Sometime ago I saw a video of two folks talking about their belief in God. At one point one person (a non-believer) said to the other (a Christian), “you don’t believe in Zeus?” and the Christian said, “That’s right”. Then the non-believer asked, “Do you believe in Allah?” and the Christian said something to the effect that Allah is God so yes he believed in Him.
That exchange intrigued me because from my understanding of Islam (which isn’t much), the Muslims see Allah as just one god and not the Trinity that Christians do. When you ask a Christian about God they immediately talk about Jesus and God the Father with a smattering of the Holy Spirit thrown in every once and awhile. So it’s my understanding that Allah is very different from the Christian God so therefore Christians are Atheistic when it comes to their belief in Allah. They simply don’t believe in Him, Her or It.
Also the Jews see God (Yahweh) differently than the Christians. The Jews see Yahweh as just one God and of course don’t recognize Jesus as the Son of God or a “god”. You can get into a debate about how the Jews don’t see Jesus as the Messiah unlike the Christians who claim that he fulfilled ALL of the prophesies in the Old Testament for the Messiah. Two differing conclusions on essentially the same book.
What I’m getting at is that Jews, Christians and Muslims are all Atheists when it comes to the other group’s god. Jews and Christians don’t believe in Allah and Muslims don’t believe in the god(s) of either the Christians or Jews.
The point of all this if the three largest and most influential religions in the world have fundamentally differing views on the very foundation (belief in God), how can any of them be close to right? Of course “rightness” doesn’t matter as long as you can get enough folks to agree with you and have influence in the halls of power.