TO ALL THE NEWCOMERS (PLEASE CHECK THIS OUT)
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As Salam Alaikum, Peace be unto all of you! My username is FreedomStands, and I would like to extend my personal email out to all of you who are new to Islam as well as the forum regulars, to feel free to contact me in order to discuss Islam as I'm not only interested in your views, but would be greatly happy to share some insights regarding Islam, the Qur'an, and comparative religion and other interesting things including techniques for discussing Islam with all manner of people through their own linguistic frameworks of preference!
To all those who are new on this website and are just learning about Islam, I believe that your communication with me and proposing your questions to me can be a great source of help and interesting replies you are not likely to find elsewhere. Of course, I first of all suggest consulting the Qur'an, but it can be interesting to talk to someone with some unique ways of describing and explaining things which you may all find enjoyable!
My email is [email protected] and I look forward to anyone willing to take up the offer, if even out of boredom! Even if you feel you know a great deal about Islam and the Qur'an already, or about world religions and history, please feel free to contact me to find out what I might say or to tell me about what you might know or share your ideas!
I'm not too pleased with the system here asking me so many questions in order to post anything, but maybe that goes away after a while.
I wrote lots online once, and continue to write on a forum called Lunatic Outpost, and one of the links to lots of discussion I had there is here
http//lunaticoutpost.com/showthread.php?tid=59014
Though I was talking to mainly Christians and Atheists there as well as some Jews and not many Muslims were around, so my way of speaking and the things I say may differ from the comfort level I feel speaking to Muslims who love the Qur'an particularly.
I highly recommend taking me up on my offer of receiving emails instead, and since it is difficult for me to respond to posts here due to the numerous questions it keeps asking me to verify that I'm not a robot, I'd prefer things to be sent to my email instead if that is not too much trouble, thank you!
Now to answer these verification questions Insha'Allah! May Allah help us all!
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Hi FreedomStands, I heard you signed up on this site from LOP, so I did as well. Thanks for giving me advice earlier on learning more about Islam. It is an interesting faith. If God is the writer of the Quran, then it must be a clear and concise book. I'm looking forward to learn more about it. I'm seeking the truth only and Islam might be it, although Christianity makes sense to me too... Either way one them has to be right. I'll learn more from this site and with God's help the truth will be revealed. The verifications are annoying to me as well. Once we have a set amount of post they will disappear?
Peace be upon you.
Og.
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Thank you so much for joining here. It seems like lots of people here are pretty good and this might be a great place to learn about Islam from some Muslims who look at it very carefully, though they still may not say the same things as I might say, so I encourage you to email me and keep in touch on your journey as it would likely be far more enlightening than encountering a standard mainstream Muslim at a mosque.
I joined this website because someone showed me something from here from a former Chaplain who discovered the Qur'an and became a Muslim (his miraculous story is out there near the top and I posted in there).
The Qur'an really is a great book that you may enjoy greatly, and though you might like a hard copy version (which can be ordered for free online from some websites), you can see which translation you might prefer by seeing the different variants for each verse here www.islamawakened.com/quran
Then you can see which translation you tend to enjoy and select that one for your hard copy version to read through if you don't want to read it online. A hard copy one is also good for skipping around in quickly to randomly find interesting things.
I have been contacted through what might be a kind of "mass message" by one user here who happened to say good things as well, so it seems largely what I'm seeing here is pretty good and the people seem pretty friendly as well, but this forum generally seems even slower than Lunatic Outpost in some senses.
I came here particularly to get in contact with that one guy, but also to see if there are others who might want to learn what things I might have to say.
So I extended my offer to get emailed by anyone interested, but especially you since you are seeming to be gravitating strongly towards Islam [email protected]
In your case though, I can tell you all about Christianity as well, because there really isn't a necessity to "choose", because they can both be made or understood to say the exact same message really. Pretty much all the religions, at their "highest level" or understanding, are promoting the ideas of Islam, and the word Islam can mean in its longer definition "finding peace/relief/healing through total surrender/total submission/total acceptance of the Reality/Truth which is the Ultimate only (who is like nothing at all, as in not made of information, but is what manifests all information).
The different religions all promote the same idea, they just use different words in their own languages. Even the practice of worship in the fashion that Muslims tend to perform it today, was widespread across the whole world among all the different cultures, even Jews and Christians used to worship like that, and some still do or at least fragments of those practices still remain among some sects of Jews and Christians.
So I don't really feel like there is a "choice" being made, there is only One Religion (which the Qur'an also says), it is just people who are differing among themselves regarding it.
Each thing can be turned to promote the same message, even Atheistic language preferences can be used to promote Islam to atheists for example, and Islam is the "proto religion" the "core religion" it is not a specific thing, nor did it just emerge suddenly in Arabia for the first time, but is the underlying belief system that has existed across the whole world throughout the ages, and even ancient "Semitic peoples" like the Akkadians and Phoenicians and whoever else were saying the same things at times and speaking about "Allah" and everything because that was their language and this concepts are just universally human, references to what is real, what they were dealing with, based in logic, reason, and observation as well as repeated revelation.
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Thank you so much for joining here. It seems like lots of people here are pretty good and this might be a great place to learn about Islam from some Muslims who look at it very carefully, though they still may not say the same things as I might say, so I encourage you to email me and keep in touch on your journey as it would likely be far more enlightening than encountering a standard mainstream Muslim at a mosque.
