Interesting that drinking wine and homosexual relationships are major sins while you are alive, but after killing innocent people for Allah and reaching paradise, you get to stay plastered and butt bump young boys. Maybe if they followed their perverted needs here on Earth it would be a more peaceful place.

I really don’t think that answers my question.

There are studies on Allah and any progeny he may have.

Have you thought of al-Lat and al-’Uzza and Manat the third, the other – (Sura 53, 19-20)

Go here and go down till you get to a comment from Pass It On

http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/010218.php

He/She does a excellent job of explaining it.

Were the original manuscripts preserved or is the Koran we have now similar to the collection of Old Testament and New Testment which are just copies of copies and even copies of copied translations, rendering them, coincidentally, incapable of ultimate scrutiny?

Also does the Koran include all of the writings of Mohammed or as in the Old Testament & New Testament were there books/suras that were lost, and or didn’t make the final cut?

Who decided how the Koran would be assembled and when was this done?

If these were addressed earlier could someone direct me there.

“And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” Genesis 2:19.

That’s something we all know to be true – we named the things.

The point is that there is no inevitable trajectory of development among religions. A key element neglected by those who assume that there is is is the fact that the content of the teachings of each religion is different. Religions are not infinitely malleable, able to be made over in any way the adherents wish to do so. Rather, they develop along certain parameters, as guided by the principles they teach.

While agreeing with all of this, I offer also that religions are sometimes actively, intentionally developed, and not always by believers. Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke made intensive use of the Scriptures in some of their writings, yet the way is certainly open to doubt the piety of one or more of them. Moreover, in selective, context-free quotation and misquotation from holy books, it seems they could have learned from the examples of previous writers too holy to name. I’m reminded of the careful use Plato made of Homer and the other Greek poets in his dialogues.

So the practice of trying to alter religious opinions from the outside is ancient. You go to spiritual war with the scriptures you have, and I agree they’re not infinitely malleable. But men who are pressed for time, or who don’t trust the believers to develop their religion on their own as they should, can take their chances with Hellfire and try to do the work themselves.

[W]hen one Islamic scholar, Suliman Bashear, taught his students at An-Najah National University in Nablus that the Qur’an and Islam were the products of historical development rather than being delivered in perfect form to Muhammad, his students threw him out of the window of his classroom.

Fresh attempts along this line might be more effective, provided that writers and speakers took greater precautions. What Spinoza and his successors did was extremely disruptive and vitiating, so it seems we could learn much of practical value from their techniques. Augustine’s withering treatment of the old Roman religion in The City of God is probably also a useful model.

Our contemporary resources for spreading corrupting doctrines are vastly greater than those of Augustine and Spinoza. What we seem to need are writers of somewhat similar ability, who know the contemporary muslim languages, and who will relish showing their superiority to Allah.

Let’s keep in mind that Islam is not the first religion to claim that men are without free will.

There are Christians who believe that your name is “written in the Book of Life” by God at the start of time. If your name was not written there, you were meant to go to Hell.

I think Calvin might take issue with this statement.

Would you agree with my assertion that in many ways Islam is the antithesis of Christianity?

In Islam, there is only Allah, and he has never begotten a son, or anything. While in Christianity, Jesus is God’s begotten son. While Christianity is still monotheistic, Islamists will see this as polytheism. So, they reject Christianity due to this. Then there is how Christianity teaches love, kindness, turning the other cheek, praying for those who persecute you, and encourages debate. At the same time, the Qur’an teaches hatred, wrath, and the killing of those who would disagree with the traditional translation.

or am I over simplifying it?

I realize that the law of contradiction isn’t entirely central to Muslim thinking.

Is it even there? I think this explains most of the schizophrenia in Islamic thinking.

The Qur’an, we’re told, is guidance to those who believe in what was revealed to Muhammad as well as in “that which was revealed before” him (v. 4). This involves the Qur’an’s oft-stated assumption that it is the confirmation of the Torah and the Gospel, which teach the same message Muhammad is receiving in the Qur’anic revelations (see 5:44-48).

