MY GOD IS YOUR GOD

John Kearney, a student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism has wrote an Op-Ed article urging that US media should stop calling Allah "Allah", and just use the name "God" to signify that Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worship the same deity.

Kearney asserts:

"There is no god but God" is the first of Islam's five pillars. It is Muhammad's refutation of polytheism. Yet to today's non-Muslims, the locution "there is no God but Allah" reads as an affront, a declaration that inflammatory Allah trumps the Biblical God. This journalistic rendition distorts the meaning of the Muslim confession of faith.

Read more here (free registration required).

The Arabic word for god is ilaah and God is Allah. This has nothing to do with religion. Allah is clearly stated in the Koran to be the name of ilaah, just as Yahweh is the name of God (Eli) in the Torah. The word for God in Greek and Latin is derived from the word for Zeus.

A reader commented in the LGF post:

Islam, Christianity & Judaism all three religions (or any religion for that matter) are based on fundamentally anti-Western, barbaric, de-humanising elements:

(1) the belief in something supernatural, based on faith, i.e. believing something without evidence, reason or logic.

(2) accepting morality based on faith, on obeying commands, rather proving, rationally, with evidence and reason, the correctness of those morals.

(3) positing a being superior to the individual, subverting the individual's happiness to something higher.

My opinion: Whats in a name?