Lord Larehip

Islam is so much bulls-hit that the only way anyone could believe it is by having it shoved down his or her throat at gunpoint. which is usually the case in most religions and in Islam in particular.

For instance, Muslims say the true Quran must be written in Arabic. For what? Because it the original language of the Quran? Well, here's the problem--it isn't! Modern Arabic did not exist at the time the Quran was said to be written by the very Muslim scholars who claim to have studied it deeply. They studied nothing. They wasted their time and everyone else's because they are a bunch of clowns.


An ancient Syrian coin minted only 5 or so decades after the supposed death of Mohammad depicts a figure called "Muhammad" as holding a cross. This, in spite of the fact that Muslims in the captured lands in the 9th and 10th centuries forbade Christians to display the cross.

The name Muhammad is also a title meaning "praised one" or "chosen one." In the Quran, the name "Muhammad" is only mentioned four times and three of the those times, the name is actually being employed as a title and the attributes of that title the Quran also attribute to Jesus! For instance, "Muhammad is nothing but a messenger; messengers have passed away before him." (3:144) and "the messiah, the son of Mary, is nothing but a messenger; messengers have passed away before him." (5:75)

Jesus (Issa in Arabic) is, in fact, mentioned 25 times in the Quran while the personage of Muhammad is mentioned perhaps once.


Part of the "Sunrise" collection of 8th century Islamic coins showing the two fish of Pisces violates the Islamic ban on depicting living creatures in art as well as glorifying the Age of Jesus, Pisces, which is why jesus is imaged as a fish.

At the Dome of the Rock, completed in 691 and said to be a triumph of Islam, are Quranic inscriptions in the arcade area supposedly taken directly from the Quran and yet many of them are distinctly different than what appears in the Quran today. The inscription use words not in the modern text but, even stranger, references to Jesus, son of Mary. But why do these verses, among the earliest known, have so much extraneous or extra-Quranic material if they were quoting from the same Qurans Muslims read from now? Some verses also change person--a verse in the Quran in the 3rd person appears in the inscriptions in the first person! The only explanation is that this book was not yet written but was just then beginning to be written--some 60 years AFTER Muhammad's death.

The original Muslims were likely a Christian sect that regarded Jesus or Issa as a messenger of god but NOT a son of god. Being ostracized and marginalized, they then split off from Christianity altogether.

Jacob of Edessa writes that the Muslims (whom he calls Mahgraye) "confess firmly that he [Jesus] is the true Messiah who is to come" but "they do not assent to call the Messiah God or the Son of God."

The 7th century seizure of Jerusalem was chronicled by Christian writers as Sophronius who wrote extensively of the "Saracens" or Arab conquerors and their invasion and occupation. He mentions how these Saracens disdained the cross and vandalized the churches. But with everything Sophronius tells us about the the Saracens, he never tells us that they were called Muslims nor that they belonged to religion called Islam nor that they had a holy book called a Quran nor that they had a messenger of god named Muhammad. For all he wrote about them, certainly he would have included this information had he been aware of it. How could he not have heard of Muhammad since it was in his name the Muslims claimed to be doing all this conquering? Only one way, the Muhammad that Islam now bows to did not yet exist. As late as 874, there are manuscripts that refer to the Arabs but not as Muslims. These Arabs deny the divinity of Christ but there is no mention of Quran or a Muhammad.

The earliest reference to a Muhammad is Sebos, a bishop, who in the 660s or 70s wrote of a "Mahmet" of the Ishmaelites who preached monotheism but who also preached of the Jews' right to the Holy Land which is blasphemous to Muslims today. Again, no mention of Muslims, Islam or a Quran.

The Arabs themselves spent a lot of time manufacturing hadiths (non-Quranic sayings of Muhammad). They are so contradictory and so clearly forged that there is no way to reconcile them as actual sayings of Muhammad. It is clear that among the Muslims themselves, the rulers (warlords) were not interested in Muhammad but only in how they could hide behind his name to grab power.

