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Sunday, September 30, 2012

Re: [mukto-mona] FW: FIGHTING OVER GOD'S IMAGE



Member Bain,
 
If you want to know about Islam, you need to read the Qurán and Islam related books. Here you were asking your "seriously religious Muslim friends" about "  an authentic translation of the Koran" but I saw you were quoting from the Bible.
 
Yes, Qurán and Bible have some similarities but there are differences as well. Muslims have faith in a formless (And genderless---neither male or female) God. Modern Christians looks up to God as a male figure who (Like Greek gods) came down to earth to father a child!!
 
Muslims do not accept such narration of  " God".
 
 
Also click here to understand similarities between  SIMILARITIES BETWEEN ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY
 
Shalom!
-----Original Message-----
From: Sukhamaya Bain <subain1@yahoo.com>
To: mukto-mona <mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sat, Sep 29, 2012 4:52 pm
Subject: Re: [mukto-mona] FW: FIGHTING OVER GOD'S IMAGE

 
Dr. Das has made an interesting observation.
 
I was reading a translation of the Bible in the University of Michigan Library system online. Why the U of M? I was aware that they had one of the best library systems in the world, and some time back one of my seriously religious Muslim friends told me that in the collection of that university there was an authentic translation of the Koran.
 
This is what I found from the U of M library online:
 
Gen. 1[26]: Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth."
 
Gen. 1[27]: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
 
To me, these two verses sound like the Abrahamic religions clearly define the image of God. It certainly puzzles me as to why so much of fuss about the image of God among some of the members of that set of religions! But let me advise my religious friends in this forum that I do not have the time to be an expert on religions, and to try getting out of my confusions, which would be an attempt that is sure to fail, I am convinced.
 
Again, I think religious people should leave any God-related mistakes/crimes by any human for correction/punishment by God Himself with that human directly, the power of which God surely has, as per the religious beliefs.
 
Sukhamaya Bain
 
======================================= 
From: Kamal Das <kamalctgu@gmail.com>
To: mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, September 28, 2012 9:45 PM
Subject: Re: [mukto-mona] FW: FIGHTING OVER GOD'S IMAGE
 
"It is universally acknowledged that God has no image"
 
- On the sixth day, God created man in his own image(Genesis 1:26)  Thus, God has no image is not universally acknowledged and if he has no image, man has neither.  To prevent desecration by his disillusioned followers, God might have discarded his image long after the creation of humankind.
On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 8:58 AM, Jiten Roy <jnrsr53@yahoo.com> wrote:
 
It is universally acknowledged that God has no image; it's a formless entity. However, being formless also means it can take any form in which it is present. For example, liquid has no form of its own. As a result, it can take any form in which it is put in. The question is how far you want to advance your thought, and there is no victory line for those who do not want to go beyond formless God.
Jiten Roy

--- On Thu, 9/27/12, Farida Majid <farida_majid@hotmail.com> wrote:

From: Farida Majid <farida_majid@hotmail.com>
Subject: [mukto-mona] FW: FIGHTING OVER GOD'S IMAGE
To:
Date: Thursday, September 27, 2012, 7:01 PM
 
Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2012 16:04:08 +0100Subject: FIGHTING OVER GOD'S IMAGE---------- Forwarded message ----------From: Hasan Essa <http://us.mc1427.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=hasniessa@yahoo.com>
Op-Ed Contributors

Fighting Over God's Image

 
Mark Pernice
By EDWARD J. BLUM and PAUL HARVEY
Published: September 26, 2012
THE murders of four Americans over an amateurish online video about Muhammad, like the attempted murder of a Danish cartoonist who in 2005 had depicted the prophet with a bomb in his turban, have left many Americans confused, angry and fearful about the rage that some Muslims feel about visual representations of their sacred figures.

Related in Opinion

 
For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.
The confusion stems, in part, from the ubiquity of sacred images in American culture. God, Jesus, Moses, Buddha and other holy figures are displayed in movies, cartoons and churches and on living room walls. We place them on T-shirts and bumper stickers — and even tattoo them on our skin.
 
