Thanks Esalem!
The BELIEVERS Surah 23 states
'Blessed are the believers, who are humble in their prayers; who avoid profane talk, and give alms to the destitute; who restrain their carnal desires (except with wives and slave-girls, for these are lawful to them) and do not transgess through...
Eselam can you or someone else here quote from the Koran where the Prophet actually has written that non Muslims will go to hell, or cannot go to Paradise. I have the Koran but did not find this. In fact the Surah - the Believers says that it is the male believers who are the heirs of Paradise...
Why Ben? Is the Patriarch not Jacob who ate lentils not meat? Did God not instruct men to eat the fruits and abstain from the Tree of Life? Of course he did. Any spiritual person will tell you that to maintain spirituality you must abstain from eating flesh. The Ancient Egyptian priests...
The selling of religion is something quite different isnt it? They used to sell you bits of paper which wiped out your sins to date - indulgences? If you join us you will live forever is the most common line. Never a guarantee or your money back. Then when you are in, hooked, there will probably...
Ultimately we are are own judge. Or at least there appears to be a part of us that will testify against us at the end. Or the Tibetans are wasting their time with their Book of the Dead. It is the weighing of our heart that will decide if we are innocent or not.
I think the point of the Herod story is that the man represents 'evil' and this negative force does not want any light shining on its dark activities. This is why John the Baptist loses his head too. The responsibility for those deaths would not be the Creator's unless the whole of Creation is...
This is dangerous territory as I understand the Kaaba once contained several gods/goddesses. I suppose that the religions in the first millenium did not want to be polytheitic. Christianity insisted on 'God' being a father, son and a spirit, but maintain 3 is 1. Judaism seems to have one God but...
We are constantly overpopulating, breeding like rabbits which is why Nature (or God) sends plagues of all descriptions. Often famine, disease, natural and unnatural disaster but man gets more and more clever at combatting this. Now we are losing our fertility and facing war and famine because we...
There is a long history of sacrificing your children in that part of the world regardless of your religion. Abraham was sacrificing his son. As quoted above babies were tossed on a fire to Baal but for centuries there was a bonfire at the top of a hill in Jerusalem and 'children were set aside'...
Maybe the Garden was somewhere near Sirius, as they could not get back there (yet) without burning up. Free will is just a sermon made out of the story, not a fact. All of us will make a mistake at some time and learn from it perhaps. Any baby who does not know right from wrong will choose...
900 years old? Our bodies are up to that and soon with stem cell help will do so again, if they did. Clones seem to have descendants with shrinking lifespans and capabilities but I may be wrong as I do not work with clones (I think). So if genes were tampered with as they are now then they may...
Genesis does not say the world is 6000 years old. We deduce 'Adam' was born around 4000BC because a King David is known to have ruled around 1000BC and we have all the generations there. Adam was not made at the beginning of the world, nor till long after the 6th day when male and females were...
The beauty of science is that it knows it is not complete and changes as evidence arrives that can prove theories which are all we really have. With God there is a different view. That is that you can give a process a name even if you do not understand and cannot test it. So there is usually a...
If you want to take Genesis literally you can but you have to read it carefully and note that the experts consider it to be written by two different authors, both their tales meshed together. There is a priestly author who writes from the spiritual side. Genesis clearly states that God had...
They were told not to eat living things (tree of life) and given fruit, herbs and wheat to eat but she just had to cook something up that the others were allowed to eat, prabably bacon, which smelled excellent to both of them. The 'others' were the first race created - see Genesis - before Adam...
I wouldn't worry too much Shukran if Allah does not take them then the Christian God might, or the Hebrew God. If they say Amen at the end of their prayers then the Egyptian god Amen will look after them if they have no money. Otherwise they have a chance of enlightenment and release if they are...
You will find some of them if you ask a search engine to find Kalki. There are also quite a few Maitreyas (the future Buddha) and Mahdis (future enlightened or guided one) and Messiahs (future baptised or annointed one). In fact there always have been. But not like the Santa Claus in every...
I should be more precise as those posting here have been.
When you say Aryan, I see Hurrian and more precisely Horian. 'The Hurrians lived after 1600BC on the route taken by Abraham from Ur to Haran. We are told that the Moabites had displaced the Emim (similar to the Anakim) and the Edomites...
There is always an unresolved muddle but race has very little to do with it. In Ancient Egypt there were several races from the blonde 'Lybians' to the black fellahin who seemed to do all the agricultural work whoever was in charge. There are two clearly different races indiginous there before...
Around a century before Jesus was born the Book of Enoch was circulating in that part of the world and first mentioned the Son of Man (binadham). They say the angels rebelled because they were jealous of this friend of their Lord of Spirits who was only a man but given power over them.