TheHeretic said:
I still don't understand how you explain the years of no God concept, to the years of polytheism. You mentioned it, but I don't understand it. How can a child believe in one God? A child doesn't believe in anything.
First of all define polytheism? I define it to mean worship of multiple Gods with equal influence or power or divided responsibilities. If that's the case, for example, Hinduism is not really polytheistic per say. The "Gods" in Hinduism are all of one essence, Brahma which is based on a core cycle of Karma. That is why *some* Muslim rulers in India considered Hinduism to be Monotheistic and Hindus as protected peoples.
There is ultimately One Essence which is the same as One God. People have taken the purity of One God and invented sub-Gods and deities around it to explain phenomena or to have political or religious influence, which is what the original religion of One God (which is now manifested as Islam) suggested. Muslims, generally, will say that Hinduism (Like Christianity) is an example of the idea of One God corrupted.
Basically, people want to have contact or have physical feel of God (beacuse philosophically the concept is difficult to grasp). So they created "statues" that they could touch, that were ultimately an "inspiration" of the One God. Since they were allowed to do this, they created different "sub-Gods" from the one "Brahma" defined by the laws of Karma, but had different roles and responsibilities to help people understand natural phenomena and things.
I think Muslims will say much of the same is true with most "polytheistic" or "monotheistic" religions or even nature-based religions. For example, in Islam, Jesus is revered as a man and solely as a man. A great man mind you, but a man never the less. He taught people the same message, that blind rituals, customs, etc were bad, that people should worship One God. That is all. Simple. Easy. But eventually corrupted and misunderstood to mean he was the literal Son of God.
This is not very much unlike what Protestants believe or even Buddhists or Taoists or Jews or many other religions in the World. Even the ANCIENT GREEKS believed in the concept of one essence/God. It's called "chronos" or "destiny" that even Zeus is beholden to, controlled by, and ultimately pulled by. The ancient tribes of Syria that worshipped the moon, Zoroastrianism, even the worshippers of fire.
Hence, Islam returns to the roots by denying the existence of sub-Gods and deities, by banning the creation of idols and pictures of revered Prophets, by saying physical phenomena, the sun and moon, the earth, the stars, the galaxy, all exist naturally within the balance of the Universe, and keeping the relationship with that one essence (what we call God or Allah) and it alone (the highest essence, the Creator, Brahma, Chronos, what have you).
Islam in the beginning was very different from the institutionalized Islam you have today. People were brought under the fold of the belief not by converting, but REVERTING, stripping away the additions to their own various religions and realizing that the core essence of what they believed was infact Islam.
Literally, it means "submission" - "submission" to the will of the One Core Essence - One God. Not Hercules, not Jesus, not Mohammad, not Zoroaster, Not Siddharta, not Moses, not any human being or invented deity. The people above may have been Prophets, Messengers, or pious people. But they were not in any way the one core essence, the order of the universe, manifested in human form.
Muslims would point out that each tribe or religious group of people essentially worshipped one primary essence. Infact, to combat the creation of various sub-deities in various cultures, Muslim scientists used mathematics and science to explain phenomena that people had attributed different Gods and deities to.
Anyways, it's really a philosophical thing. The only way you can argue the point that we are discussing is if you say:
1. Atheism is correct (which is impossible to prove, since you can't disprove the existence of God)
2. Polytheism is correct (which is impossible to prove, since you can't prove Any God let alone Multiple Gods exist)
3. Agnosticism is incorrect (which is impossible, because Agnostics do not deny the existence of a force higher than them, but can not clearly show it's existence either)
What Muslims brought with them in addition to the idea of One God everpresent since the beginning of time, were their cultural habits, their philosophies, their ideology, their ideas, etc. These are what I think the majority of people focus their attention on.
So if you have a criticism, I think it should be with what the rituals and practices are, not what the core philosophical belief is, because it's really not all that different from the majority of religious beliefs. Infact, strip away the rituals, and it's basically agnosticism believeing there is a force but it can not be physically shown or proven other than within the intelligence of design and the balance of the world.