Re: The Lost Gospel / new material A new chapter of The Power of Popular Culture is nearing completion. This chapter is quite lengthy because the subject, Sufism, is complicated and is important to many Americans whether they are Sufis or not. This includes biographical information about people you may not know are Sufis, like Shaquille O'Neal, the basketball star, like Imam Rauf, best known for his ill-advised plan to build a mosque at Ground Zero, like Reza Aslan, the author of Zealot, and so forth. There are sketches of people who are below the radar of most Americans but who deserve recognition for achievement, like Denise Sati, a superlative artist whose creations sometimes are remarkable. Research for this chapter has been time consuming but before it could be completed a thought occurred to the effect that some place in the book there needed to be a statement that explains my personal religious philosophy rather than leave it up to readers to guess -and probably guess wrong. I identify as a Christian and do so without the least equivocation. However, you will not find a defense of any kind of current theological orthodoxy, nor a defense of a literalistic reading of the Bible. As far as I am concerned neither of those options is viable. On the other hand there may be unwarranted confusion which I want to avoid. Most believers who are unorthodox and who do not take the Bible at face value are modernists of a certain kind often associated with the political Left. That is not me, not in any way. My views are heterodox, original, and independently arrived at. These views are very different either than those of traditionalists or of so called "religious liberals." And just as different than the views of religious conservatives. Some readers might notice that some of my ideas derive from the Baha'i Faith. At one time I was a member even though that period came to an end in 1972. How does that source of inspiration make sense taken together with Christian faith? You will be able to see for yourself, soon enough. My overall philosophy is also a factor since it cannot be thought of as either Leftist or Right-wing. For some people I may be regarded as a liberal with a few conservative ideas, for others these characterizations are reversed and they see a few liberal ideas against a background that is essentially conservative. Neither conclusion is warranted since I am a Radical Centrist, a philosophy that borrows freely from both Left and Right and includes "other" ideas as circumstances warrant. Hopefully any questions of a personal nature, viz, "what is the author's actual religious faith?", are explained to good effect in the material now being sent to you. This new material is entitled "The Lost Gospel" and will be included in the Appendix to the book. It does not speak to the theme of Popular Culture as directly as the chapters do but everything is directly relevant and explains all sorts of things a reader might be curious about. The theme of a "lost gospel" starts the essay. What this is all about is the claim that Jesus as presented in the Koran is the "real Jesus" and the New Testament falsifies the historical record. Not that there aren't historical problems with the Gospels but the Muslim claim is so preposterous that it calls for detailed refutation. How can this be done most effectively? The stratagem decided upon was to compose a hypothetical Gospel "as if" it had recently been discovered by archeologists in the Holy Land. In it you will find not only the Jesus of the New Testament, presented pretty much verbatim, but Jesus as conceived by Muhammad and written down in the pages of the Koran. This "new" gospel is divided into episodes from the life of Christ. Each episode begins with the Jesus of the Bible, mostly quoting from the New English Bible translation, which is favored by a great many scholars for its clarity and well-conceived sense of style. You can read it with ease and at the same time be reminded of the sonorous qualities of the King James Version. Each episode then segues into the Jesus of the Koran, either in the mythic form that Muhammad usually described him, or as a sort of composite of the Koran Jesus and Muhammad. Exact Koran verses on which these passages are based are cited in the text following each episode. The Muslim version of Jesus in the "lost gospel" is not "made up" as a slander of Muhammad or Islam, it is a verbatim or nearly verbatim version. Text consists of quotations taken from English language translations of the Koran. What emerges is a travesty of Christ, which is to say that Jesus, as Muslims understand him, is a travesty without any justification. And it is about time someone said so. And it is about time that people who have never actually read the Koran, who tell others that the 'Muslim Jesus' is the same Jesus as we find in the Gospels, are exposed for the frauds that they are; their case rests on a foundation of ignorance and wishful thinking and deserves no respect whatsoever. To repeat a point that needs repetition so that there is no mistake, I do not buy into the fable that the Koran was revealed to Muhammad and ultimately was dictated by Allah / God. That fiction does not impress me in any way, and authorship of the book is placed where is belongs; Muhammad wrote the whole thing and it reflects his private values and beliefs. It has nothing to do with God except by false attribution. The "God" of the Koran closely resembles the Satan of Christian tradition.. You could not ask for a more closed-minded bigot and criminal than Muhammad's "Allah." The Koran is Muhammad's book, and is often referred to in those terms in what I write concerning Islam. ----------- There are a couple of other -and very important- texts to write for the Appendix. Every essay /article in the Appendix is serious substance. This does slow down completion of the book as originally conceived but the idea is to present my very best ideas about subjects that are relevant to topics in the book proper. B. Rojas
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