Bismillah: Assalamo Alikum.
Grace Seeker
Be careful making statements like that:
Yes I am careful, and what I said is just obvious, you may go to Philippines, Mexico, Egypt, Italy, UK, India, Hong Kong and China etc and at the same times, study the religions/Scriptures of those nations and you can easily figure out that they are not really following their scriptures, but rather traditions.
Are you well enough aware of all the practices of those your are referring to so that you can number them off in order to do that math you have proposed?
Yes I am.
Are you so familiar with "God's alleged books" so that you know which of these practices are based on them and which are based on "traditional beliefs".
Yes I am very well aware of the Bible, Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, Ramayana, Gitas and many other Scriptures.
Have you factored in the very real possibility that many "traditional beliefs" may have become traditions incorporating practices originally based on "God's alleged books", so that practices based on those "traditional beliefs" are also in fact historically based on "God's alleged books"?
I know the differences already, since I have spent quite sometimes in studying those scriptures, lived with Christians, married from them, attended their mass and Bible classes, and many more...
It is a common for all people to have practices based simply on how they were raised. Why for instance, do Americans drive on the right side of the road and the British drive on the left? Muslims, no less than other people, have many such practices that are just traditions they have probably never even thought about. Be careful, in casting dispersions on the practices of Hindus and Christians, you might just be throwing stones in a glass house.
I am not against traditions of other nations;
I am only speaking of those traditions that go against the religion or religious scriptures. Like for example, the Catholic Christians in Philippines do worship a little image called “
Santo Nino”/ “Baby saint” , referring to Jesus when he was a child, every year on a particular day, they hold that image of Santo Nino and walk around in the street praising this little child, bow down to him, touch him etc and at the end of the day they take the image to the Church and start praying to him all night. If you can show me where does the Bible encourage such practices, I will really appreciate it.
And I do agree with you, that even some Muslims go against the teaching of the Qur’an by their traditional practices, in which we also point out their faults and try hard to educate them.
Gross generalizations and stereotypes tend to tell us relatively little about flesh and blood human beings. It is tempting to see people who are different from us as somehow inferior as well. But, be careful, that type of building one's self up by putting others down is, in the long run, actually more demeaning to the character of the person who does the belittling of others based on preconcieved prejudices than to anyone else.
I am not putting anyone down here and sorry if I offended you by speaking the truth, but this is what I’ve observed during my course of study and by experience during traveling and communicating with people from different faiths.
Salam
Serving Islam
