Abrahamic religions

The Abrahamic religions, are a group of religious communities of faith that claim descent from the Judaism of the ancient Israelites and the worship of the God of Abraham. The Abrahamic religions are monotheistic. The term derives from patriarch Abraham, a major biblical figure from The Hebrew Bible. And the other three are after Judaism is Christianity, Islam and the Bahá'í Faith.

Quotes

 * Theodicy is the Achilles Heel of faith. There is no reasonable answer to the problem of gratuitous evil (i.e., the slaughter of children or mass killings by natural phenomena like tsunamis), and the will to continue believing in the face of such things truly shows the folly of faith. For those evils prove absolutely either that God is not benevolent and omnipotent, or that there is no god. (Special pleading like “we don’t know God’s mind” doesn’t wash, for the same people who say such things also claim to know that God is benevolent and omnipotent). Both nonbelief or belief in a malicious or uncaring God are unacceptable to the goddy. Ergo, any rational person who contemplates gratuitous evil must become an agnostic, an atheist, or someone who rejects the Abrahamic God. It is a touchstone of rationality.
 * Jerry Coyne "The Christmas NYT: faith everywhere" December 26, 2012
 * Then there are other factors which transcend the material. The Middle East is the birthplace of three great religions-Moslem, Christian and Hebrew. Mecca and Jerusalem are more than places on the map. They symbolize religions which teach that the spirit has supremacy over matter and that the individual has a dignity and rights of which no despotic government can rightfully deprive him. It would be intolerable if the holy places of the Middle East should be subjected to a rule that glorifies atheistic materialism.
 * Dwight D. Eisenhower, Special Message to the Congress on the Situation in the Middle East, (5 January 1957)


 * But the revealed monotheistic religions carry with them a typical fundamental doctrine that sets them apart from all other religions... Thus, the Semitic religions constitute a radical break with natural religiosity, which had always made nature share in the manifestation of the divine, and which had never thought of limiting the awareness of the divine to one community... In books written in a monotheistic cultural milieu, this revealed monotheism is always portrayed as a great step forwards in the march of humanity. However, in real terms I cannot see one genuine advantage that has accrued to humanity thanks to the is revelation-based monotheism.
 * Elst, K. Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society (1991)


 * The religions whose theology is least preoccupied with events in time and most concerned with eternity, have been consistently less violent and more humane in political practice. Unlike early Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism (all obsessed with time) Hinduism and Buddhism have never been persecuting faiths, have preached almost no holy wars and have refrained from that proselytizing religious imperialism which has gone hand in hand with political and economic oppression of colored people.
 * Aldous Huxley, The Perennial philosophy


 * The three major Middle Eastern religions are significantly different in their relations with the state and their attitudes to political power. Judaism was associated with the state and was then disentangled from it; its new encounter with the state at the present time raises problems which are still unresolved. Christianity, during the first formative centuries of its existence, was separate from and indeed antagonistic to the state with which it only later became involved. Islam from the lifetime of its founder was the state, and the identity of religion and government is indelibly stamped on the memories and awareness of the faithful from their own sacred writings, history, and experience.
 * Bernard Lewis,


 * This is just my opinion, but when I listen to Muslims explaining their religion to each other, I get the impression that Islam is hateful and violent, but that it’s also pretty stupid; “full of shit”, as my dad would say -because none of it can be justified or shown to be true, and what little they do know can’t really imply what they say it does. The same thing goes for Christians. When I listen to Christians discussing their religion, I get the impression that they’re hateful too, but their violent reactions are culturally inhibited. So they compensate for that with a staggering level of bewildering stupidity, coupled with dishonesty. It sounds to me like pots and kettles accusing each other in the perfect example of the blind leading the blind. But when I listen to those Jews who still believe in God and the Bible, and I hear them arguing aspects of their beliefs, it strikes me that the foundation of Abrahamic religion is utterly empty, devoid of any possible meaning or value. I don’t want to say “who cares?”, because way too many people do. That’s what confuses and alarms me! How could anyone imagine that any of this is really true or really matters?
 * Aron Ra "My take on the Abrahamic triad", Patheos (March 4, 2015)


 * Asking for the meaning of life is no different than a fortune teller casting tea leaves, chicken bones, or Tarot cards, then looking at the random mess they created and wondering what that means. Abrahamic religion offers no purpose either, apart from a Stockholm syndrome, because the best you can hope for is to be imprisoned by an indomitable despot and have to press your lips to his colon for the rest of eternity –or else suffer a fate worse than death. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
 * Aron Ra, Anti-theist Answers to Christian Questions (November 22, 2015)


 * Everywhere in the world except in Asia Minor, the three great Semitic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - are intruders; that indigenous Asia is Brahmanist, Confucianist, Buddhist, Taoist; indigenous Europe is pagan; that in Europe, Christianity is a superimposition; in Asia, Islam is.
 * Ralph Borsodi: The Challenge of Asia. Quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 1, (quoting from Ram Swarup, Hindu View of Christianity and Islam, Voice of India, New Delhi, 1992, pp. 48-49)


 * However long Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians struggle to find multiple meanings in this text, the dominant seems to be this: Abraham’s unquestioning willingness to heed gods command to sacrifice the thing he loved most is what qualified him to become the father of what are called still the Abrahamic faiths.
 * Susan Neiman. Beyond Belief conference (November 2006)


 * The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly.
 * T. E. Lawrence Seven Pillars of Wisdom  Ch. 3


 * I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam — good people, yes, but any religion based on a single... well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system that has worked pretty well for twenty-five hundred years. So you see I am ecumenical in my dislike for the Book. But like it or not, the Book is there; and because of it people die; and the world is in danger.
 * Gore Vidal, At Home (1988), Appendix


 * The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved — Judaism, Christianity, Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal — God is the Omnipotent Father — hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not for just one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose.
 * Gore Vidal. "America First? America Last? America at Last?", Lowell Lecture, Harvard University (20 April 1992)