CallMeTex

You can make similar kinds of arguments for any big guy in the sky religion. None of the holy books or Abrahamic Religions make any sense. One is about as good as the other. Or as bad.

Remember the words of Robert Pirsig (from "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"): "When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion."

ataraxia

I am not Muslim but I'd like to point out that while Modern Arabic didn't exist at the time, classical Arabic did. The Quran was written in Classical Arabic, and when Muslims read from the Quran they are speaking Classical Arabic. Languages change over time and there is no such thing as a language being exactly the same as it was hundreds of years ago.

Lord Larehip

No. The oldest known manuscripts of the Quran have no diacritical marks. Arabic notates consonants and long vowels but not short ones. As the vocabulary expanded and the culture of the Arabs changed and expanded, it became necessary to have a way to express short vowels because it was impossible to distinguish words. Ten words could be spelled identically but there was no way to know which word was meant. So diacritical marks--little dots and slashes--were invented to be added to these words to distinguish them from one another. This occurred about the 660s under the reign of Muawiya I of the Umayyad Dynasty. This convention did not exist in Muhammad's time since he was said to have died in 632.

Yet the Quran is written in diacritical marks. So it may be classical Arabic but of a more modern form. I did not mean to imply that it was written in Modern or Literary Arabic although I wasn't clear on that--apologies. The problem is, of course, who made the decision to add the diacritical marks and how do we know they did it faithfully? It could only have been arbitrary and done to push various agendas.

But here are a mess of other problems:

1. The Quran itself as well many hadiths say that the Quran must be in Arabic, that it was delivered in Arabic and only makes sense it Arabic. Why would these assertions even be necessary?? The only reason they would be is because the earliest texts were, in fact, not in Arabic.

2. Is there evidence of this? Yes, from the Quran itself. Sura 16: 103 makes mention of a mysterious "foreigner" (or "Persian") believed to have supplied Muhammad with his verses. Ibn Ishaq from his book The Life of Muhammad believed this foreigner was "Jabr the Christian, slave of the B. al-Hadrami, and teacher of Muhammad." Muqatil ibn Sulayman, who died in 767, identified the foreigner as Abu Fukayha Yasar whom he states was a Greek-speaking Jew. Muqatil further quotes in his work Tasfir al-Qu'ran Muhammad's chief critic, an-Nasr ibn al-Harith: "The Qur'an is naught but lies that Muhammad himself has forged...Those who help him are Addas, a slave of Huwaytib b. Abd al-Uzza, Yasar, a servant of Amr b. al-Hadrami, and Jabr who was a Jew, and then became a Muslim...This Quran is only a tale of the Ancients, like the tales of Rustam and Isfandiyar. These three [were] teaching Muhammad at dawn and in the evening." 25:4-5 of the Quran virtually restates that very accusation.

3. Since many of the Old Testament stories appear in the Quran, we either accept that they were given to Muhammad by Allah or that others reused earlier non-Arabic material to make the Quran. Many of the verses in the Quran are ambiguous if not unintelligible. About a fifth of the book falls into that category. An example occurs in 2:29 where it is written: "It is He who created for you all that is in the earth, then He lifted Himself to heaven and leveled them seven heavens; and he had knowledge of everything." The Arabic phrase uses "them" but what does it mean? Leveled them seven heavens? What or whom is the "them" the passage refers to?

4. If that isn't bad enough, 4:12 uses the word "kalala" in regards to inheritance law. What is it? It is not an Arabic word. It is, in fact, not a word known to any language. 83:7-9 mentions Sijjin. What is it? No one knows. What we do know is that it is not a word in Arabic. The Quran seems to to say that Sijjin is "a book inscribed" but what book?? 21:104 uses the word sijill--"roll up heaven as a sijill." Some have translated it as "scroll" as a very similar sentence occurs in Revelation in the New Testament. This may be its meaning, it certainly seems so, the problem is--where did the word come from and why is it in the Quran at all?? Again, it is not Arabic and does not belong to any known language. Some have theorized that it is a corruption of the Greek word sigillon or "imperial edict" but that would only prove the Quran was not inspired by god and was not originally written in Arabic. 112:2 uses the phrase Allahu as-samad and there are as many translations of this phrase as there are translators. Quite simply, no one knows what it means.