But Americans have had their own history of conflict, some of it deadly, over displays of the sacred. The path toward civil debate over such representation is neither short nor easy.
 
The United States was settled, in part, by radical Protestant iconoclasts from Britain who considered the creation and use of sacred imagery to be a violation of the Second Commandment against graven images. The anti-Catholic colonists at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay refused to put images of Jesus in their churches and meetinghouses. They scratched out crosses in books. In the early 1740s, English officials even marched on an Indian community in western Connecticut, where they cross-examined Moravian missionaries who reportedly had a book with "the picture of our Saviour in it."
 
The colonists feared Catholic infiltration from British-controlled Canada. Shortly after the Boston Tea Party, a Connecticut pastor warned that if the British succeeded, the colonists would have their Bibles taken from them and be compelled to "pray to the Virgin Mary, worship images, believe the doctrine of Purgatory, and the Pope's infallibility."
 
It was not only Protestants who opposed sacred imagery. In the Southwest, Pueblo Indians who waged war against Spanish colonizers not only burned and dismembered some crucifixes, but even defecated on them.
 
In the early Republic, many Americans avoided depicting Jesus or God in any form. The painter Washington Alliston spoke for many artists of the 1810s when he said, "I think his character too holy and sacred to be attempted by the pencil." A visiting Russian diplomat, Pavel Svinin, was amazed at the prevalence of a different image: George Washington's. "Every American considers it his sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington in his home," he wrote, "just as we have images of God's saints."
 
Only in the late 19th century did images of God and Jesus become commonplace in churches, Sunday school books, Bibles and homes. There were many forces at work: steam printing presses; new canals and railroads; and, not least, the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Catholics who brought with them an array of crucifixes, Madonnas and busts of saints. Protestants began producing their own images — often, to appeal to children — and gradually became more comfortable with holy images. In the 20th century, the United States began exporting such images, most notably Warner Sallman's 1941 "Head of Christ," which is one of the most reproduced images in world history.
But there was also resistance. When Hollywood first started portraying Jesus in films, one fundamentalist Christian fumed, "The picturing of the life and sufferings of our Savior by these institutions falls nothing short of blasphemy." Vernon E. Jordan Jr., an African-American who was later president of the National Urban League and an adviser to President Bill Clinton, recalled that white audience members gasped when he played Jesus as an undergraduate at DePauw University in Indiana in the 1950s.
 
In fact, race has been a constant source of conflict over American depictions of Jesus. In Philadelphia in the 1930s, the black street preacher F. S. Cherry stormed into African-American churches and pointed at paintings or prints of white Christs, shouting, as one observer recounted, "Who in the hell is this? Nobody knows! They say it is Jesus. That's a damned lie!"
 
During the civil rights era, black-power advocates and liberation theologians excoriated white images of the sacred. A 1967 "Declaration of Black Churchmen" demanded "the removal of all images which suggest that God is white." As racial violence enveloped Detroit that year, African-American residents painted the white faces of Catholic icons black.
 
More recently, there have been uproars over the Nigerian-British painter Chris Ofili's "Holy Virgin Mary" and the New York artist and photographer Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ." Mr. Serrano's image of Jesus on the crucifix, submerged in the artist's own urine, roused a crusade against the National Endowment for the Arts in the late 1980s. Mr. Ofili's painting of a dark-skinned Madonna with photographs of vaginas surrounding her enraged Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. The mayor, who mistakenly claimed that elephant dung was smeared on the image when it in fact was used at the base to hold the painting up, tried to ban it from being displayed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, in 1999. (One upset Christian smeared white paint over it.)
 
Images of the sacred haven't caused mass violence in the United States, but they have generated intense conflict. Our ability to sustain a culture supersaturated with visual displays of the divine, largely without violence, came only after massive technological change, centuries of immigration and social movements that forced Americans to reckon with differences of race, ethnicity and religion.
Edward J. Blum, an associate professor of history at San Diego State University, and Paul Harvey, a professor of history at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, are the authors of "The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America."
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on September 27, 2012, on page A29 of the New York edition with the headline: Fighting Over God's Image. 
Hasni EssaPeace & Pluralism

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