I am quite impressed by the oral/recitation nature of the way Quran is "enjoyed" by its followers. It strikes me as bringing back the essence of God worshiping by ordinary people in their ordinary life, or the "lectio divina" practice of mystic Christianity, thus its power and "stickiness" to its mass followers all over the world.
I am also struck by the various exegeses the Quran scholars and theologians have developed through various lenses, not only considering the literal meaning of the text, but also from the historical, moral, allegorical, metaphorical angles. This is similar to what many Christian scholars and theologians have been doing with the Bible since the beginning of Christianity.
It's interesting on one hand Islam accepts the truth that God is indescribable yet on the other hand it spells out 99 terms/attributes to describe Him, that to me indicates the equal emphases on the mystic and the practical sides of Islam.
I find the Gita verses most enjoyable in the course so far.
One major theme I gather from reading it is the condemnation of desire as the origin of sin, or evil, etc., yet in the following verse it says:
"Enriched by sacrifice, the gods will give you the delights you desire."
Here I think it implicitly tries to say there's a difference between "desire" and "delight". Stay away from desires (bad), and you will get delights (good).
Another verse I find interesting is:
"In the three worlds, there is nothing I must do, nothing unattained to be attained, yet I engage in action."
It's Lord Krishna citing himself as an example of action in discipline--another major theme of this teaching, I suppose. But I also find this "do it even if I don't quite need to" sentiment resonates with the "even I don't know how the world is created" verse we read in the creation hymn of Rig Veda in the beginning of the course:
"Whence this creation has arisen - perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not - the One who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only He knows or perhaps even He does not know."
As I've learned through the course so far, Judaism is more than a religion, but a combination of God, Peoplehood, and Torah. Though the God part can be arguably universal (same God as Christian and Islam's), the "Peoplehood" part, unlike both Christianity and Islam, which accept believers from different ethnicities into one faith family, is taken to mean only people with Semitic lineage, be they Sephardi or Ashkenazi or Jews from any other parts of the world. Thus a person can be agnostic yet still called Jewish if he/she is of ethnic Jew ancestry, while in theory a non-Semite person can convert to Judaism, as it did/does happen, it is not actively solicited and when it happens it usually involves an ethnic Jew in an inter-racial union.
As to the Torah part, it is meant to include both the written Torah (the so-called Hebrew Bible) and the verbal Torah and rabbinical canons. Though the majority of the Hebrew Bible contains the same contents as the Old Testament of Christian Bible, they are arranged differently, and do not include books in Old Testament that are deemed "apocryphal" by Judaism standard. Even more significantly, the Hebrew Bible is meant to be the foundation of the Judaism faith, with oral Torah and many rabbinical interpretations to come, while the Old Testament is meant to be the prelude to the New Testament and the Christian faith.
In conclusion: the Peoplehood factor, the open-ended interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, and the diverse experiences Jewish people encountered through their diaspora that influence their beliefs and customs, make Judaism much more than a religion of the Old Testament.
* Out of the 5 major world religions (Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism) the "World Religions Through Their Scriptures" series cover, I only take 3 of them above.
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