[QUOTE=AntiKarateKid;1179324]GraceSeeker, I don't understand you.[quote]You're right, you don't understand me.
You think that God can harden people's hearts, prevent them from believing to prevent them from converting,
No. That isn't what I said. Read it again: "I've come to see them as passages in which it is as you say that God does not actually make people to behave in these ways, but rather that he pushes them so as to reveal the hardness already present in their hearts." God does not harden their hearts so much as reveal the hardness that is already therein. Like it is the property of concrete to be hard and what God does is make sure that it fully cures. But he doesn't actually create the hardness.
yet you distinguish the illusion of Jesus pbuh on the cross from the internal illusions God created in those people's hearts that led them astray?
Notice it is your words that "God created" that in their hearts, not mine.
Be realistic, they are both one and the same.
They aren't the same because I am not saying that God created that hardness; only you are saying that. I am saying that God only amplified the hardness that they themselves freely choose.
Be that as it may, we don't need to debate the above. It is what it is. But perhaps you can help me to understand how this worked?
But in the Quranic case, Allah didn't do it to prevent them from converting, Allah did it as a punishment. That is the real difference between the Quranic verses and the Biblical ones.
How is it that seeing Jesus on the cross would be a punishment of the Jews? Now, I'm the one who doesn't understand.
As for your last comment, deception means to convince someone to believe what is wrong.
Agreed.
Yet that isn't what Allah did. He presented them with an image and let them decide.
I just don't see this yet. Did Allah expect people to not believe their eyes?
The same way as he would present a miracle to a people and let them decide. He doesn't force people in the former or latter.
I don't get this connection either. Are you saying that miracles are also illusions that we accept by faith because they appear to us this way, but they aren't really so?
On a separate note, according to Imam, who is much more knowledgeable than me in the matter, argues that there was no illusion, and that the crucifixion was hearsay and rumor.
And I have heard another interpret the passage saying that it appeared to the Jews that since they wanted Jesus dead and that he was crucified that they had crucified Jesus, when in reality it wasn't the who crucified Jesus but the Romans who had. The emphasis in that interpretation being not on whether Jesus was or was not crucified, but with regard to who it appeared had done it versus who had actually carried it out.