The Idle Thoughts Of An Idle Fellow ۞: February 2008

I am here with a rather delicate topic, this post might be blasphemous, erroneous and all the insane stuff - it might require, but i would still like to stick to the facts - to my best.

Religion indeed is a complex idea. People make it more complex.

The concept of God has been puzzling as ever - As for the Old Roman saying on christianity, "There is a new sect called christianity - they are very poor - they are so poor that they have only One God..!!"

But to the most, the Concept of God is rather Simple - There is a Supreme being residing in the sky - who watches over all other beings, counts their deeds - blesses them or punishes them on their account, as simple as that.Well, let me get down to the topic....

YHWH - The God of Abraham (The Monotheist God of Jews, Christians and Muslims).

According to the people of the books(Tanakh, the Jewish Scripture - The Bible, the Christian scripture - The Koran, the Islamic scripture ), Many messiahs and prophets existed before and after Abraham, but Abraham is one who is actally a distributing point for the three major religious followings (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) together they constitute abour 53% of the total world population. It is to be noted that around 14% of the total world population are not involved in any religious following.

I am not including the Dharmic religions for the discussion( they constitute about 19% - which are, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jaininsm and Sikhism) as this discussion is mainly with regard to the God of Abraham and his people, though there is a twist in the story with the entry of Baha'ullah - I will get back to the Dharmic belief towards the end of my post

If we had to arrive to a conclusion from the statistical and Historical account,

Probably, the Homosapiens settled around Mount Caramel (Coastal mountain range in current Israel and West Bank) approximately dating from about 90,000 BCE. This is regarded as the branching point of the Modern Humans. [Ref. The History of Levant]

Judaism was founded in the Early Iron Age (2000 BC) - Number of followers 14 million

Christianity was founded in 1st Century AD - Number of followers 2.1 billion

Islam was founded in 7th Century AD - Number of followers 1.5 billion

Do you find anything strange in this statistics ?

Why would Judaism, which was founded about 4000 years ago have less number of followers compared to Islam or Christianity ?

No offences meant here - But i came to an understanding that the Jews were the most suppressed people on earth, and This might be the reason for their imbalanced population statistics.,Every great nation wanted to wipe out the Jewish culture from this world - and finally had failed everytime. Right from the Egyptians(1300 BC) to the Germans, Hitler- to be more specific(1940 AD) have failed in their every attempt to eliminate Jews.Further more the Jewish diaspora during the Roman Period (around 135 A.D), led to further decline in the spread of Judaism. But why would so many nations specifically target this community ?

In modern times there are news regarding people converting to christianity and people converting to Buddhism or conerting to Islam, but not much on people converting to Judaism.

Frankly, the Jews are one of the most gifted people in the world - Einstein,Maimonides, Golda Meir, Emma Lazarus, Anne Frank, to name a few - Astounding is that the number of Jewish Nobel Prize winners (approximately 160 in all) - and as a fact the maximum output on modern telecommunication-protocol research and weapon research is from Israel(a.k.a, Canaan in Old Biblical Period).So, i am questioning myself- are they really the People of the God ?

The 3 Patriachs Abraham, Issac and Jacob (a.k.a, Israel) are the founders of modern Judaism.

The geneology from Abraham to Israel and then further down the generations to Moses and further then to Jesus(also a Jewish Preacher) can be mapped to how christianity came into practice.

Abraham- Through his First Son Ishmail (Born to an Egyptian Hagar) leads to the generation of Arabs and therefore to Mohammud, gives the origin of Islam.

To the people not familiar with either of The Tanakh, The Bible or The Koran, is the following piece of Information.

Adam the first man and Eve the first woman were created by God in the Paradise, and were sent to Earth after being tempted to taste the fruit of knowledge by a snake (Satan).

Noah (Associated with the Great Floood) and Abraham were several generations down from Adam and Eve.

Of all the God's People Abraham is an important figure in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

The belief is like that Abraham, married for a long time didn't had any children.As per his wife's suggestion he entered into nuptials with an Egyptian Hagar, who gave birth to a son named Ismail (Later,The father of the tribe of Arabs). Later by some years the first wife gave birth to Issac(Later,The father of the tribe of Israelites).

For some reason, the first wife felt threatened by the presence of Ismail and requested Abraham to seperate Ismail and his mother from their tribe, so Abraham together with Ismail built the foundations of Kaaba(The holy-place in Islam) and left the two people in that town, in the desert of arabia.

As mentioned, further generations from Issac, namely - Jacob(a.k.a.,Israel) and Moses became the preachers of the One God. This belief is accepted by all these three religion of The Books.

After rescuing the Israelites from the Egyptian Pharoh(The Exodus), Moses brought the Ten Commandments for them from YHWH. But was enraged to see that his people had entered into Idolotary (By Worshipping the golden calf) and destroyed the tablets.These israelites were to become the earliest jews after accepting the Ten Commandments and believe in Monotheism.Thus after going through many changes from Abraham to Judah then to Moses, David , now what exists is the modern Judaism.

