Fr. Gilles' Website: June 2014

Monday, June 30, 2014

The True Origin of 'Allah': The Archaeological Record Speaks

At this website by various means we seek to defend life, to encourage Christian faith, to promote Catholic tradition, to edify Marriage in its link to the Creator, to encourage families and individuals, and to support missionary disciples of Jesus. G.S.

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The True Origin of 'Allah':
The Archaeological Record Speaks
https://sites.google.com/site/islamrkntv/09-a-the-true-origin-of-allah-the-archaeological-record-speaks
A. The Name of God in the Bible

The God of the Old Testament is known as YHWH ()or, when pointed with the correct vowels, Yahweh. This translates as "The Self-Existent One", being derived from the Hebrew háwáh, meaning "to exist". As Allah is the name of God on the Muslim Koran (or Quran), so Yahweh is the Name of God in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Bible. What is particularly interesting and significant is the fact that Yahweh never appears as the name of of any deity outside the Bible. There is no record anywhere of any other tribe or religion which worhipped Yahweh. The Hebrew Name of God is unique to the Bible and its chosen people. From this alone we may deduce that the Name "Yahweh" was not borrowed from some other culture or religion. It emerged unquely within the Bible revelation.

It is claimed by Muslims that Allah is the God of the Bible and that he is mentioned in the sacred texts. This is absolutely not true. The name "Allah" does not appear once in either the Old or New Testaments. The only time God is referred to by name in the Old Testament is either as YAHWEH (meaning "He (who) is") or as a contraction, YAH. [Please note that the name "Jehovah" is not a biblical name of God but was especially 'created' by Jews afraid to pronounce the Sacred Name by combining the consonants YHWH with the vowels from adonai, meaning "Lord"].

The word alah does exist in Hebrew but it is not a proper name and it never refers to God. It has three principal meanings: (a) to curse, swear, or adjure; (b) to lament (weep); and (c) to arise, ascend, climb, go away, leap, etc.. It is an indisputable fact that ALLAH does not appear even once as the Name of God, or even of a man, in the Hebrew Scriptures. There is no word 'alah' or 'allah' in the Greek New Testament at all. It was, quite simply, unknown in the Bible world. To therefore claim that 'Allah' was the name of God in the Bible is without one single shred of evidence. God has always been known as Yahweh, or (much less frequently) by the contraction Yah.

B. Origin of the Name Allah

The word "Allah" comes from the compound Arabic word, al-ilah. Al is the definite article "the" and ilah is an Arabic word for "god", i.e. the god. We see immediately that (a) this is not a proper name but a generic name rather like the Hebrew El (which as we have seen was used of any deity; and (b) that Allah is not a foreign word (as it would have been if it had been borrowed from the Hebrew Bible) but a purely Arabic one. It would also be wrong to compare "Allah" with the Hebrew or Greek for God (El and Theos, respectively), because "Allah" is purely an Arabic term used exclusively in reference to an Arabic deity.

The Encyclopedia of Religion says: "'Allah' is a pre-Islamic name ... corresponding to the Baylonian Bel" (ed. James Hastings, Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1908, I:326).

I know that Muslims will find this hard to believe so I am now going to make many citations and present the archaeological evidence to prove conclusively that is true. Though this data will be painful for many of our readers, it is necessary to face the truth. Facts are facts, and unless you are willing to desert all logic, reason and common sense, and the evidence of your eyes, they must be faced.

C. Archaeology of the Moon-God

Pre-Islamic and Islamic Crescent-and-Star Glyphs Anatolian (left), Islamic (centre), Ancient Persian Moon-goddess (right)

Muslims worship a deity called Allah and claim that the Allah in pre-Islamic times was the biblical God, Yahweh, of the patriarchs, prophets, and apostles.

Ahmed Deedat, well-known Muslim apologist, argues that Allah is a biblical name for God on the basis of "Allelujah" which he convolutes into "Allah-lujah" (What is His Name?, Durban, SA: IPCI, 1990, p.37). This only reveals that he does not understand Hebrew, for haleluyah is the contracted form of Yahweh, YAH, preceeded by the verb "to praise" (literally, Praise Yah(weh)!). His other "biblical" arguments are equally absurd. He also claims that the word "Allah" was never corrupted by paganism. "Allah is a unique word for the only God ... you cannot make a feminine of Allah", says Deedat. But what he does not tell his readers is that one of Allah's daughters was named "Al-Lat", which is the feminine form of "Allah"!

The issue here is therefore seen to be one of CONTINUITY for the Muslim's claim of continuity (from Judaism to Christianity to Islam) is essential in their attempt to convert Jews and Christians. If "Allah" is part of the flow of divine revelation in Scripture, then it is the next step in biblical religion. Thus we should all become Muslims. But, on the other hand, if Allah was a pre-Islamic pagan deity, then its core claim is refuted.

Religious claims often come to grief as a result of solid scientific, archaeological evidence. So, instead of endlessly speculating about the past, we can look to science to see what the evidence reveals. As we shall see, the hard evidence demonstrates that the god Allah was a pagan deity. In fact, he was the moon-god who was married to the sun-goddess and the stars were his daughters.

Archaeologists have uncovered temples to the moon-god throughout the Middle East. From the mountains of Turkey to the banks of the Nile, the most widespread religion of the ancient world was the worship of the moon-god. It was even the religion of the patriarch Abraham before Yahweh revealed Himself and commanded him to leave his home in Ur of the Chaldees and migrate to Canaan.

Archaeologists have uncovered temples to the moon-god throughout the Middle East (see the artistic reconstruction above based on museum artifacts, wall paintings found in ruined cities, etc. in ancient Mesopotamia). From the mountains of Turkey to the banks of the Nile, the most widespread religion of the ancient world was the worship of the moon-god.

Conclusion

The pagan Arabs worshipped the moon god Allah by praying toward Mecca several times a day; making a pilgrimage to Mecca; running around the temple of the moon-god called the Kabah; kissing the black stone; killing an animal in sacrifice to the moon-god; throwing stones at the devil; fasting for the month that begins and ends with the crescent moon; giving alms to the poor, and so on.

The fact that the Muslims worship only one god - are monotheists - does not prove that the god they worship is the True God.

LINK for the full article: https://sites.google.com/site/islamrkntv/09-a-the-true-origin-of-allah-the-archaeological-record-speaks

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© 2004-2021 All rights reserved Fr. Gilles Surprenant, Associate Priest of Madonna House Apostolate & Poustinik, Montreal QC
© 2004-2021 Tous droits réservés Abbé Gilles Surprenant, Prêtre Associé de Madonna House Apostolate & Poustinik, Montréal QC

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Monday, June 9, 2014

Opinion: Research shows that global warming isn’t natural - By Shaun Lovejoy, Special to The Gazette June 9, 2014

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Opinion: Research shows that global warming isn’t natural

By Shaun Lovejoy, Special to The Gazette June 9, 2014

https://montrealgazette.com/opinion/editorials/opinion-research-shows-that-global-warming-isnt-natural

Photograph by: Tony Gutierrez , AP

In this Aug. 3, 2011, photo, Texas State Park police officer Thomas Bigham walks across the cracked lake bed of O.C. Fisher Lake in San Angelo, Tex. Global warming is rapidly turning America the beautiful into America the stormy, sneezy and dangerous, according to a federal scientific report. Climate change’s assorted harms “are expected to become increasingly disruptive across the nation throughout this century and beyond,” the National Climate Assessment concluded. The report emphasizes how warming and its all-too-wild weather are changing daily lives, even using the phrase “climate disruption” as another way of saying global warming.

Last year, the Quebec Skeptics Society laid down a challenge: “If anthropogenic global warming is as strong as scientists claim, then why do they need supercomputers to demonstrate it?”

My immediate response was: “They don’t.”

Indeed, in 1896 — before the warming was perceptible — Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, toiling for a year, predicted that doubling CO2 would increase global temperatures by five to six degrees C. This turns out to be close to modern estimates of how much temperatures would rise in that scenario.

Yet the skeptics’ question resonated.

For decades, scientists have done their best to prove the hypothesis that the warming is human-made. In September’s fifth Assessment Report (AR5), the International Panel on Climate Change concluded that it is “extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century” — thus strengthening its 2007 assessment, which said it was “likely.”

