From your first link:

If you are not a theist, then you are an atheist.

Utter bullshit. I do not believe in god or any other deity, and yet, I am decidedly NOT an atheist. I don’t want to be associated in ANY way with “atheism”, seeing the ‘wrong’ type of atheist completely hijacked the term to profess their supposed moral superiority.

In its strictest meaning, yes, the guy is right. But out in the real world, atheism has become much more than simply ‘not believing in a god’. It’s become a way of life, with its members acting a lot like religious folk.

Don’t bother to reply here, by the way, I’ll turn this into my next blog post. If anyone wants to comment here, it will have to be on-topic, else it gets deleted.

We are also grossly off-topic here, btw.

No it’s not. That’s stupid.
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2008/02/18/is-science-faith-based/

I like your cellular theory, and it does kind of make sense. Kind of like collective memory I suppose. I suppose we share background with all living mammals. Who know’s were the apes strayed off and became humans? Or maybe humans strayed off and became apes. No, don’t quote that. I don’t know enough about Biology. It’s more a rhetorical question. It’s like that memory was imprinted though. Like us humans, generally, are scared of heights, spiders, and snakes. Cause we learned the hard way perhaps. So maybe those early Morgonucodons (not sure on the spelling there, but the rodents from the distant past), saw the fire-breathing dragons? And that’s why people from far different cultures and places around the world speak about dragons? Just checking that I’m following. So it might be interesting to know, which cultures, based on the Geology of Earth, you know like, Pangaea so to speak, actually have traditions about dragons, and which also had the rodents in question. Right?

Did I hijack this?

I sort of stumbled upon this page as I was looking for beautiful pictures, and couldn’t help but butt in.

For example, both Judaism and Islam refute the New Testament and consider it blasphemy. Christianity embraces Judaism’s Torah as the first part of its “Old Testament” and considers Islam’s Qur’an to be the work of “the devil”.

The Qur’an only considers speaking of God as “having a son” is wrong, but doesn’t refute the NT, it merely states it contains errors inserted by humans.

Same thing for the Torah - which isn’t “Judaism’s Torah”, it’s both Christians’ (in Greek) and Jews’ (in Hebrew) and in fact everybody’s Torah, created by Judaic and Israelite religious and literary elites - however, the Jews are the ones to have preserved the original Hebrew texts, which is nice.

Judaism, as we know it, comes from the same Hellenistic cultural source as Christianity or rather, as Jesus (I know this is a controversial statement, but it’s for a fact). It has developed in its own unique direction, but when Judaism uses the word Torah it does not mean the OT but much more.

I actually don’t know if “Christianity” considers the Qur’an to be a diabolic work - I mean, officially, i.e., clergy claiming that. Obviously, that would be sad since Muslims, and the Qur’an, love Jesus, generally. :)

But I do have to say that you approach the matter from a very “who hates who” type point of view. I wouldn’t take that approach because it’s silly and it’s of no interest to common believers. And I agree with Thom it’s far more interesting to see what they have in common.

As for the cellular thing theory, I’m not sure if I understand it really.. sounds good. But I’d just say there’s always been more contact between far-away cultures than we tend to think there has been.

Not to be redundant to herman’s post, but as a non-religious person even I know that those three are worlds apart as religions. Sure, they share the same common root “god” but that’s about it. For example, both Judaism and Islam refute the New Testament and consider it blasphemy. Christianity embraces Judaism’s Torah as the first part of its “Old Testament” and considers Islam’s Qur’an to be the work of “the devil”. As you should know, there are countless other major differences between the three.

Please note I’m not defending any one of the above three; I don’t profess any of them. I’m not an athiest (a religion itself) or agnostic, just not religious at all. It simply irks me to see supposition and/or stereotype put forth as fact.

As in, Emmentaler, Mozarella and Gorgonzola are more or less the same? :P