The ridiculous story of that Wheaton College professor who was placed on leave for saying that Christians and Muslims worship the same god just keeps going. (My nephew, Ryan, has a nice story on this at The Guardian, and here is the story I linked to yesterday.)
Let’s be clear: This isn’t a close call. Islam is solidly, incontestably, an Abrahamic religion; of course Muslims worship the same god as Christians. Much of the Quran, in fact, was stolen wholesale, verbatim, from the Old Testament. They then did what every other religion on earth has done — they adapted those teachings to suit their particular needs in their particular time and their particular place.
Now, a column at the Washington Post weighs in:
Appealing in part to arguments in my book “Allah: A Christian Response,” Hawkins asserted that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. She did not insist that Christians and Muslims believe the same things about that one God. She did not state that Islam and Christianity are the same religion under a different name, or even that Islam is equally as true as Christianity.
All religions are human inventions, myths and stories made-up to explain the world in which people find themselves. That’s one of the points that Nietzsche makes in The Antichrist, that Christianity was born in a despised and abused underclass, and so it refashioned obsequiousness and poverty as virtues. Similarly, the Jews before them needed a warrior god in order to survive, as did the Muslims, and so we got the serial indecencies of Numbers and Islam’s “bloody borders.”
The real source of the dispute isn’t hard to find: If Muslims worship the same god as Christians … then maybe Christians don’t have the Eternal Truth nailed-down, maybe Christians aren’t so special and the others doomed to the eternal torture they deserve.
I am not, I should add, entirely sympathetic to Professor Hawkins; after all, anybody of ordinary intelligence is quite capable of figuring-out that it’s a bushel of nonsense, and so it is her own intellectual laziness or character failure that put her at Wheaton and set her up for pointless humiliation within the precincts of the pious. Bah. A pox on all their goddamn houses.