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Real İslam is only in Quran

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I've asked this of the Jesus Freaks many a time without getting an answer and I have even less hope to get anything coherent, much less a coherent answer, out of the Muhammed Freak but here goes, just to put it on record.

Why? What's the point? Why is God keeping it so his words are so hard to understand? What does "this" (gesturing at the amount of wasted effort spent trying to figure out what God said that humanity has spent and the bloodshed that has caused) serve? What does his words having to be parsed and translated and interpreted by an endless line of priests and oracles and soothsayers accomplish from the perspective of either God or the general populace (oddly the only advantage seems to be TO the soothsayers which I think tips the hand rather much)? Why does the infinitely perfect being talk to us in such a demonstrably ****** and massively inefficient ways?

If it's important that we know this stuff why doesn't God just snap his fingers and make a clear, concise, parable free actually readable book of laws and rules just appear on everyone's night stand, in their preferred language, complete with a glossary and a 1-800 number to call if you have questions and QR codes to Youtube videos showing demonstrations of how to do it right?

Why, hundreds or even thousands of years after God sent Jesus or Mohammed or John Smith or L. Ron Hubbard or whoever to "write his message" has God just not noticed that we aren't getting it and are obviously never gonna get it? Why the "Jeez people I had someone tell the random tribe of illiterate goat herders the parable about the one legged prostitute and the jar of pickles three thousand years ago why else do you need?" routine? To what end and what purpose is this leading?

God is supposed to the be this being that is so much better then us we can't even comprehend it and this makes no sense in that context. In the past I compared to me rehydrating a batch of Sea Monkeys, telling one random Sea Monkey a vague parable, waiting for 10 generations of Sea Monkeys to go by and then one day randomly killing all the Sea Monkeys because they didn't get that that parable meant they were supposed to face a certain direction in their tank twice a day and sing a song about how much they like my hair cut and it's not MY fault they didn't get it.

WHAT PURPOSE DOES THE UNCLARITY SERVE IN GOD'S MESSAGE?
 
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In a followup to JoeMorgue's question, why does not a single holy book, supposedly written by an all powerful, all loving god, contain simple instructions on how to make penicillin? A simple steam engine? Basic virology and bacteriology?
And more Islamic specific, until very recently the only way to have sterile drinks (and thus safe drinks) was to use alcohol. Why does your god specifically forbid the one thing that could have saved untold lives from things like cholera?
 
And what Lukraak_Sisser said. Some Grand Holy Book spends a bajillion pages on "Smeckle begat Horance who begat Flibberijohn who begat..." and it can't spare one line going:

"Oh and by the way, keep your drinking water and your pooping water separate as much as possible, that's super important."

That one line right there, that didn't need a ******* dumbass vague parable to get across and could be understood by anyone without needing a holy man to interpret it at any level of our species' social or technological development, would have done humanity more good at literally any point in history prior to 1854 then everything in the Bible, Quran, Hebrew Bible, the Tao Te Ching, The Bhagavad Gita, the Torah, and the Upanishads combined.

Religious people do this all the time, it's one of their stupidest forms of bad apologetics. "Well ah you see ackshulally the rule in East Orthodox Rastafarianism that says you shouldn't eat eggplants because eggplants were created by the devil is ackshually because eggplants were often poisonous in the place and time that East Orthodox Rastafarianism developed..."

THEN WHY THE **** DID GOD NOT JUST GO "Don't eat the eggplants, they are often poisonous."
 
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Emre_1974tr said:
In the verse they give, it is only said that a person is travelling from one place to another.
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A prophet travelled from Mecca to the Temple at Jerusalem (1,240 kilometres / 770 miles) without knowing it was destroyed centuries earlier by the Roman Empire. From there, he climbed an invisible ladder to the heavens above.

Is the person you mention the same as the prophet (PBUH) I mention?
 
There was a stand up bit I heard once where someone joked that the Bible was mistranslated and that Mary was just nagging Joseph the entire trip; "Mary rode Joseph's ass all the way to Bethlehem."

This is like that but not trying to be a joke.
 
JoeMorgue said:
And what Lukraak_Sisser said. Some Grand Holy Book spends a bajillion pages on "Smeckle begat Horance who begat Flibberijohn who begat..." and it can't spare one line going:

"Oh and by the way, keep your drinking water and your pooping water separate as much as possible, that's super important."

That one line right there, that didn't need a ******* dumbass vague parable to get across and could be understood by anyone without needing a holy man to interpret it at any level of our species' social or technological development, would have done humanity more good at literally any point in history prior to 1854 then everything in the Bible, Quran, Hebrew Bible, the Tao Te Ching, The Bhagavad Gita, the Torah, and the Upanishads combined.

Religious people do this all the time, it's one of their stupidest forms of bad apologetics. "Well ah you see ackshulally the rule in East Orthodox Rastafarianism that says you shouldn't eat eggplants because eggplants were created by the devil is ackshually because eggplants were often poisonous in the place and time that East Orthodox Rastafarianism developed..."

THEN WHY THE **** DID GOD NOT JUST GO "Don't eat the eggplants, they are often poisonous."
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Germ theory can be summarised in a sentence.
 
If I polled 100 random but demographically diverse Islamic people who self-described as "fairly religious or higher" and I asked them if there was flying mule in the Quran what would "Survey says" answer be?
 
Emre_1974tr said:
As can be seen, there is no flying winged mule Burak in the verses. Point.
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Even if we accept this specific point to be true, why on earth does that matter? Ok, the Quran doesn't contain this specific point of obvious nonsense, but what about all the obvious nonsense it does contain?
 
Emre_1974tr said:
No, the laws of physics are God's way of doing things too and none of this is magic. The big bang is not magic, neither is teleportation or travelling in a spaceship.
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Please explain, with reference to the specific supporting surahs, how your god overcomes Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, so as to make teleportation possible.

Emre_1974tr said:
By the way, you don't know what does or does not violate the laws of physics.
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Thus proving, as if further proof were needed, that you simply don't understand science at all.
 
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JoeMorgue said:
I would like an answer to my question Emre.
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Emre’s not making his point here clearly (obviously!), but he’s being internally consistent on this one. He says the only true Islam is in the Quran, not in any hadiths and fatwas etc.

The Quran itself doesn’t contain any winged horse/mule/donkey, it just hand waves the miracle journey in a throwaway line. Hadiths later filled in the gaps with Buraq.

Emre, unlike most Muslims, chooses to ignore the hadiths.

However, that doesn’t detract from MarkCorrigan’s point and your long list which remains unaddressed.
 
"At least they are consistently wrong" isn't a flex worthy of note in my world.

And even then, with that low bar to pass, he fails because he has to lie about what's in the Quran.

All major religions are more about their cultural fandoms then their religious canon.

Find me a Christian, Muslim, or Jew whose day to day religious is mostly based on what's in their holy books. I'll wait.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Find me a Christian, Muslim, or Jew whose day to day religious is mostly based on what's in their holy books. I'll wait.
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Define 'mostly'.

Emre_1974tr said:
As can be seen, there is no flying winged mule Burak in the verses. Point.
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I have checked this out and it appears to be true.

The Quran may be full of fiction, but that doesn't mean it's OK to make up stuff about it. Start Trek is fiction too and everybody knows it, but you wouldn't get very far arguing that transporters are actually winged mules. People would ask "what episode was that in?", and fan fiction doesn't count.
 
JoeMorgue said:
"At least they are consistently wrong" isn't a flex worthy of note in my world.
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I guess for me it depends on the posture of the discussion. Something can be logically consistent yet factually wrong (or at best, untestable). A lot of religion for me falls under the "wrong or untestable" heading too, which means I don't usually care whether its axioms are consistent or not. When someone asks me to believe something, I generally stop if they can't supply evidence. I don't care what they think they can supply instead of it.

But sometimes for me there's suitable academic interest in the logical consistency of an argument. For polemical purposes I might be tempted to argue that it can't be true if it isn't also logically consistent. Conversely someone might argue that a proposition is entertainable if it follows logically from acceptable first principles, even if there's no direct evidence for the outcome. This isn't as woo as it sounds. It's the basis of the hypothetico-deductive method in science, around which we build proper controls.

I'm not usually willing to accept the axioms of a religion, i.e., "God exists." But even accepting them academically for the sake of argument, I usually find that you can't reason from them to the conclusions proffered by the religionists. Their intended proof by induction falls flat too.

So in sum, if something fails an inductive proof and fails an empirical proof, then you head off two different modes by which someone might argue its truth. But that doesn't mean you're wrong or wrong-headed. If someone's not interested in that philosophical tap dance, then I don't fault them at all.

All major religions are more about their cultural fandoms than their religious canon.

Find me a Christian, Muslim, or Jew whose day to day religious is mostly based on what's in their holy books. I'll wait.
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To help answer this from my perspective within the confines of the challenge—

Roger Ramjets said:
Define 'mostly'.
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—I think the sentiment is generally correct that sectarianism more proximally determines behavior that canonicity, but I think the relationship between canon and fandom is a little more nuanced. More often than not, in my experience, sectarian commentary is postured as an interpretation of canon, not just a hedge or extension of canon. Granted, in this thread we deal with clear extension in the hadith. They're anecdotes that relate to canon. But I don't think this holds the same in all religions.

When sectarianism is simply, "This is what this Qu'ran surah means," then it's certainly right to suppose that one sect will differ from another, and that this characterizes the distinction and the day-to-day. But it's harder to say that the individual sectarians are ignoring the canon. They both look to canon, but they view it through a sectarian lens. This is not to downplay the effect of that view. But I don't find it useful to consider the lens by itself.

Incidentally, I think Peter Gomes hit the nail on the head in The Good Book when he says that the most insidious interpretation is the one people deny they're making. "To read is to interpret," he says. And if he's right, then there really is no objective understanding of the canon to look to. There's no way to look at canon except through a lens that can then be criticized as fandom. That makes the objective meaning of the canon little more than a Platonic ideal.

Roger Ramjets said:
The Quran may be full of fiction, but that doesn't mean it's OK to make up stuff about it.
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Agreed. We stop being skeptics when we do that.
 
Roger Ramjets said:
The Quran may be full of fiction, but that doesn't mean it's OK to make up stuff about it. Start Trek is fiction too and everybody knows it, but you wouldn't get very far arguing that transporters are actually winged mules. People would ask "what episode was that in?", and fan fiction doesn't count.
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JoeMorgue himself isn’t making it up, it is part of Islamic belief, just not in the holy book.

An imam presumably made it up when people in AD700 or so asked ‘hang on, those places are too far to travel in a night, it’s normally a two week journey, how did he do that?’

“Um…he had a donkey”

“Even a donkey couldn’t do that”

“It was a winged donkey!”

Most Muslims here - even those of a scientific bent - believe this story, and at least a few actually believe it’s in the Quran. The fact it’s in a hadith makes it ‘true’.

So it’s effectively become canon for the majority of Muslims. To look at it in the Star Trek light, it’s TNG and Voyager, rather than fan fic.

Emre is insisting TOS is the only true Star Trek, none of this later stuff.
 
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