But this consensus among scientists hasn’t stopped climate skeptics from insisting that the computer models are wrong, and that the warming is simply a natural turn of events.

So I decided to tackle the Quebec Skeptics Society challenge by taking a new approach.

Rather than trying to prove that anthropogenic warming is correct, I believe I have conclusively proven, in a study recently published in Climate Dynamics, that natural warming is incorrect: that it has such a tiny probability — less than one per cent; probably less than 0.1 per cent — that it can be dismissed.

The demonstration has two parts: the first uses instrumental data since 1880 to estimate the industrial-period global warming, while the second uses tree rings, ices cores and other proxies to estimate the probability of large temperature changes — on the order of 0.9 degrees C — over 125-year periods during the pre-industrial era. The beauty here is that whereas no scientific theory can ever be proved to be true beyond reasonable doubt, a single decisive experiment can disprove a theory, in this case that the warming is natural. Even better, the disproof doesn’t need supercomputers — only data and a little non-linear geophysics (my field of research).

Within hours of the paper’s findings being disseminated online, one leading contrarian, Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, had deliciously dignified it as “a mephiticly ectoplasmic emanation of the forces of darkness.” A few days later, a Calgary-based group with the Orwellian name of Friends of Science dismissed my study’s conclusion and called on McGill University’s chancellor to retract the university’s press release about it. Their argument: that between January 1663 and December 1762, records show that the temperatures in central England also experienced a changed of 0.9 degrees C, so that my conclusions must be mistaken. However, since all of England is only 0.04 per cent of the globe, this is hardly a global-scale change: the actual global value is only about 0.2 degrees C.

In contrast, much more favourable reactions came from such media as LiveScience, Epoch Times, TheStreet and Radio Canada International.

Without natural variability to fall back on, the only way to avoid the conclusion that the warming is human-made is to invoke a third alternative, a miracle-type hypothesis of the sort “let’s temporarily suspend the laws of physics.”

Where does this leave us in Canada? The axing of the Canadian Fund for Climate and Atmospheric Science (CFCAS) in 2011, which undermined Canadian climate research, is symptomatic of our government’s priorities. Rather than trying to better understand and protect our fragile boreal environment, northern investment has focused on new military installations. Rather than making bold initiatives in carbon-free energies, the government has shamelessly promoted the dirtiest fuels for the richest multinationals. Rather than supporting international efforts to limit climate damage, no matter how imperfect, it has reneged on its Kyoto accord responsibilities and has sabotaged international cooperation.

Here in Quebec, the situation is only a little better. Our enormous hydroelectric capacity enables us (in principle, at least) to decarbonize our economy much more easily. Yet the former Parti Québécois government — now followed by the Liberal government — has blessed the Enbridge pipeline project that will bring us dirty oil, and the government is leaving open the possibility that Anticosti Island may be exploited for petroleum.

When will we take advantage of our unique situation in the world to carve out a role at the forefront of green technologies?

We need to change course, quickly.

Now is the time to invest in a sustainable future.

Shaun Lovejoy is a professor of physics at McGill University. He is also president of the Nonlinear Processes Division of the European Geosciences Union.

https://montrealgazette.com/opinion/editorials/opinion-research-shows-that-global-warming-isnt-natural

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NASA Earth Observatory

Is Current Warming Natural?

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/GlobalWarming/page4.php

In Earth’s history before the Industrial Revolution, Earth’s climate changed due to natural causes not related to human activity. Most often, global climate has changed because of variations in sunlight. Tiny wobbles in Earth’s orbit altered when and where sunlight falls on Earth’s surface. Variations in the Sun itself have alternately increased and decreased the amount of solar energy reaching Earth. Volcanic eruptions have generated particles that reflect sunlight, brightening the planet and cooling the climate. Volcanic activity has also, in the deep past, increased greenhouse gases over millions of years, contributing to episodes of global warming.

A biographical sketch of Milutin Milankovitch describes how changes in Earth’s orbit affects its climate.

These natural causes are still in play today, but their influence is too small or they occur too slowly to explain the rapid warming seen in recent decades. We know this because scientists closely monitor the natural and human activities that influence climate with a fleet of satellites and surface instruments.

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