Abrahamic Religions

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Abrahamic Religions
Abrahamic Religions are all religious groups that can trace their origin from one spiritual source; Abraham. They collectively believe in the spiritual tradition identified with Abraham. Three of the major Abrahamic Religions include Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. The fact that they all trace and believe they originated from Abraham as the founding father, means there exists some similarities among them. However, it is worth noting that their eventual separations and adoption of different beliefs led to growing differences and rifts among them. This article critically compares Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, and this is achieved through listing what they have in common as well as ways in which they differ.
The existing similarities among Christianity, Islam, and Judaism include the following: Monotheism, which is the belief in one God though, they all identify Him with different names (Burrell 12). All these religions hold on to the belief that God is the Creator, manifests himself through His prophets, has love for mankind, instills discipline and offers forgiveness for those who ask for it. Although they believe in one God, all of them identify Him with a different name. In Islam, they identify Him as Allah, Christianity as Yahweh or The Holy Trinity and Judaism identify Him as Yahweh or Elohim. Christianity has some bit of similarities to Judaism as it is considered as an earlier section of Judaism.
All the three Religions believe in the existence of prophets whom God reveals himself to, for the conveying of His message. Both Islam and Christianity recognize Jesus and Moses as God’s prophets but Islam also recognizes Mohammed. Judaism only believes in Moses as a prophet, but does not recognize either Jesus or Mohammed. However, it is recorded that they view Jesus as an important figure, but not the messiah (Peterson 21). Jesus, Mohammed, and Moses are believed to be the central and final prophets in Christianity, Islam and Judaism respectively. They are highly respected in their respective religions and both Islam and Christianity believe in the holy birth of Jesus. However, the Islamic religion does not believe that Jesus died because of crucifixion. In that sense, believers of Islamic religion have a common understanding that Jesus ascended into heaven during crucifixion.
The three main Abrahamic religions also believe in holy books that they believe God inspired the prophets to write. In Christianity, it is known as the Bible, in Islam as The Quran and in Judaism as the Tanakh, which is similar to the Old Testament in the Bible (Spurway 48). In other words, the similarity here is brought through the holy books whilst the difference comes in the way they name or recognize them. All of them believe the holy books to be the word of God and hence the reason why Christians refer to the Bible as “the word of God” whereas Islam refer to it as the final revelation given by Allah to humankind through Prophet Mohammed.
Human beings are considered as the highest creatures on earth in all the three religions. The belief that God created humankind and gave them power over all other creatures. In that case, there is a clear agreement in the three religions that human’s beings are the superior creatures above the other creatures that exist in the universe (Peterson 54). They also believe that humans can and should be able to communicate with God. By revelations and manifestation through prophets being the most significant. This eventually led to the writing of the Holy Scriptures whose respect is highly encouraged.
Rituals are very important part of these three religions. They all believe that the stipulated rituals help to bring a believer close to their creator. The rituals being a very sensitive and essential part of the religion, they have to be adhered to and any violation is considered as sin (Spurway 87). Despite the importance of rituals in these religions, it is important noting that they are performed in varying wa...