On 21/02/2008, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I think "belong" is the wrong word. Muhammad
has meaning outside the
context of Islam.
Perhaps it isn't the wrong word though; perhaps, primarily Muhammad
does belong to Islam? That would be largely consistent with the
wikipedia article, and if you google him.
Loki doesn't have meaning outside the context of
Norse religion (apparently - for all I know, Loki could be based on a
historical person, most of my knowledge of Norse tradition comes from
Stargate!).
OK, consider L.Ron Hubbard- does he belong to Scientology?
I would argue a highly qualified yes, or it's arguable. How do you decide?
Since scientology talk about him quite a bit, he's theirs to a fair
degree. But highly qualified, because there's a lot of quite high
quality sources on him that say completely the opposite to what
Scientology says; so he doesn't completely belong to them.
But for Jesus and Muhammad, very much the biggest sources by far that
we have on them are from their respective religions, and thus the term
'belonging', probably is very appropriate.
That these are iconic subjects, failing to realise that causes *huge* problems.
--
-Ian Woollard
We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
imperfect world things would be a lot better.