Do you know who Muhammad is?

Today at work one of my coworkers told a story about how she resold an old text book online to a guy named Jesus. I find this coworker to be well educated and to be one who prides herself on knowing ‘whats up’. She was laughing at herself for not having known back then that people today with the name Jesus pronounce it with a spanish accent, different from how english speakers would say the Prophet’s name. She was commenting, though, on how she found it a bit odd for people to name themselves after a prophet. Myself and another coworker mentioned how this was also common with the name Muhammad. I was surprised when my coworker responded by asking ‘who is Muhammad?’ So we kindly informed her that Muhammad is the prophet founder of Islam, the second largest religion in the world with some 1.5 billion adherents. Not only that, but Muhammad (according to numerous google results when ‘most common name in the world’ was searched) is the number one most common name in the world.

This coworker said that she had gone to a Catholic school her whole life and got a bit defensive saying ‘when was I suppose to have learned that?’ I guess I just found it interesting (shocking?) more than anything, especially coming from my religious background where ‘progressive revelation‘ is a principal belief.

Then when I got home I saw in the news headlines that a new study had been conducted on religion in the US and some of the results were quite interesting, one of them being that 92% of those surveyed believe in God. Here is the link to the article to read more. I’m always interested to know what the ’spiritual pulse’ is on the world we live in.

Just some food for thought, I suppose.