature” can, but do not have to, “see Him”. On the other hand those who read the sacred books of various religions without thinking can get a distorted image of Him. I think this is more or less what also goodthief is saying.

TR,
I agree 100% with what you say, and would only add that this “rebuilding from the ground up” has to come from the INSIDE, from Muslims themselves. We, the outsiders, cannot “rupture” anything, we should only encourage those among them who have their try on this rebuilding. And not make it harder for them by condemning or ridiculing also what is sacred to all Muslims, the fundamentalists as well as those working on a renaissance of their faith.

I should think it's safe to say every thing is created by God in his image. Including man. Which is not to say man was created in the image of God. There is a very distinct difference intended by the structure of both these sentences. Every living creature on earth is distinct from the other. Every planet in our solar system is distinct from the other. All of the stars and extra solar system planets studied to date have proven to be distinct from one another. The constellations of the stars are distinct from one another. Far away galaxies are distinct from one another. Which mathematical or scientific principle allows for this existent diversity from no thing. And no thing first existed what led to the accumulation of dust particles that created the mass that initiated the big bang of scientific beginnings. Why is all this things held in a vacuum megaverse of no thing. Science has no answer and has gone on to discuss strings and slices of bread to opine dimensional physics in explaining the universe unanswerable through scientific methodology. Which has only proven to confound their science more thoroughly. Man in his glory is not the equal of God, except for in one regard. Destroying what God has given us in a vain attempt to be God like. And then have the audacity to question what it is we are guilty of. Are Muslims and non-Muslims going to destroy any renaissance of Islam because the opportunity for such a renaissance exist simply to prove once again how superior we can be?

George and TR

interesting points, but..... if you take away Bukhari and the other transmitters of oral tradition, what about the Quran ? Its as damning as the others which simply fill in the blanks.

You are really saying that Muslims need to turn their religion into something that is not 'Islam'.. which would be a good thing.

Not much chance of that. After all.. it was 'sent down' by Allah..

"And for the prophet.. if a believing woman offers herself to you, you may marry- you are without blame, this only for you, not the ordinary believers" partial quote of 33:50

Mohammad practiced 'temporary' marriage and allowed it... people can draw their own conclusions about where this kind of 'revelation' was 'sent' from.
Like financial crime.. 'follow the money'... with cults .. often it is 'follow the sex' to find the who and why of it all.

I honestly doubt if any Muslim would ever have the testicles to go against the 5 major schools of Islamic law which allowed the Ottoman sultan to have 300 concubines. "Islamic law allows a man 4 wives and as many concubines as he can support" is what I found in a bio sketch of Sulayman...Ottoman Sultan.

BATTLE OF LEPANTO.. what lesson should we learn from this ?

Note the words of the Ottomans and think about it.

Spoken to the Christian alliance after the Battle of Lepanto.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lepanto_(1571)

"In wresting Cyprus from you we deprived you of an arm; in defeating our fleet you have only shaved our beard. An arm when cut off cannot grow again; but a shorn beard will grow all the better for the razor."

That 'regrown beard' was felt a few decades later..at the gates of Vienna.......were it not for the magnificent courage and skill of one Jan III Sobiesky.. we would be speaking Arabic today.

Tours 732
Vienna 1683
Nahr el-Bared camp..Lebanon, 2007

goodthief, if wordplay is your substitute for argument, so be it.

But you aren't fooling anybody except yourself.

Let's start with the word "axiom".

It comes directly from the Greek axioma, meaning "that which commends itself as self-evident". It has been used in English in this sense since Caxton in 1485.

If we now look again at what you say with this explanation in mind.

>>This is my point:- this axiom is where your thinking begins. You believe the axiom to be true, but the truth of the axiom is not experienced:- it’s simply apprehended<<

The entire point of having an axiom in the first place is to have somewhere to start from that is free and independent, in order to avoid the necessity of having to believe in it. Something that is axiomatic is, by definition, self-evident. The axiom is the starting point simply because it is not necessary to go behind it or beyond it in order to understand it.

That is why it is not necessary to "believe an axiom to be true". It simply "is" an axiom.

It would be perfectly acceptable for you to set out to refute my statement that "it is simply axiomatic that experience, or awareness, precedes knowledge". That would be fair enough, and is the direction that logic should take you.

But it is a perversion of the English language to try to argue that an axiom is not axiomatic on the basis that it requires belief.

The direction your argument takes you, unfortunately, is towards a view that words have no meaning in and of themselves.

That leads to "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."

That way also lies Derrida, Foucault and co. and the deconstruction gang, and I'm pretty sure you don't want to go there.

The existence of God, on the other hand, cannot be axiomatic. You can still believe in him, of course, there is no logical prohibition against belief. We are after all human beings.