Outside Reading Blog #4 - Simon Robson

  Reflection on Overlapping Religions

04/26/2021

   Today I was reading an article about the similarities and differences between the two major religions of Islam and Christianity. I personally am a Christian, but I find a lot of things very interesting regarding the overlapping of major religions such as these and also Judaism, which pretty much goes unsaid. The article I was reading highlighted 3 main points as the difference between Islam and Christianity. One being that Christians believed in the Holy Trinity, two: that they believed in the divinity of Christ (these two go very much hand in hand), and three: Christians believe Christ died on the cross. Islam rejects all these ideas and says that Christ was not divine and that he was taken up into heaven right before the crucifixion, but God tricked the Romans into believing that they had killed him. In most other ways however, the core beliefs are very similar, which makes it all the more surprising the kind of relationship that is usually associated with the two. This also may be an uneducated/ tone deaf thing of me to say, but I have always felt that Judaism had a much better relationship with Christianity and was more associated with it than Islam. It seems to me that Judaism has less in common with Christianity though. Which at first led me to believe maybe its the smaller differences between Christianity and Islam that create the rockier road and there is more acceptance and respect for Judaism because it is more of its own thing. This didn't stand as a valid reason in my head for very long though as I began to think about different Christian denominations and their minute differences. In the end I guess it is just always a competition to have more believers and to try to convert one another, but it seems that more people could respect the other’s beliefs as well.

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