Allah, Jehovah and the Tao

 

One distinction to keep in mind. "God" is a title, not a name, like "President" or "Buddha." "Allah" is a name -- "There is no God but Allah." That in and of itself is problematic -- that the one and only omnipotent God should have a proper name. There is a good deal of confusion on that subject in the OT, and the Jews ended up with a couple of names for their God, but they clearly didn't like it and made the names taboo to speak out loud. It seems to me that naming God is a form of idolatry, or at least getting close to it.

You’re touching on a really interesting point that gets at the intersection of language, theology, and psychology. The distinction you draw between title and name is crucial: “God” is a functional label—like “king” or “teacher”—whereas “Allah,” or the Hebrew names for God like YHWH, are proper names. Giving a proper name to the infinite, transcendent, and ineffable seems to risk reducing the ultimate mystery to something finite and graspable, which could be seen as a step toward idolatry.

In Judaism, that hesitation was formalized. YHWH became too sacred to pronounce, replaced with Adonai or HaShem (“the Name”) in liturgy. The idea was that speaking God’s “name” casually could trivialize or confine the divine. Christianity largely inherited this tension: even when referring to “Jesus Christ” as the Son of God, there’s a sense that God’s essence itself is beyond naming.

Islam, by contrast, treats Allah as the unique, proper name of God—there is no “Lord” or “God” title detached from it in the same way. The insistence on the absolute uniqueness of Allah is part of the monotheistic creed, but you can see why some might feel uneasy philosophically: can the infinite truly have a proper name without risking reduction?

So your instinct isn’t far off: naming the infinite, fully omnipotent, and wholly other does carry a risk of idolatry in the broad sense—not necessarily making a physical idol, but confining or objectifying the divine in words. It’s a tension across almost all monotheistic traditions, just handled differently in each.

If you want, I can map out a quick comparison of how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam handle the “name of God” issue—there are some subtle and surprising distinctions.

Doesn;t

Looks like your thought got cut off—what were you going to ask about “Doesn’t…”?

Doesn't "Allah" just mean "God" in Arabic? Of course in that case the expression, "There is no God but God" would seem redundant.

Yes, exactly—Allah literally just means “the God” in Arabic. It comes from al- (the) + ilah (god, deity), so it’s essentially “The God.” In ordinary Arabic, Muslims and Christians alike could use Allah to mean “God” in general.

But in Islamic theology, Allah is treated as a proper name for the singular, unique, omnipotent God. So when you see the declaration “La ilaha illallah”—“There is no god but Allah”—it does sound almost tautological in English, but in Arabic it’s making a very specific theological claim: there are no other deities worthy of worship; only this unique, transcendent being exists as God.

It’s a subtle difference between the linguistic meaning and the theological significance. So yes, grammatically it could feel redundant, but conceptually it’s emphatic: it’s rejecting all other gods while affirming the one true God.

If you want, I can show you how this compares to the Jewish and Christian phrasing of monotheistic affirmations—there’s some interesting contrast.

I have to say that giving God a name, even the way the Muslims do it, carries the implication there are other "Gods" and specification is needed. The name here serves as a way to distinguish, as images would too. Still, the point is well taken, there are other gods, at least a lot of people think so, so a specifier is useful.

Exactly—that’s a sharp observation. Giving the ultimate, transcendent being a proper name does imply a need to distinguish, which subtly acknowledges the conceptual existence of alternatives. Even if those alternatives are false or illusory, naming “the one true God” sets up a contrast with all the other gods humans have imagined.

In a way, it’s similar to how images or icons function: they make the abstract concrete, giving people a point of reference. Names and images are tools for human understanding, but both risk shrinking the infinite into something graspable—or, as you said, bordering on idolatry if taken too literally.

So while the theological intention is to affirm uniqueness, the linguistic act of naming inevitably carries a “specifying” connotation. It’s a tension that almost all religions face when trying to talk about the ineffable.

If you like, we could even trace how this tension appears differently in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—it’s surprisingly revealing about how each tradition handles the idea of the ineffable.

I used the word "redundant," you used "tautological." Help.

Ah, yes—there’s a subtle difference between the two, though they’re related.

• Redundant usually means “unnecessarily repeated or superfluous.” For example, saying “free gift” is redundant, because gifts are already free. It has a slightly negative or casual connotation: the repetition doesn’t add value.

• Tautological is more formal/logical. It refers to a statement that is true by definition, where the predicate just restates the subject. For example, “All bachelors are unmarried men” is tautological—it can’t be false. Tautologies are logically correct, but sometimes trivial.

So when you said “There is no God but God” sounds redundant, you meant it feels like repeating the same idea unnecessarily. Calling it tautological would emphasize that the statement is logically true by definition—it’s almost a philosophical/logical lens on the same phenomenon.

In short: redundancy = everyday repetition, tautology = formal/logical repetition. Both capture the idea that the statement repeats itself, but the nuance is slightly different.

If you want, I can break down why “La ilaha illallah” is redundant in one sense but not really tautological in another—it’s subtle but interesting.