Of course, Christians have textual evidence dating to the 1st and 2nd century AD proving that we’ve changed nothing. That doesn’t seem to matter to Muslims. When you ask them about the Uthmanic recension and the possibility of textual corruption of even the earliest form of the Qur’an, you get nothing but vitriol.

Robert Spencer is Blogging the Koran at HotAir…….

Mr. Spencer, when you say, there has been no development in Islam as there has been with Christians and Jews of their scriptures; do you mean that the Jews and Christians understand their religion and Gods in a more forgiving and gentle way? ie., less violent? Do you think this is because the Jewish and Christian religions are older and there’s been more time for these changes to occur? If that is so, do you think the Muslim religion might be entering a place and time where it will be forced to change?

It is extraordinarily common to hear people affirming that yes, the Islamic world tends to violence today, but Islam is 600 years younger than Christianity, and just look at the Christian world 600 years ago!

This seems to assume that all things that are labeled “religions” will develop in similar ways, along similar time frames. But there is no reason why this should be so. After all, Buddhism is a religion. Siddharta Gautama lived around 500-400BC. Since there were wars of religion in Europe 1600 years after Christ, should we assume on that basis that there were wars among Buddhists around 1100-1200AD? Judaism was radically transformed in the wake of the destruction of the Temple in 70AD. But there is no correspondingly catastrophic incident in Christian history.

The point is that there is no inevitable trajectory of development among religions. A key element neglected by those who assume that there is is is the fact that the content of the teachings of each religion is different. Religions are not infinitely malleable, able to be made over in any way the adherents wish to do so. Rather, they develop along certain parameters, as guided by the principles they teach.

So in short, I wouldn’t ever expect the development of Islam to follow that of Judaism and Christianity, because even those two didn’t develop in the same ways, and because Islam is sui generis, as are all religions. It has its own teachings and perspectives and emphases, and will develop according to them.

I think you’re probably right, since the families of suicide bombers have praised Allah for granting their son the honor of being a martyr. This assumes that it was entirely a matter of the divine initiative.

Most of the early converts, as CBP has noted already, were pagans. He had few followers in the early years, and the first was indeed his wife. The converts had been polytheists, worshipping Arab tribal gods. They seem to have been impressed by Muhammad personally. After the Night Journey — Muhammad’s claim to have been transported miraculously from Mecca to Jerusalem, thence to Paradise, and then back to Mecca in one night — Muhammad lost some followers.

But when Abu Bakr, one of the earliest and staunchest Muslims, was invited to leave also, he refused, saying that Muhammad had already convinced him of more unbelievable things than that, and everything he had said had proven correct.

Is Islam/Muhammad connected to Ishmael? And if so, is this part of the reason Muhammad had such a hard-on for the Jews?

csdeven on June 10, 2007 at 10:55 AM

The traditional Arabs are the descendants of Ishmael, which is why they claim that Abraham is as much their father as he is that of the Hebrews. Since Ishmael was born before Isaac, this claim regularly includes a belief that the Abrahamic covanent and birthright is theirs, not Isaac’s.

All because Sarah didn’t think God was able to allow her to conceive. (Genesis 16)

The Qur’an is not to be questioned or judged by any standard outside itself; rather, it is the standard by which all other things are to be judged. That, of course, is not significantly different from the way many other religions regard their Holy Writ. But there has been no development in Islam of the historical and textual criticism that have transformed the ways Jews and Christians understand their scriptures today. The Qur’an is a book never to be doubted, never to be questioned:

Mr. Spencer, when you say, there has been no development in Islam as there has been with Christians and Jews of their scriptures; do you mean that the Jews and Christians understand their religion and Gods in a more forgiving and gentle way? ie., less violent? Do you think this is because the Jewish and Christian religions are older and there’s been more time for these changes to occur? If that is so, do you think the Muslim religion might be entering a place and time where it will be forced to change?

Thank you again for your time and devotion to this!