Further generations apart, through Issac, Jacob then through Judah, was Jesus of Nazreth (a Jew) who began his preaching on the concept of One God (This attempt was to renew the Monotheistic religion from Abraham, as few customs favouring the temple and the then jewish priests were in practice - the jewish priests encouraged many customs and changes to the original Scriptures for their own benefits, thus the original scriptures began to corrupt), the jewish priests felt threatened by his teachings wanted an end to this. They finally succeeded in his execution, through Judas Iscariot(The Crucifiction, as believed by the christians - to be noted islam doesn't believe in death of jesus, they believe that jesus(a prophet - not a son of God) was lifted up into the heaven before his capture by the Romans).The followers of Jesus(Jews and Romans) became the earliest christians.Thus through Abraham christianity had found its place.

Now do you remember Ismail ?? - yeah right, the first son of Abraham was the father of modern Arabs and Prophet Mohammed. Mohammed was born in Mecca (Town built around the Kaaba), during this period Kaaba, became the polytheist ground for 365 idols (a God for a day), this generated great deal of interest for the Egyptian, Abyssinians and the local Arab tribes for a pilgrimage, this helped the Meccans economically.Mohammed showed no interest in those idolotary right from his early age. when Mohammed received the message from God, throught the angel Gabriel, he spoke against polytheism and asked everyone to embrace monotheism and submit to One God. The meccans felt threatened by this as they would be at risk of losing their main source of income.So that says, how Islam had branched from Abraham through, Ismail.

Jerusalem, a holy-land for all the three religions, was a battleground once. The European Christians who felt threatened by the growing popularity of Islam wanted to gain back Jerusalem, in order to get their strong hold. This led to the Crusades (The Holy Wars) . "Jihad" is the the term used to describe this from the Islamic context.

It is said that the Jerusalem then was populated with muslims and jews were living in harmony with each-other.Their peace was disturbed by the christian invaders.The Pope during the period were Corrupted with power and held their sway over modern England, Burgundy(Germany) and Italy.Though more than a score of battles were fought, it ended as a stalemate between the christians and muslims.

So after this long narration, are you able to get the point that, in my view - all these three religions are said to be the one and the same, as the one preached by Abraham and his predessors, but geographically and politically - they have been divided into three.They all refer to the same God (but the variation being the Messengers - they were different - this made the religions different)

Before the I and II world wars, there was a three way hate prevailing .

1. The christians hated Jews (for their involvement in Jesus' crucifiction)

2.The christians feared the muslims (for being a big political power in Eastern Europe, Northern Africa and Asia) and the fast spread of the faith was threatening.

3.The Jews hated the Muslims(for the capture of Jerusalem, the Jews had a holy site there, the wailing wall)

4. Muslims hated the Jews and Christians for the same reason (To keep the strong-hold over Jerusalem and over their Political power)

Things began to change for the muslims after Turkey's defeat (The Muslim Ottoman Empire) was shaken down to it abyss.

At some point during the II world war, the European Jews (Survivors of the Holocaust), felt that a separate nation could make then secure(ZIONISM - return to the Holy Land), the Allies favoured in creating the Modern Israel state, which previously was an Arab area.This led to the Israel-Arab war, which lasts till date as the Palestinian conflict.The actual fact is that even before Arabs came to this land (Palestine), It was known as Canaan(In Modern day - Israel) during Biblical period, and it was the homeland of Israelites until the Jewish Diaspora around 135 A.D.

There seems a little difference in the belief systems (Regarding GOD and the monotheist beliefs) in all these three major religions, but the fight seems to be more on the basis of Geography, Wealth and Politics rather that religion itself.

The Struggle between the Three Religions can be mapped as a Struggle between Three Nations,

The Jews(Israel) , The Muslims(Arabs) and The Christians(Europeans) - It is more like three children arguing as whose daddy is the best, but what they do not know is their daddy is the same person.

One point worth mentioning is of Baha'ullah from Persia, regarded as the most recent of the prophets (Muslims believe that Muhammed was the last prophet from the God, they do not accept Baha'ullah as a Prophet), mentioned that Krishna, Buddha, Abraham,Jesus and Mohammed are all messengers of god like himself through the first man and woman, the Adam and the Eve.The famous Lotus temple at New Delhi stands as his testimony, Bahai faith has spread as far as Germany and America.The fact is that, he fused the Dharmic religions and the Abrahamic Religons into a single group.Bingo..!!

Well, i can drag down to few more pages but i feel that, i have come to a logical end and so i am closing this post here.

What have i gained from this post is an insight into Theology,Spirituality, Politics, History and Human Nature.

Signing off: