Cosmic Consciousness: The Man-God Whom We AwaitMcIvor-Tyndall, Alexander J. (Alexander James)
Religion
Cosmic Consciousness: The Man-God Whom We Await
McIvor-Tyndall, Alexander J. (Alexander James)
Theosophy
Mohammed taught, first of all, the fact of the one God. "There is no God
but Allah," was his cry, and, following the example, or at least
paralleling the example of Jesus, he "destroyed their idols" and
substituted the worship of one God, in place of the tribal deities, which
were a constant source of disputation among the clans.
Compare the following, which is one of the five daily prayers of the
faithful Muslim, with the Lord's prayer as used in Christian theology.
"In the name of God, the compassionate--the merciful.
Praise be to God, the Lord of the worlds,
The compassionate, the merciful.
The king of the day of judgment.
Thee do we worship and of Thee do we beg assistance.
Guide us in the right way,
The way of those to whom Thou hast been gracious,
Not of those with whom Thou art wroth, nor of the erring."
Mohammed never tired of telling his disciples and followers that God was
"The Very-Forgiving." Among the many and sometimes strangely varied
attributes of God (The Absolute), we find this characteristic most strongly
and persistently dwelt upon--the ever ready forgiveness and mercifulness of
God.
Every _soorah_ of the _Kur-an_ begins with the words: "In the name of God,
the compassionate, the merciful," but, even as Jesus laid persistent
emphasis upon the _love_ of God, and yet up to very recent times,
Christianity taught the _fear and wrath_ of God, losing sight of the one
great and important fact that _God is love_, and that _love is God_, so the
Muslims overlooked the _real_ message, and the greatness and the power and
the fearfulness of God, is the incentive of the followers of the Illumined
Mohammed.
The following extracts from the Kur-an are almost identical with many
passages in the Holy Scriptures of the Christian, and are comparable with
the sayings of the Lord Buddha.
"God. There is no God but He, the ever-living, the ever-subsisting. Slumber
seizeth Him not nor sleep. To Him belongeth whatsoever is in the heavens
and whatsoever is in the earth. Who is he that shall intercede with Him,
save by His permission?"
The Muslim is a fatalist, but this may be due less to the teachings of the
prophet than to the peculiar quality of the Arab nature, which makes him
stake everything, even his own liberty upon the cast of a die.
The leading doctrine of the all-powerfulness of God seems to warrant the
belief in fatalism--belief which offers a stumbling block to all
theologians, all philosophers, all thinkers. If God is omnipotent,
omnipresent, omniscient, how and where and in what manner can be explained
the necessity of individual effort?
This problem is not at all clear to the western mind, and it is equally
obscure to that of the East.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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