What's the difference between Islam and Radical Islam?

That's pretty distorted. She may not have -quite- made it up but there are substantial omissions and some big exaggerations in there.Why do you expect anyone to fall for this crude propaganda which can easily be seen to be false ? You may be allergic to fact-checking but the rest of us certainly aren't.

And how do you know that the standard histories are "whitewashed" ?And how would Gabriel know any better ? She is, after all, a reporter not a historian and one who might be expected to have something of a chip in her shoulder.Evidence, Faith. Where is yours ?

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Hitler was supported by Arabs in the Middle East. Is that news to you?

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There were Americans in the US who supported Hitler. Is that news to you ?
And there were Americans who got into trouble for opposing Hitler - and that trouble came AFTER the war. Does that surprise you ?And, of course, "supporting Hitler" can mean many things. In WWII the US supported Stalin.

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There is no such thing as a Palestinian people. That was an invention pasted onto the refugees that left Israel when the Arab nations warned them they were going to attack. The refugees had come from all over the Middle East to work in Israel, they were not "Palestinians" until there was a political reason to call them that in order to try to discredit IsraeL

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There are two major falsehoods here. First, many Palestinians were driven out by the Israeli army. Second, there was a substantial Arab population living in Palestine even under the Ottomans. (The rest is spin based solely on the fact that Palestine was not a nation - it had been part of the Ottoman Empire prior to WWI and under control of the victors afterwards)

Propaganda and spin. There were plenty of Arabs living in Palestine, whose families had been there for generations. Just because they weren't formally identified as Palestinians is irrelevant. And don't forget that there was a rush of Jewish settlers into the area.The Hitler stuff is also spin. Anti-Semitism is popular amongst Arabs NOW largely because of the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. It's shocking and wrong - but understandable. And, of course, it is a perfect example of what you call a "Godzilla attack" - all about the moral failures of the target with no regard to the actual point of the argument.

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The spin is yours. You've bought the lies. The people living there were few and far between and it was not a national entity, it was wild land with scattered settlements.

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There was a substantial Arab population, even when Twain visited. And I have been saying all along that Palestine wasn't a nation so I don't see why you feel the need to raise it as an issue of disagreement.The whole point of raising Hitler is "moralistic denunciation". You don't connect it to the argument at all - let alone consider the reasons for whatever support there is or has been. So why shouldn't it count ?

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The main thing: "Allah" is not the name of God if you are a Christian, and you are extremely deceived to believe that. The Bible gives us God's name and it is NOT "Allah."

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"God" is not the name of God. But you still call God "God". "Allah" is Arabic for "God" and if you were an Arabic-speaking Christian you would very likely say "Allah" in place of "God"And not believing the propaganda you happen to like is a sign of good judgement.

That depends on who "considers it to be God's actual name"And given your habit of falsely accusing people of lying any such assertions on your part are less than convincing.

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Oh wow. God's Name is sacred in the context of the Bible, you don't fool around with it.

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Only one name is sacred. And nobody is certain how it is pronounced.And "Allah" is still the Arabic equivalent of "God" which you have no trouble saying.

Not really. Ultimately it is likely derived from El - which you can find in the Bible as a name of God. But by the time of Muhammad it just meant "The God"

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Allah was the main god in a whole pantheon of gods, Mohammed made into the monotheistic God. El in the Bible refers to the One Creator God

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In reality El originally referred to the head God in a whole pantheon of Gods - and there are traces of that still in the Bible. Yahweh, too, was originally part of a pantheon.Besides if Paul could say that the Greeks worshipped God as "the unknown God" why would it be impossible for the Arabs to worship God as part of their pantheon ?Further, Muhammad did not simply promote a pagan God to the one God, his ideas about God came from Christianity and Judaism, too.

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Not according to the Bible. "El" may have had other meanings among the pagan nations but in the Bible El is the generic name for the One Creator God

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As I said, there is an exact parallel. When will you learn that making poorly-considered excuses is not a winning debating strategy ?

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I suppose you mean the "us" in Genesis: "Let us make man...?

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No, I don't mean that, or not only that.

