” . . . remember that I have bestowed favours upon you . . .”

Is that God?

Is that God and the Prophet?

” . . . remember that WE have bestowed favours upon you . . . .”

Mohammed will proclaim that the Jews perverted the Torah, but the Jews — and let’s acknowledge that the Torah has been “set” in history (okay, it was a committee) and then transcribed by hand on parchment in Hebrew for every living Torah letter by letter by scribes devoted to that extraordinary and regimented art — may claim that not one letter of the Torah has been altered through the ages . . . through the ocean of time between finality and what is read today.

What is “supersession” but a political attempt to “one-up” the Torah and claim final authority in the interest of personal aggrandizement and enrichment?

No Moses?

No Muhammad.

No Constantine?

No Church of Rome.

Frankly, I blame Hillel the Elder for striving to make Judaism accessible to the “restive of Rome”.

He succeeded.

But the Romans, whatever they were, were not necessarily Jewish in soul. They could and did abandon the Pantheon of the Gods (good thing), but they needed the symbols of the divine as Divine.

And oh ye Muslims . . .ye cannot brag the slaughter of the Banu Qurayza on one hand and convincingly tell of “no compulsion” on the other.

It doesn’t wash.

I’m an American of Jewish descent — an American Secular Humanist.

I appreciate the full range of thought about God, nature, and the universe, and much the appreciate today the fewer than 7,000 living languages into which our thoughts have been packed, each language representing an isolated People’s way of inventing responses to their own environmental and social challenges.

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If I were drawing salary as an academic or writer, I would embark on a lengthy period of research and discussion about “modernity”, humanism, comparative religion, and multiculturalism.  However, unpaid, occasionally validated, I may leave the above to stand as it stands.

Here is the renowned but under-publicized Daniel Everett on his experience with Christianity, primitives, language, and faith:

Everett’s terrific, a capable scholar of unquestionable integrity.

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