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HomeShop at BookSurgeEducationClassroom ManagementEarthTrek: What Is All The Fuss About Religion? |
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| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review: ( 11 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 12 found the following review helpful:
 The spam makes me distrust the reviews... Feb 11, 2010
By Peter Seebach
The authors appear to be sending a huge amount of spam for this book to addresses scraped off random web pages. I don't honestly trust the other reviews to be real or sincere -- especially since they all have very similar writing styles, which happen to match that of the promotional spam.
7 of 9 found the following review helpful:
Spammer Feb 12, 2010
By Vivek Khera
Don't buy this book. They are trying to pump up sales by spamming widely and heavily for this book, making it look like the messages are from Amazon directly. Do not support this activity by buying the book.
7 of 9 found the following review helpful:
Spammer. Don't trust these reviews! Feb 11, 2010
By Aaron
This person has been sending junk email messages which claim to be coming from Amazon, but in fact are not. So, when you read the other glowing reviews of this book, keep in mind that deceptive practices have already been employed to market this book. Can you really trust that the other reviews here are legit?
My advice? Support other, more honest authors.
5 of 7 found the following review helpful:
A "self promotional" book Feb 13, 2010
By Robert van Aven
"RvA"
The book has much to do with the life and experiences of the author. It does not cover the subject matter in a serious manner (as the title would suggest) since the author does not seem to be familiar with material in comparative religion in general. The writing style is not even up to par with what one is used to in average popular books.
 Beware of weak comparisons May 02, 2011
By William C. Greene
"Common Knowledge and Common Sense"
This book seeks to compare the Judeo-Christian religion with the Islamic Faith by a study of their founding documents. And it is that objective that dooms the possibility of arriving at any meaningful comparison.
Anyone who has read these "bibles" knows that they are magnificent pieces of literature but do not readily lend themselves to summarization, for they are full of contradictions, opaque statements, varied commentary, and ambiguities. There are vague sentences scattered throughout the texts that can be interpreted in many ways. There are calls for violence and calls for forgiveness with little chance to weight the relative amount or importance of each. Althiough there are detailed comparisons of the texts the author appears to have an axe to grind in favor of her own Faith; and someone seems to have planted many excessively ecstatic 5-star ratings in the reviews here as noted by many other reviewers!
A flaw in the author's appraoch is that a historical view of the religions should be based more on the role they played, the influences they had, and the end result of their existence, not an attempt to determine what the original texts suggested. Religions are shaped by the prophets and priests who follow in the centuries after their first rude beginnings.
Indeed, the people, the congregations themselves, have often shaped the trajectory religions have taken. There has never been a Martin Luther in Islam, unfortunately, because such recurring reforms have had positive effects on Christianity that are absent in Islam, and of course not even imaginable when just looking at original texts.
The overriding difference in practice has been the ability under the Western faiths to separate Church and State which allowed more tolerance and more open inquiry in the West, and that has made all the difference. The turning point was when traditional Islamic fundamantalists won the day and adopted Al Ghazali's rigid orthodoxy over Averhoes liberal scientific searching in the 12th century. Up to that point, Islam had been the scene of considerable cultural and scientific discovery for the 400 years it had been in existence. But after that time the Muslim theocracies in power shut the minds of their people. And the West, empowered by the numerous universities See:COMMON GENIUS: Guts, Grit, and Common Sense: How Ordinary People Create Prosperous Societies and How Intellectuals Make Them Collapse -- Universities founded by the Franciscan and Domincan monks that allowed free and scientific thought in Euriopean nations to surge ahead.
If you want to read about the theological beliefs of these religions, Moormann's book may be of real interest because it explores most of the major theological questions that all religions wrestle with, including her work to establish the real existence of God. In that vein, it is too bad the author excluded the Eastern religions and philosophies because they address the same questions even though they are not monotheistic.
Because all three faiths she deals with are the offspring of Abraham of the Old Testament there are going to be many similarities in the written record and Moormann illustrates some of these connections. Indeed, it can be argued that Islam highjacked the ideas and legacy of the Jews' Abraham who was a foundation stone of Judaism more than two thousand years before Islam was founded by Mohammed. Bruce Feiler's "Abraham" gives a particularly good introduction to these three faiths and documents the trail from Abraham to the successors. It would pay the reader to compare Feiler's book with Moormann's in order to get a full and fairer perspective because Moormann does seem to try too hard to defend the Qur'an and in that way suffers a possible lack of objectivity in her stated purpose.
See all 11 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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