The Three Religions

[Csargo]

I know there's really not much of a difference between the three (at least I think) but I was wondering what the major differences between Judaism, Islam, and Christianity?
Just wanted to get some info on the topic if anyone has anything that can help me.

[Justiciar]

They all worship the same god. It's just the prophets that they follow that make the noticable differenece. Each time a new prophet shows up they get a following and the worshippers of their predecessors deny their divinity. Jews follow the older prophets, Christians follow the older prophets plus Jesus, Muslims follow the older prophets plus Jesus plus Mohammad. There are other religions that follow other prophets. Aten.. Zoroaster.. the Gurus.. and Bahá'u'lláh.. I can't thing of any others but I'm sure if you search around you'll find more.

[Kralizec]

Christianity is understould by christians to be the continuation of the jewish religion after the Messiah. Whereas jews needed to attone for their sins by sacrifice, the sacrifice of Jesus served to attone for all sins for all people, provided you believed of course.
According to Islam, the older religions of Judaism & Christianity were "distorted" and the angel Gabriel revealed the true word of Allah to Mohammed by literally citing the text of the Quran.
In Islam, Jesus is not the son of God like he is in christianity, but just another prophet.

Furthermore I believe that while Judaism and Christianity hold that everybody is born as a sinner, Islam holds that everybody starts with a clean slate.
I think that muslims believe that Jesus did not actually die on the cross...much less that his supposed suffering took away the sin of everybody.
I could be wrong about these last two, though.

[Avicenna]

Islam also, I believe, (sorry if I am wrong) rejects Jesus as a false prophet.

I think Hindus also follow the god. Their multiple deities are just the different sides of the God that Judaism, Islam and Christianity believe in.

[Kralizec]

[QUOTE=Tiberius]Islam also, I believe, (sorry if I am wrong) rejects Jesus as a false prophet.[quote]

Not true.

I think Hindus also follow the god. Their multiple deities are just the different sides of the God that Judaism, Islam and Christianity believe in.

While I know little about Hinduism, I have heard something like that: that their deities are just representations of a single, supernatural power.
However they have no connection to the "abrahamic" religions Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Abraham or Ibrahim was the father of Isaac and Ishmael, fathers of the Israelites and Arabs respectively, and is sort of a father figure to all three religions. Whatever the Hindus believe in they developed their religions seperately.

[Pontifex Rex]

Islam and judeaism are so very close in doctrine and belief that in many ways they are almost the same. These two religions are often referred to as cousins while Christianity (with its emphasis on Christ as the Messiah) is a more distant relative.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Yes, thats true but the relationship is actually more like two cousens, one of which had a son.

Islam and Jewdaism split at Abraham while Christians are just followers of the Messiah prophesied in the Torah. There are even some modern Jews that accept Jesus as the son of god but they remain Jews because Christianity is Jewdaism stripped down for export.

[Justiciar]

Muslims see Jesus as the Messiah of the Jews, and do hold him as a prophet. They simply deny that he is God's sole son and heir.. as the origional Christians may well have done. The countless gods in Hinduism are part of a single greater entity, but it isn't the god of Israel.

[orangat]

Christianity is understould by christians to be the continuation of the jewish religion after the Messiah. Whereas jews needed to attone for their sins by sacrifice, the sacrifice of Jesus served to attone for all sins for all people, provided you believed of course.
According to Islam, the older religions of Judaism & Christianity were "distorted" and the angel Gabriel revealed the true word of Allah to Mohammed by literally citing the text of the Quran.
In Islam, Jesus is not the son of God like he is in christianity, but just another prophet.

Furthermore I believe that while Judaism and Christianity hold that everybody is born as a sinner, Islam holds that everybody starts with a clean slate.
I think that muslims believe that Jesus did not actually die on the cross...much less that his supposed suffering took away the sin of everybody.
I could be wrong about these last two, though.

Correct and I'll add that Muslim believe Islam was the religion was the religion of Abraham so many (all?)Jewish prophets on down are considered to be Muslim prophets too. And Abraham's son Ismail is believed to be the progenitor of the Arabs. Muhammad was the last prophet who received the final revelation from God in the form of the Quran.

All 3 religions come have the same Abrahamaic roots but the beliefs of each of the 3 are held to be blasphemous by the others.

Associating Jesus with God is the ultimate blasphemy in Islam since he is only a Muslim prophet. And Jews likewise do not believe Jesus was the messiah.

[lars573]

I think Hindus also follow the god. Their multiple deities are just the different sides of the God that Judaism, Islam and Christianity believe in.

That's not quite true. It depends in the type of Hindism you follow. To some Shiva, Ganesa et all are gods like Zeus, Apollo, or Odin. To others they are all manifestations of Bhramin the one supreme being that is everything (even us).

[Sjakihata]

every march hindus have Shiva-radhri (shiva day) where everyone, police, elderly, small children (8+) and even the kind smoke hash, to celebrate Shiva goddess of marihuana

[Atilius]

every march hindus have Shiva-radhri (shiva day) where everyone, police, elderly, small children (8+) and even the kind smoke hash, to celebrate Shiva goddess of marihuana

There is a variety of Cannabis indica called Shiva. I'm puzzled about how this association of the (male) god Shiva and marijuana came about. The river Ganga (Ganges) is said to flow from his hair: Ganges=Ganja? But perhaps it's just because Shiva is known as the Destroyer. Must be good stuff.

[beauchamp]

Muslims see Jesus as the Messiah of the Jews, and do hold him as a prophet. They simply deny that he is God's sole son and heir.. as the origional Christians may well have done. The countless gods in Hinduism are part of a single greater entity, but it isn't the god of Israel.

