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Feb 28, 07, 01:04 #61
At the level of the worshiper, however, religious experience has a tendency to seek out its place of origin. Notwithstanding all of religion's creedal statements and outward dimensions, worship grounds itself at the perceptual level within the heart and mind, where direct apprehension necessarily reveals patterns of infinite individuation. When a creedal formula is shared, each person sharing it forms, nonetheless, a unique psychological construct for what he or she believes about it.
At the empirical level--alone with God--all believers, the religious and the less deeply religious alike, posit their own predicates and have their own compelling or not-so-compelling vision of God. At the existential level of living faith and inner constructs of belief, the clear-cut lines so essential to unified doctrine and distinctive creeds blur, and the world of faith becomes a kaleidoscope.
From a Muslim's perspective, the premise that Muslims, Jews and Christians believe in the same God-is so centred to Islamic theology that unqualified rejection of it would, for many, be tantamount to a repudiation of faith. From tim Qur'anic standpoint, Muslims, Christians and Jews should have no difficulty agreeing that they all turn to the God, despite their theological and ritual differences. Historical arguments between their faiths have rarely if ever been over what to call God or who was invoked by that call, and Islamic salvation history is rooted in the conviction that there is a lasting continuity between the dispensations of Muhammad, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and the biblical and extrabiblical prophets.
The Qur'an instructs Muslims to acknowledge openly and forthrightly that their God and the God of biblical religion is the same: "Do not dispute with the people of the Book [the Bible--Jews and Christians] but in the best of manners, excepting those of them who commit oppression, and say [to them]: 'We believe in what was revealed to us and what was revealed to you. Our God and your God is one, and we are a people in twilling] submission to him" (Qur'an 29:46).
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