Peace all,
I’ve stated this many a time, and I’ll say it again. The fact that some people are actively refuting the messengership of Rashad Khalifa serves only to prove the Quran right when it speaks about those who cannot fathom, nor accept, the insipidness of a human messenger.
I would like to make two points on this subject, deriving my argument primarily on the first several verses of chapter 38:
1. Personally I believe, and I could be wrong, that such people abstract the idea of messengership in their minds. They see messengers of God as possessing super-human qualities, or as being transcendent creatures. Then, when a messenger is sent to them, they are faced with the reality of how boringly human these messengers really are. As a consequence, they fail to reconcile their abstracted beliefs with the rawness of reality. That’s one aspect.
2. An additional aspect is that of ego. We as people, and I include myself, cannot bear to hear someone say “I am better than you”, especially if done in a subliminal way. Thus, when Rashad Khalifa said “I am a messenger of God”, the egos of many people cringed with disgust. However, their sentiments are unfounded. This is as a consequence of their abstraction of the idea of messengership.
As to the proposition that Rashad played no role in spreading the message of Quran alone, one will only need to take a look at the correlation between the time of Rashad’s activities in the 1980s and the global spread of Quran alone which ensued soon after. The correlation – to say the least – is uncanny, don’t you think?
A strong demonstration is the following: how many members of this forum have followed the Quran alone for more than 20 years? Maybe a few, but not many at all.
Thus, let us not preclude the possibility, and let us not ignore the correlation.
If you choose not to accept Rashad Khalifa as a messenger of God, then at the very least have the basic courtesy of accepting him as a fellow believer who followed, and advocated, the worship of God alone.
I have no doubt, no sliver of doubt, that Rashad Khalifa was a messenger sent to us from God, because it’s nothing new, that’s what God’s been doing since the time of Noah.
But what has passed, has passed. So let us leave the dead to rest in peace, and let us all be friendly to each other and aid each other in understanding as one, strong, united community.
How merciful of God to have sent human messengers to humans throughout history, and to have given us books to read, and to have taught us how to read, and to have given us minds with which to reflect, and to have given us sight, hearing, and the senses, and to have guided us to the true path. Many thanks to God.
