I personally hold the view that these labels (monotheism, polytheism etc) are foreign to the very nature of various faiths. Take Islam for example, it is commonly classified as an Abrahamic monotheist religion. But it a-priory adopts the position that in all nations and all lands God's message...
Without sticking my nose into the meaning of the terms "final word of God" (of which there is no direct Quranic verse as far as I am aware) I would just like to say some things about earlier scriptures being invalid.
There are 3 ways of attitudes people have shown while interpreting the Quran...
But is he now necessarily better then dogs? Or have I misunderstood you, and what you were saying is that initially at the time of being born man was better but not right now among all creation?
Not that I am aware of. It is however certainly not meant that one should not laugh or joke at all. There are lots of hadith of the Prophet joking and being merry with others. I would surmise that it is in context of heedless, long spells of laughter based on worldly things. Laughter of a more...
There is another hadith, "Avoid much laughter because much laughter deadens the heart." This one is explicit I guess. I had heard it as a general saying and myself wasn't aware that it was a hadith until now.
The meaning is often lost in the readers perception of the translation. Here the verse just means that their mockery will ultimately cause harm to them only.
Listening to music is permissible, and in fact desirable, if listening increases a person's devotion to God; and it is not permissible if it has the opposite effect. Once the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) was asked about odes and poetry and he replied, "They are merely words. As such, they can be...
I never said you were misrepresenting Islam. I said I don't think you understand Islam. You framed your posts in such a way that gave me this impression.
This is your opinion based on lack of understanding.
These aren't my perceptions. See the books Islam by W.C. Smith and Discourses of Rumi (translation by Arberry). Specifically what did I say that you think is my own perception?
I don't think beerisit you understand Islam. You are literally interpreting external forms of Islam without bothering to understand the context they were delivered in and their real import. What you understand by the terms "Allah", "hell", "heaven" may not be so. Allah is just a symbol for the...
Just to chip in, I wrote a post on the virtues of the caste system some time back. The caste system had its plus points in a certain age but it is out of context today.
From the Islamic perspective, there is no caste system. The approach in the verse cited is that God is all-powerful and man...
I prefer the proof above with a small change: Think of a subset of the naturals as a sequence of zero's and one's. (A one indicates a particular element is in the subset, a zero indicates it isn't). Between every digit, put a 3 and in the begining put a decimal point. (Eg 11001... becomes...
Of course, it is in this case. By "may" I meant that an arbitrary discrete sample space can have a uncountable or countable sigma algebra, while having countable number of elements. At least that is the standard definition.
I have not read the book but why should there be a uniform distribution for probabilities (probability for each elementary event =1/n). He may have used a non uniform distribution. One can easily assign non zero probability values in a discrete sample space. Eg consider A={1,2,...} and let S be...
I recall a urdu couplet of Iqbal which went something like:
"Phir uthi tawheed ki sada punjab se, Hind ko bedaar kiya ek mard-e-kaamil ne khwaab se" (Translation: Once again the cry of Oneness of God was heard from Punjab...India was awakened from its slumber by a perfect man(Guru Nanak)")...