Friday, December 11, 2015

What are the similarities between the three Abrahamic religions?

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are what are termed "Abrahamic religions" because they all share scriptural texts. The Jewish "Old Testament," God, and figures such as Moses and Abraham are shared among all three faiths; the "New Testament" and Jesus Christ are present in Christianity and Islam; and the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad are unique to Islam. Thus the first areas of similarity are found in the shared scriptural texts, including the account of the origin of the world in Genesis.
All three religions are monotheistic, believing in the existence of a single God and condemning all beliefs in other gods as heretical or infidel. Although some thinkers in all three religious traditions advocate ecumenism, all three have a history of intolerance of rival religious beliefs, unlike, for example, ancient polytheistic religions, which admitted a wide range of gods and spirits and readily made room for diverse belief systems.
All three religions believe in some form of afterlife and contain accounts of some sort of reward or salvation for believers who suffer in ordinary life. This sense of life as we know it having a beginning and end against a permanent divine world is recapitulated on the cosmic level, where God creates the material world and then eventually destroys it, with human souls then returning to a spiritual cosmos.
All three religions are historical, with their sacred scriptures not simply having philosophical or theological claims, but telling narratives about their peoples and prophets. All three have extensive grounding in historical claims about people and their biographies.
Finally, all three religions have complex codes regulating the lives of believers, including dietary codes, sexual moralities, and codes of conduct.


The three Abrahamic religions—Christianity, Islam, and Judaism—all stem from their belief in the prophet Abraham, whom they view as the father of their religions. These three religions all believe that Abraham, an Israelite, had a direct relationship with God in which fundamental religious values were communicated.The first and most obvious similarity between these three religions is that they are all "prophetic" or believe in prophets, as they do with their common patriarch, Abraham. The definition of a prophet is a person who speaks on behalf of God through divine inspiration. There are many prophets in the Christian Bible, the Islamic Quran, and the Jewish Torah.
Another similarity between these religions is that they are all monotheistic. They believe in a single God. In contrast to the Abrahamic religions, many other religions, such as Hinduism, are polytheistic and believe in many gods.
Lastly, each of these three religions provides an ethical framework, as given by God, to differentiate between good and evil in order to live a good life.


The three Abrahamic faiths are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They are related through several fundamental beliefs and a shared history, beginning with the figure of Abraham. These three religious traditions are called "Abrahamic" because they each trace their beginning to Abraham, who founded the Covenant (relationship of respect and obligation) between his people and God. The Abrahamic Covenant, specifically, was God's promise to protect and shepherd Abraham's descendants, and Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all value this Covenant but may have different opinions about what else happened between God and mankind. For example, Christianity holds that Jesus Christ was prophesied as the Messiah and died for the forgiveness of all sins. In Islam, while Jesus Christ is regarded as a prophet, he is not believed to have been the Messiah. 
One of the main things the Abrahamic faiths have in common is that they are monotheistic. That means they believe in just one god, the God, who is creator of all things. 
These three religions also share similar cosmologies and eschatologies. Cosmology deals with how the world and the universe were created, and the Abrahamic traditions agree that God created the world, separating the once united heavens and earth, in six days and took a rest on the seventh. Eschatology has to do with the end of a person's life as well as the "end of time," and all three religions hold that if a person acts in accordance with God's will during their time on Earth, there is peace awaiting them after death. They also believe that there will come a time when God will intervene on Earth and make it into a paradise, banishing people who do not act in accordance with God's will, for some amount of time.
In practice, the three Abrahamic faiths have some traditional rules regarding personal conduct. All three religions engage in periods of fasting throughout the year, observe a weekly holy day, and encourage regular, ritualized prayer. Of course, the extent to which individuals hold to these rules varies widely. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam each also have a holy book containing many of the same stories of creation, God's stewardship of mankind, and rules for living.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Abrahamic-religion

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