Hi - I'm reading "The Reason for God: Belief in an Age
of Skepticism" by Timothy Keller and wanted to share this quote with you.
"I was troubled by those Christians who stressed
hellfire and damnation. Like so many of my generation I believed that, if there
was a core to all religions, it was a loving God. I wanted to believe in a God
of love who accepted people regardless of their beliefs and practices. I began
to take courses in the other major religions of the world—Buddhism, Hinduism,
Islam, Confucianism, and Judaism. I have profited to this day from those
studies. However, my explorations in other faiths proved me wrong on this
particular point about the centrality of a loving God. I found no other
religious text outside of the Bible that said God created the world out of love
and delight. Most ancient pagan religions believed the world was created
through struggles and violent battles between opposing gods and supernatural
forces. I turned to look more closely at Buddhism, the religion I liked best at
the time.
"its great emphasis on selflessness and
detached service to others, Buddhism did not believe in a personal God at all,
and love is the action of a person. Later on, after I became a minister, I was
a speaker and panelist for several years in a monthly discussion program in
Philadelphia between a Christian church and a mosque. Each month a speaker from
the church and a speaker from the mosque would give a Biblical and Qu’ranic
perspective on a topic. When we covered the topic of God’s love, it was
striking how different our conceptions were. I was told repeatedly by Muslim
speakers that God was indeed loving in the sense of being merciful and kind to
us. But when Christians spoke of the Lord as our spouse, of knowing God
intimately and personally, and of having powerful effusions of his love poured
into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, our Muslim friends balked. They told us
that it was disrespectful, in their view, to speak of anyone knowing God
personally. 
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