zlacker

>>asim+(OP)
Fasting is a great idea, but most of the Muslim friends I have eat through out the night after breaking the fast at sunset. I don't think that is very healthy.

>>jimmye+z8
Its not particularly healthy, though many ancient cultures prior to Islam have used fasting as part of a way to cleansing of the gut. The relevance to the moon is also from Pagan cultures

>>amriks+m31
Have you ever occurred to you that it might be the other way around? There was always one monotheistic religion and God, but then things got sidetracked and people started making stuff up.

Also, Moon is relevant in Islam, as a calendar and timekeeping, nothing to be worshipped.

Also, All Monotheistic Religions have had fasting (the 3 big ones that survived so far) but again, the worst enemy of the people is their own selves and not the devil, and thus they modified what was given to them.

>>nullch+Zg1
> There was always one monotheistic religion and God, but then things got sidetracked and people started making stuff up.

We know for a fact that this is false. For example, the Egyptians were building the pyramids and worshipping their gods at least a thousand year before any known monotheistic religion. The native people of Australia have even older polytheistic religions.

>>simion+bp1
The ancient Egyptians were spectacularly insular and xenophobic, though. If anyone was going to make up their own belief system, probably out of spite, it's them.

What evidence there is specifically in this case suggests that the monotheistic middle eastern religions were derived from the evolution of a polytheistic belief system into a monotheistic one via a stopping-off point that acknowledged multiple deities, but consistently only worshipped one of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israelites and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh are worth a read, and there are several references to multiple gods in the Old Testament, often in the PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE OTHER GODS BEHIND THE CURTAIN sense rather than as direct callouts, as you'd expect.

So unless we might mean that the sidetracking happened before the archaeological record of Canaanite polytheism starts, it's not really tenable as a suggestion.

I do not say this to devalue or challenge anyone's beliefs today; just that ignoring facts has a tendency not to go well. The moral and personal value of religious belief need not, to my mind, lean on historical record for its validity.