this is about the essence of god once for all

How is anything stated above "about the essence of god"?

because that is where ALL religions start

Even the Mayan and the Aztec and the animistic beliefs of the Australian Abos and of Borneo and Sumatra and...and...and???

Well, one can hope.

Spinoza probably said it best when he defined God as a causa sui whose very essence involves existence and whose nature cannot be conceived unless existing. For Spinoza, God simply is in much the same way that ‘nothing’ is not.

Poor Baruch Spinoza. He was formally cursed and exiled from the Jewish community in Amsterdam where he had come of age. He was, after all, a heretic. Later on he was in difficulties with the Church and most of his writings were not published during his own lifetime. He was accused of being an atheist although he never claimed to be one. Theologically Spinoza was a few centuries ahead of his time. He uses the words ‘God’ and ‘Nature’ virtually interchangeably. For Spinoza, there can be no Creator which is separate from his creation. God (or Nature, if you will) is self-creating and eternal. Causa sui, a cause of itself.

This almost echoes the Islamic dictum that God ‘does not beget and is not begotten.’ (Which, of course, makes nonsense of the notion that God somehow got Mary, the mother of Jesus of Nazareth, pregnant! But that’s beyond the scope of this discussion.)

* * *

There was an Arab philosopher living about 700 years before the time of Spinoza whose views on the nature of God seem to pre-figure the musings of Baruch Spinoza, although it’s not clear whether Spinoza had ever read any of the works of al-Kindi. Yusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi (or Joseph Jacob son of Isaac al-Kindi, if you prefer an anglicized spelling) was a prolific writer on a wide range of subjects in the first half of the 9th century C.E. In his best-known work, On First Philosophy, he states that God is simply “One” and, as such, cannot be described in any human language. He writes: “…the true One possesses no matter, form, quantity, quality, or relation.” (Emphasis mine.)

It would seem, then, that when a Muslim says, “Bishmillahi ar rahman ar rahim,” -- “in the name of God, the clement, the merciful” -- the qualities of mercy and clemency that the speaker is attributing to God are in the nature of a metaphor. For al-Kindi God simply is. No such qualities as love or mercy or compassion can be ascribed to God. “It is…pure unity, nothing more than unity.”

If that sounds as though al-Kindi is contradicting the Quran, be sure that he knew it. He even had the temerity -- or courage, if you will -- to suggest that the Quran was created in time and, therefore, was not eternal but, in time, would cease to exist. I don’t know whether, 700 years later, Spinoza ever said anything similar about the Torah, but the concept is certainly implicit in his world-view.

This kind of non-conformist thought got al-Kindi into more trouble than Spinoza was ever to face. Caliph Mutawakkil of Baghdad, where al-Kindi was living, had him imprisoned and his library seized. But apparently al-Kindi had enough political and ecclesiastic connections to get himself cleared of charges of heresy and his books returned. He died about 10 years later, in 870, peacefully at home.

Bullshit. So, for example, the aboriginal inhabitants of North and South America got religion from Sumer . . . how? Osmosis? Telepathic messages through the cosmic ether?

Come on, 'fess up . . . you're making this **** up as you go along . . .

Oops . . . i should have read further in the thread . . .

'Sawright. This op obviously doesn't have a clue anyway. Wonder what his point (and agenda) is.