I joined this website because someone showed me something from here from a former Chaplain who discovered the Qur'an and became a Muslim (his miraculous story is out there near the top and I posted in there).
The Qur'an really is a great book that you may enjoy greatly, and though you might like a hard copy version (which can be ordered for free online from some websites), you can see which translation you might prefer by seeing the different variants for each verse here www.islamawakened.com/quran
Then you can see which translation you tend to enjoy and select that one for your hard copy version to read through if you don't want to read it online. A hard copy one is also good for skipping around in quickly to randomly find interesting things.
I have been contacted through what might be a kind of "mass message" by one user here who happened to say good things as well, so it seems largely what I'm seeing here is pretty good and the people seem pretty friendly as well, but this forum generally seems even slower than Lunatic Outpost in some senses.
I came here particularly to get in contact with that one guy, but also to see if there are others who might want to learn what things I might have to say.
So I extended my offer to get emailed by anyone interested, but especially you since you are seeming to be gravitating strongly towards Islam [email protected]
In your case though, I can tell you all about Christianity as well, because there really isn't a necessity to "choose", because they can both be made or understood to say the exact same message really. Pretty much all the religions, at their "highest level" or understanding, are promoting the ideas of Islam, and the word Islam can mean in its longer definition "finding peace/relief/healing through total surrender/total submission/total acceptance of the Reality/Truth which is the Ultimate only (who is like nothing at all, as in not made of information, but is what manifests all information).
The different religions all promote the same idea, they just use different words in their own languages. Even the practice of worship in the fashion that Muslims tend to perform it today, was widespread across the whole world among all the different cultures, even Jews and Christians used to worship like that, and some still do or at least fragments of those practices still remain among some sects of Jews and Christians.
So I don't really feel like there is a "choice" being made, there is only One Religion (which the Qur'an also says), it is just people who are differing among themselves regarding it.
Each thing can be turned to promote the same message, even Atheistic language preferences can be used to promote Islam to atheists for example, and Islam is the "proto religion" the "core religion" it is not a specific thing, nor did it just emerge suddenly in Arabia for the first time, but is the underlying belief system that has existed across the whole world throughout the ages, and even ancient "Semitic peoples" like the Akkadians and Phoenicians and whoever else were saying the same things at times and speaking about "Allah" and everything because that was their language and this concepts are just universally human, references to what is real, what they were dealing with, based in logic, reason, and observation as well as repeated revelation.
Awesome dude thanks for the information. sun
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Welcome to the forum,
Christianity, minus the delusion about Jesus as an image separate from God, is relatively on par and accurate with "real" Islam, which you get when you can interpret the Arabic of Quran properly. Arabic has a lot in common with Hebrew, more than people may realize. One example is that the Arabic letters are all derived from Hebrew and are not more different than the symbols. Arabic is its own language, but they still share the letters' innate meaning.
Quran is a hijacked scripture to falsely represent a Pagan religion by deriving a false inference out of its passages. Its message underneath the very poor interpretation sounds vastly different. It continues to teach on what Jesus/'Jesu'/Isa/Jeshua brought up roughly 2000 years ago, particularly about assimilation with God and the following spiritual ascension and growth and deepening.
When you remove; Pagan prayer ritual, pilgrimage to the huge idol building, Ramadhan and a vast amount of false derived arguments, then you have the faith that Quran teaches. Fasting you do to show grief or repentance for something bad that you did.
Mainstream Islam is just a horrible tradition that has been ongoing for centuries and even millennia which no prophet ever propagated. Jesus was strongly against it, and no earlier prophets propagated it either. Today one can ironically call it Judaism 2.0 and Zoroastrianism 3.0. It is the false faith of Satan to materialize/visualize God and make the faith fleshly and physical. Mainstream Islam even contains a major breaking of one of the ancient commandments on the matter of facing the big building in today's Saudi Arabia. It cannot get much worse.
Some fool just handpicked salat(eh) to mark a ritualistic prayer since it has nothing to do with it. The root is not even referring to it but it means to follow or be aware of something. In the linguistic compound of salat(eh) it is reflexive. It could be interpreted as lifestyle.
The word duah in Arabic is the closest resemblance of a word referring to the act of praying (for something), for it is undeniable that the prophets did pray in the past. It is just that they did not do brain dead vain repetitions or say many (repetitive) words.
Faith and harmony to you -
Yeah, as you see here, there will be a wide variety of interesting and free opinions regarding these matters being discussed, more so than would be common in most Mosques these days. The wide diversity of ideas can be frightening at first, much like a person may feel confused by the varying beliefs of Christians or their explanations, so it is up to one to research carefully, logically deduce things, and see what the source material (like the Qur'an) says in order to figure it all out. The same should go for anything and should just be the way one approaches all things in life, with patience and intelligence, in order to learn what the best strategy might be to attain what we desire the most, and what we should logically desire the most.
So I mentioned this place on Lunatic Outpost because I wanted to give people a chance to see the diversity of ideas being presented rather than a monolithic image of Islam, since most people, even if they are mainstream, tend to at least secretly harbor a variety of ideas regarding things, but this website allows members to expose those ideas more freely.
It looks like that annoying "verification questions" thing is finally gone! Shukur Alhamdulillahay Rub Il Alameen!