True, but in the Quranic version of Revalations, the Muslims belive that Jesus will come to earth first and start the fight against Gog and Magog (like the servents of satan that invade from europe) and then prepares the earth for Mohammeds return by converting all of the Christians into Muslims.

[Russiantsar]

What about the moral beliefs are they also similiar or not?

[wolftrapper78]

I think that many people miss the true point of Christianity. This is nowadays only followed by the Protestant branch and not the Catholic or Orthodox brach of Christianity.

This is that man is saved from certain eternal damnation by Jesus' GRACE ALONE. If you don't believe me, pick up a Bible and read the oft-quoted John 3:16.

This puts Christianity into a completely different category of religion than any other religion in world history. All others need some kind of salvation by works on top of grace.

[Puzz3D]

I think that many people miss the true point of Christianity. This is nowadays only followed by the Protestant branch and not the Catholic or Orthodox brach of Christianity.

This is that man is saved from certain eternal damnation by Jesus' GRACE ALONE. If you don't believe me, pick up a Bible and read the oft-quoted John 3:16.

This puts Christianity into a completely different category of religion than any other religion in world history. All others need some kind of salvation by works on top of grace.

Catholic Christianity follows that same idea that the only salvation is through Jesus. The theology of this is that the magnitude of an offense is determined by who is offended. If you sin, you have offended the infinite being, God, and therefore your offense is infinte. Good deeds performed by humans for other humans are finite, and therefore not enough to atone for an infinite offense. In addition, every human is stained by the original sin (disobedience) of Adam and Eve at conception. The rational for this, as put forth by St. Augustine, is that conception is the result of the lustful act of sexual intercourse even if it takes place within the sacrament of matrimony.

Jesus is not a lesser god (That is considered Arian heresy.). He is God; fully equal and made of the same substance as God and He always existed, but He took on a dual nature by becoming man. As such, His sacrifice for man's sin against God is an infinite sacrifice and therefore enough to atone for an infinite sin. Since Jesus made an infinite sacrifice, there is no way for humans to repay him. This produces a lot of guilt in believers.

I don't really understand how the Catholic Church justifies killing non-catholics and heretics. If the Church was in a position of power today, they would be still doing that. Of course, they don't carry out the executions themselves. They have the secular authorities do that, and traditionally secular authorities are quick to use religion to get rid of people they don't want around. The Catholic Church has never disbanded the Inquisition, and the current pope's nickname is "The Enforcer" since he was the head of the Inquisition before he became pope. I've seen a picture of the previous pope, John Paul, with Adolf Hitler at the signing of the resolution that made Catholicism the offical religion of the Third Reich.

Messianic fervor was very high during the time of the Roman occupation of Palestine. Many messianic figures emerged during this time and the Romans killed them all. Jesus could be a composite of more than one person. The Jews believed the Messiah was going to bring the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. To them that meant returning the "just" people, the Jews, to power. The messiah would lead the revolt. The Jews did revolt in 66 - 73 CE, believing that God would insure their victory, but they lost. Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed, and many Jews were massacred and sold into slavery. There were two more revolts, one in 111 -117 CE and one in 132 - 135 CE. All these losses resulted in the surviving Jews being scattered and without a homeland.

The idea that Jesus was God was authored by the leader of the Coptic Church to counter Arian and it was made doctrine at the First Ecumenical Council at Nicene in 325. The Second Ecumenical Council at Constantonople in 381 introduced the terminology that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father. At the Synod of Toledo in Spain in 447, the language was changed to say the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son. This was done to combat the by then widespread Arian belief that Jesus was a lesser being than God by cementing the idea that the Holy Trinity was composed of three equal beings. The Third Ecumenical Council at Esphesus in 451 forbade any further changes in the Creed.

The belief in the divinity of Jesus and the Holy Spirit evolved over time, and are not clear from scripture alone. Also, the new testament scriptures were written by unknown authors a long time after the events they describe, after the first Jewish revolt during a time when the political situation had changed. Christianity which started out as an anti-Roman religious movement gradually evolved into an anti-Jewish religious movement, and that evolution can be observed in the four canonical gospels. By 1215 the Fourth Council of the Lateran headed by Pope innocent III declared that all Jews and Muslims shall wear a special dress to distinguish them from Christians. As I recall, it was a yellow patch for Jews.

Irenaeus of Lyons picked the four canonical gospels c. 185. He declared that "it is not possible that there can be either more or fewer than four", using as logic the analogy of the four corners of the earth and the four winds. Apparently, the Church destroyed scriptures of which they didn't approve. My understanding is that there were once multiple versions of the gospel of Mark.

[Sarmatian]

It is very easy to misinterpret the bible. Just think how many translations the bible had. First from arameic (i`m not sure if this the word for the language that bible was originaly written in), to greek or latin, and then to all other european languages. And probably it wasn`t translated by an expert, just by somebody who knew the language.

[wolftrapper78]

Sarmatian,

Not necessarily, the Bible as we read it in English is not translated from the Latin. But for the most part, the Bible has been translated from the closest possible language to its original. The Old Testament is translated directly from the original Hebrew and Aramaic and the New Testament from the Greek. The other translations of the Bible were used as a reference in translation because there are alot more similarities between Greek and Latin to English than between ancient Hebrew and English, as we all know. But those versions are still useful and used.

That being said, I don't dispute that it is very easy to misinterpret the Bible. If everyone understood the Bible the same way, there would only be one church of Christians and not the vast horde of different denominations.