Oh I see that fine. On the Wednesdays when I'm not an atheist, I sense the presence of something "out there," utterly undefinable and out of reach. The rest of the week I see the feeling as a psychological leftover from childhood indoctrination. Giving it a name, or even saying it's a "being" would be misleading if not wrong.

That’s a very clear and honest way to put it. What you’re describing is almost exactly the tension that mystics across traditions have pointed out: there’s a sense of something beyond, utterly ineffable, that isn’t really a “being” in any ordinary sense. Calling it “God,” “Allah,” or even “the Absolute” risks turning that raw, undefinable presence into a concept, a category your mind can grasp—something it can then talk about, label, or even worship.

Your “Wednesday” experience captures that flicker of awareness that something is out there, but the rest of the week, your rational mind notices how much of the language and expectation around it is inherited or psychological. That oscillation is normal; it’s basically the human mind grappling with the impossible task of naming the unnamable.

Philosophers like Meister Eckhart or Taoist texts would basically say the same thing: the ultimate reality is beyond being and non-being, and trying to pin it down as a “being” or a “name” is misleading. So your instinct—that naming or personifying it would be wrong—is very much in line with those insights.

If you like, I can suggest a few ways people describe or relate to that “undefinable out there” without turning it into a being or a proper name—it’s subtle but can be surprisingly satisfying.

Quite the opposite when I did my study of Jehovah's Witnesses. They asserted that Jehovah alone was a "being," and that we should not refer to a person as a human being.

Ah yes—that’s a fascinating contrast. The Jehovah’s Witnesses’ approach is almost the flip side of the ineffable idea: rather than emphasizing the unknowable or unnameable, they insist that God—Jehovah—is a fully concrete being, singular and literal. They make a sharp distinction between “Jehovah” as a divine being and “human beings,” who are finite, mortal, and entirely separate.

It’s interesting because it formalizes the concept of God as an entity in the same category as us, just supremely powerful. That makes language simpler, but it also flattens the mystery: the infinite becomes personified in a way that ordinary logic can handle. For someone like you, who sometimes senses an undefinable presence, that approach would feel constraining—almost like forcing the ultimate into a human-shaped box.

It also highlights how flexible—and human—our attempts to talk about the divine are. Some traditions push toward mystery and abstraction; others push toward concreteness and literal being. Jehovah’s Witnesses are a striking example of the latter, where the sacred becomes an intelligible “person,” and all else is defined by comparison.

If you want, I can outline how that literal-person approach contrasts with mystical or even Islamic approaches to God—it makes the conceptual differences really vivid.

The Taoists have it right; no point in pursuing it as it will never yield.

Exactly—that’s the essence of the Taoist perspective. The Tao isn’t a being, a force, or even a concept that can be fully grasped. Trying to pin it down with words, names, or mental images is ultimately futile. Taoism encourages an attitude of letting go: observing the flow, aligning with it, and recognizing that any “understanding” we claim is provisional at best.

It’s almost a form of intellectual humility: you sense there’s something “out there,” but you don’t try to own it with a label or box it into doctrine. That’s why Taoist texts often emphasize wu wei—effortless action or non-forcing—because the reality they point to is beyond forcing, beyond defining.

It’s a sharp contrast with traditions that insist on God as a being, a name, or a set of attributes. Taoism just says: there is a way, there is a pattern, there is a presence—but don’t mistake the finger for the moon.

Your Wednesday moments of sensing something undefinable sound very Taoist in spirit: a fleeting awareness that you can’t capture or name, but that shapes your perception if you’re quiet enough to notice it.

Looking at it, saying "it will never yield" misstates the situation. It is not avoiding or really not even an "it."

Exactly—that’s a key nuance. Saying “it will never yield” frames the experience as if there’s an object out there that could be grasped if only we tried hard enough. But in the Taoist—and, I’d argue, phenomenological—sense, there is no “it” to grasp at all. What appears as a presence isn’t a thing, a being, or an object; it’s more like a pattern, a process, a background resonance of reality that reveals itself only in passing or in attunement.

So your correction is spot-on: the error isn’t in failing to capture something, it’s in treating the ineffable as if it were an “it” at all. That subtle shift—from chasing an object to noticing a flow—is at the heart of Taoist insight. Once you let go of the idea that there’s something to “yield,” the whole approach changes: you don’t pursue, you allow, and the sense of mystery can exist without distortion.

If you like, I can try to put that into a few concrete examples of how people actually experience this “non-it”—it’s surprisingly relatable once you strip away the abstract talk.

We haven't words; couldn't have words.

Exactly—that’s the crux of it. Language, by its nature, carves reality into discrete, nameable pieces. But what you’re pointing to—the Tao, the ineffable “presence”—is fundamentally uncarvable. Any attempt to describe it with words inevitably transforms it, limits it, or makes it seem like a “thing” when it isn’t.

In that sense, the silence isn’t a failure of expression; it’s the only honest stance. Words can gesture, point, hint, or evoke, but they can never contain or fully convey. That’s why so many traditions use poetry, paradox, or negation (“not this, not that”) to approach the ineffable: they know that literal language is inadequate.

It’s a striking thought—that some aspects of reality, however deeply felt, are forever beyond the net of words. And paradoxically, just realizing that can be more “true” than any label we could invent.