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Perhaps you get this stuff from the "scholars" you put above the Bible?

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By which you mean I trust real scholars more than I trust the men YOU put above the Bible.

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They will always lead you astray. Many of the most famous of them don't believe in much of it. How can you find truth that way? Truth is only found by believing the Bible, period. The scholars will only mislead you.

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An unprejudiced view is a far better way to find the truth than the gross prejudice of dogmatic belief. And the fact that you choose lies and slander to fight against the truths found by scholars only demonstrates that you are no Christian.And we know that when the book of Romans told you to obey the law of the secular authorities you appealed to a contradictory passage that you never found and probably doesn't exist to claim a loophole. Your belief in the Bible is not all you would have us believe.

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Paul needed a way to talk to the polytheistic and intellectual Greeks about Christ in a peculiarly inhospitable environment. He may have thought the "unknown god" they included in their pantheon represented the Creator God, that's not clear.

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So your only counter is that Paul might have been lying. Do you really want to say that ?

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Yes they did. It was the pagan Arabs who worshiped the pantheon he wanted to convert to the one God, but not to the God of Judaism or Christianity but to this new one he got from "the angel Gabriel" he believed was superior to both.

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Which would make perfect sense if he was speaking for the real creator God of Abraham and Jesus as he claimed. And if the Allah of the Arabs was a distorted memory of that God - which the parallels with El hardly discourage - your argument goes to nothing. Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

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Even if there was a vague memory of the one true God in the polytheistic religions, He was not worshipped in any special way apart from all the other gods, was barely above them at all, being at best the No. one god in a pantheon.

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Just like El.

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The Bible for instance is full of references to the gods of the surrounding nations, the ones the people actually followed, and "El" hardly figures at all among them.

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Because the various peoples took their own patrons from the shared pantheon - and that includes the Israelites. On the road to monotheism they conflated their patron god with El.To your first question mark I remind you that your attempted objection was in fact a point of agreement. As you certainly ought to have noticed if you actually thought about it.To your second I invite you to investigate the parallels between the Biblical texts and the pagan Canaanite descriptions of the Divine Court of El.

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Believers put themselves beneth the Bible, treating it as authority and not criticizing it as the "scholars" do. All the men whose views of the Bible I trust put themselves beneath the Bible in the same way.

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Obviously they do not and their rejection of scholarship is proof. A deeper understanding of the Bible is obviously not a threat to anyone who truly respects it.

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But the scholars are demonstrably prejudiced against the revelation of the Bible. The Bible is presented to us as a revelation of God Himself by God Himself, and believing it is what a person must do with such a revelation. Jesus said it: "Repent and believe." You don't criticize God's word if you have any respect to it AS God's word.

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By which you show that you place unBiblical dogma ahead of the Bible.

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Well, as they say, you are entitled to your opinion. In this world anyway

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It seems pretty obvious that anyone who would stoop to evil means to suppress knowledge of the Bible is not a Christian. If you wish to argue otherwise it would probably be amusing.

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I had no trouble finding the passage in question that I recall. It's in Acts 5:29

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Which refers specifically to preaching about Jesus in contravention of the commands of the Sanhedrin (rather than a specific law). And since you don't have a command - or even anything that really suggests any reason to interfere with a purely secular affair it isn't exactly adequate.

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if that's the only option then he had to know it represented the Creator God, but I don't call making use of a teaching aid to be lying

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Saying that the Unknown God is the God he preaches would certainly be a lie if he did not believe it (Acts 17:23)

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Allah has nothing in common with the Biblical God

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You mean apart from pretty much everything in the Bible ?

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But as I argue above, the true God, even if vaguely remembered, was overshadowed by the idol gods in the polytheistic pre-biblical and pre-Islamic religions.

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Which completely ignores Muhammad's contribution.

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And we do know that Allah was specifically identified as the moon god, which isn't much evidence that anyone regarded it as more than an idol among idols.

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In fact we do not know that. What we do know is that Muhammad's Allah is certainly not a moon god - and that Muhammad's Allah owes far more to Judaism and Christianity than the pagan gods of the Arabs.