5. The very title of chapter (sura) 108 is "Al-Kawthar". What is that? It is not used anywhere else in the Arabic language. There are literally dozens of possible translations by various scholars as to its meaning which only verifies that it has none. Yet, the Quran itself has the audacity to proclaim that it itself is written in "Arabic, pure and clear" as it says in 16:103 and that god would not have sent the Quran in any other language than Arabic (41:44) yet we see this is bulls-hit, pure and clear.

6. All the names of the Old Testament prophets that appear in the Quran are in Syrian and specifically the Aramaic dialect. Much of the sentence structure of the Quran is Syraic and not Arabic. In Syriac, the very word "quran" is a reading from scripture for liturgical purposes. The very title of the book appears to be Syriac.

7. There is no Arabic paganism to be found in the Quran not even statements or polemics against it and yet, this is was what the majority of Arabs worshiped in Muhammad's day--what he himself would have been taught as a boy. Why doesn't the Quran mention it? Likely, because the Quran was not written in Arabia at all but in Syria or an Aramaic-speaking people who were not Arabs.

Lord Larehip

That's not the point of this thread.

CallMeTex

You are talking about the title of your post as being the point. That's a shrug for me. Was Jesus, Jesus? A lot of stuff is co-opted based on who was writing what, when. But you have a larger point or I thought you did. You say....

"Islam is so much bulls-hit that the only way anyone could believe it is by having it shoved down his or her throat at gunpoint. which is usually the case in most religions and in Islam in particular."

Then you go on with a great amount of detail of things wrong with the holy book. I echo your original statement but added... pick any of the books.

So here is my theory (which I stole) - people always believe the nonsense that is passed down to them by their parents. Why? Because the brain is not rational. It isn't a biological computer. And over our about 150,000 years of man's evolution (and more from our ancestors) those that could accept what mom/dad said without much back talk were more likely to survive. We are programmed. (For better discussion see Dawkin's "God Delusion").

As it turns out, the number 1 predictor by far of a person's religion, is the religion of the parents. You are not Muslim because you were not raised Muslim.

Similarly, we are programmed for Type 1 errors or false positives rather than Type 2 errors or false negatives. If early man identified a tiger shaking the bush and runs, he has attributed agency to a natural occurrence. He is rewarded for his paranoia by getting a bit more exercise. There isn't much price to be paid for being wrong. If early man says no tiger, and he is wrong (type 2 or false negative), his genetic line comes to an end. Type 1 errors are favored.

So given an authority figure preaches a big sky guy can smite us, it is easy to appease the big guy and give agency to the natural world. Perhaps we are programmed to live Paschal's wager. Paschal argues that there is less risk in believing in a God and being wrong than choosing not to believe and being wrong.

From my perspective man is but a blink in time. The earth is 4.5B years old, and man has only been here for about 150K. Heck, look how long we have had a written record. Civilization is like yesterday. And the only reason we are here at all is because a mass extinction event wipe out the dinosaurs and paved the way for the rise of mammals. Dinosaurs ruled for about 65 million years compared to our meager time of existence. And realize that extinction event was only one of several. So... it's hard to accept we are the Big Guy's special monkey as it has been quite a circuitous route to being here at all.

Coming back to your post then... to "Islam in particular", I respond ... not so particular. If you don't believe me go watch the Southpark analysis of the Mormons. Have you heard that story? But still... all the stories are kind of goofy. And if that isn't your point... it is mine. And as to the question in your title... does it matter?

Paul Smeenus

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Cuthbert

lol @ Islam.

Franco Pepe Kalle

Mohammed and Jesus are the not the same people. They did however pray to GOD.

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The problem with Franco Pepe Kalle is that he is a unpredictable character. There is surprising info about this man. You think he only likes Franco and Pepe Kalle but when you find out that he hears other artists, you are shock.

Girls are the sexy thing that God created.

Important to notice FPK.

Paul Smeenus

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