Quotes from Reza Aslan

That Jesus—the eternal logos from whom creation sprang, the Christ who sits at the right hand of God—you will find swaddled in a filthy manger in Bethlehem, surrounded by simple shepherds and wise men bearing gifts from the east.

como «los principales sacerdotes y los ancianos», o «los escribas y fariseos», en el siglo I en Palestina eran grupos distintos y separados, y Jesús mantenía relaciones diferentes con cada uno de ellos.

No one speaks for God - not even the prophets (who speak about God)

Like so many prophets before him, Muhammad never claimed to have invented a new religion. By his own admission, Muhammad's message was an attempt to reform the existing religious beliefs and cultural practices of pre-Islamic Arabia so as to bring the God of the Jews and Christians to the Arab peoples. "[

Among Romans, crucifixion originated as a deterrence against revolt of slaves, probably as early as 200 B.C.E. By Jesus's time, it was the primary form of punishment for inciting rebellion (i.e., treason or sedition) the exact crime which Jesus was charged.[..] The punishment applied solely to non-Roman citizens. Roman citizens could be crucified, however, if the crime was so grave that it essentially forfeited their citizenship.

sacred history is like a hallowed tree whose roots dig deep into primordial time and whose branches weave in and out of genuine history with little concern for the boundaries of space and time. Indeed, it is precisely at those moments when sacred and genuine history collide that religions are born.

Because the concept of the Trinity is not explicitly mentioned in the New Testament (the term was coined by one of the oldest and most formidable church fathers, Tertullian of Carthage, early in the third century C.E.), it was neither widely adopted nor universally construed by the early Christian communities.

Certainly the shahadah contained an important theological innovation, but that innovation was not monotheism. With this simple profession of faith, Muhammad was declaring to Mecca that the God of the heavens and the earth required no intermediate whatsoever, but could be accessed by anyone.

874 The occultation of the Twelfth Imam, or the Mahdi

But tawhid, which literally means "making one," implies more than just monotheism. True, there is only one God, but that is just the beginning. Tawhid means that God is Oneness. God is Unity: wholly indivisible, entirely unique, and utterly indefinable. God resembles nothing in either essence or attributes.

All these schools of though gradually transformed into legal institutions, the diversity of ideas and freedom of opinion that characterized their early development gave way to rigid formalism, strict adherence to precedent, and an almost complete stultification of independent though

An apology is a defense, and there is no higher calling than to defend one's faith, especially from ignorance and hate.

From the Islamic perspective, however, the attacks on New York and Washington were part of an ongoing clash between those Muslims who strive to reconcile their religious values with the realities of the modern world, and those who react to modernism and reform by reverting—sometimes fanatically—to the "fundamentals" of their faith.

there can be no a priori moral framework in a modern democracy [...]

God is, in other words, wholly Other: the Mysterium Tremendum, to borrow Rudolph Otto's famous phrase.

Can belief save you?" he retorts. "Even the demons believe—and shudder!" (James 2:14,19).

The Ka'ba, like the Pyramids in Egypt or the Temple in Jerusalem, may have been constructed as an axis mundi, sometimes called a "navel spot": a sacred space around which the whole of the universe revolves, the link between the earth and the solid dome of heaven.

For the Sufi, reality is neither emptiness nor illusion; reality is God.

Like most people born into a religious tradition, my faith was as familiar to me as my skin, and just as disregardable.

manism (ancestor cults)—but it was not as concerned

Whereas a religion of many gods posits many myths to describe the human condition, a religion of one god tends to be monomythic; it not only rejects all other gods, it rejects all other explanations for God.

The Rationalists argued that God's attributes could not possibly exist coeternally with God, but must be a part of creation.

Thus, the Quran promises that "all those who believe—the Jews, the Sabians, the Christians—anyone who believes in God and the Last Days, and who does good deeds, will have nothing to fear

Muhammad's example must have had a lasting effect on his early followers: as Nabia Abbott has shown, throughout the first two centuries of Islam, Muslims regularly read the Torah alongside the Quran. Certainly