Is Islam in accordance with rationality and science?

[bob x]

Here is a map of the US prior to the Brown case and it already shows that the scene was not "very different" from what I described:

You do not understand how the US worked then. In the South, blacks and whites lived intermingled, so school districts set up separate school systems; in Michigan, it was not allowed for school districts to separate the schools, so the way that whites prevented black children from attending the same schools as white children was by forbidding black families to live in the same neighborhoods. There were no black children in my elementary school, not a one; because there were no black families for miles around. In the 1960's "open occupancy" laws were passed, ending the legal restriction of blacks to particular neighborhoods, but in practice, blacks who moved into white neighborhoods were often burned out of their homes or otherwise intimidated. Judges ordered the schools mixed by "bussing" plans, which transported black children from black neighborhoods to formerly-all-white schools, and vice versa: the public opposition to this was intense and violent.

Excuse me if I don't take you as a credible witness of how things really were (all over your country).

No, I will not excuse you. I would never have the freaking nerve to lecture a Pakistani about how things really are in Pakistan. It is very rude, and makes you look stupid.

Yea [the school-prayer ban] was "enormously unpopular"... in a very few states. Namely, Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama and Florida.

And in Michigan, and in Indiana, just to name the states where I lived back then. The states you name may have been the only ones to put it in the law books that schools were required to open the day with prayers, but elsewhere in the country similar customs were taken for granted: before we ate, we had to chant, "God is great! God is good! Let us thank him for our food!" No, it doesn't rhyme, and always sounded stupid, but that's what everyone did until the courts said that wasn't allowed; and the change was not popular, though nowadays few would want to go back.

In other words, you cant prove your case on abortion either.

You were claiming that the courts rule out of fear of violence from mobs; it is not relevant to your claim which way the majority sentiment is, but which side commands the violent mobs. All the threats of violence come from, and always have come from, the anti-abortion side.

You are completely ignoring the point. Why did these Nazi courts survive if what the verdicts they were issuing went against German public opinion?

First of all, they weren't "Nazi" courts, just "the courts" as they had existed in Germany from before. And secondly, I already pointed out that they did not survive: their functions were taken away from them, until they were not allowed by the Nazis to decide anything anymore, precisely because they were not "politically reliable".

It is a fact that by the time these show trials started the Nazi party was the only party which owned public adoration.

It is indeed a fact. And that is what makes it amazing that the judges had the courage to acquit all the defendants in the "show trials"; which is why the Nazis did not let the judges handle political cases, ever again, and eventually would not let them handle anything.

If it is so independent from public pressure, then explain why marijuana is illegal, but alcohol isn't? Just try and explain to me how that is not a case of public attitude influencing law, which (for whatever reason) decides that alcohol is fine, but pot isn't.

You do not understand the concept of "separation of powers". The courts are not the legislature. A judge cannot look a law and decide whether to uphold it or strike it down on the basis of "If I were writing the law, is this how I would decide?" If the majority has supported a law, it is uphold unless it can be struck down on the basis of "invidious discrimination": that is, the judge can only look at whether this is the sort of law which a majority does not have the authority to impose on the minority. The first question, as I explained before, is: does the law discriminate against an immutable characteristic, or against a voluntary action? The law discriminates against pot-smokers, a voluntary class, so one can avoid being discriminated against by: choosing not to smoke pot. Therefore, the judge only asks for the weakest kind of justification for the law: is there any "rational basis"? Any intoxicants can make people lazy or do damage: that is enough of an argument; of course there are arguments for allowing them (intoxicants give enjoyment) but it is not up to the judge to weigh which considerations are stronger or weaker (that is the legislature's job), just to see that there exists at least one rational consideration in favor of the law the majority chose.

Yea, tell that to Israel. The fact is that whoever wins the war, owns the land.

You are telling me "Israel discriminates against the Arabs in the occupied territories"? Yes, of course that's true; who could possibly say otherwise? Are you also saying that nothing should be done to change that?

Natives have to accept that reality, just as the Palestinians have to accept theirs today.

Well, tell that to Palestine. They won't hear it from Americans; God knows we have tried to explain it to them over the years, but maybe if they started hearing it from other Muslims they might listen. If they accept that they lost the war, and that there is no purpose served by re-fighting and re-re-fighting the war they already lost, so that they lose again, and again and again: THEN it would become possible to give them some territory back and let them live in peace. The keys to their prison are in their own hands, and always have been.

Look, as far as medinah is concerned, just go and read up on whatever source you want. I have never encountered any credible academic claim of tyranny by the Prophet himself. The claims of Muslim tyranny begin once the Muslim rulers who came a century later started expanding

I'll take your word for it. I don't know much about the Medinah period, as I have admitted; I was just back-projecting what the later Muslim rulers acted like on to the original situation, and that is unfair, then I stand corrected.

Do you have a point here? How does this support your argument that the Quran is "randomly jumbled" ??
The Quran picks up on Jesus (pbuh) story after the story of Israel is given, which is only logical.

It goes from the decay of Israel, to the emergence of Muhammad, and then to Jesus, without indicating that there is a backtrack here (of course, we already know that Jesus has to be before Muhammad) or telling us where in the timeline Jesus fit. It was rude of me to call the Qur'an's order "random" (farhan's word "didactic" is better: what comes next depends upon what moral is being drawn from the story just told) but it is not "chronological"; and in particular there are never any time-spans given (quite unlike the Bible, which gives year-counts all the time).

I have given you the numbers of The Quran. There is only one numbering scheme.

The numbers you gave me did not direct me to the verses you were talking about; I really cannot figure out what system you are using.

The Quran mentions the histories of prophets that came between Moses and Jesus (pbut), like Solomon and David (pbut).

The Qur'an never SAYS that Solomon and David were "between" Moses and Jesus. It is only because we have the Bible that we have any idea about the ordering or the timeline; if all we had was the Qur'an it would be hard to tell who came before whom.

Do you agree that Noah (pbuh) preceeded all of them? Yes, fine.

But the fact that Noah is mentioned first would not, if we did not have other sources, tell us that chronologically he came first; anymore than the mention of Muhammad before Jesus meant that Muhammad preceded Jesus.

Next is mentioned Hud. Verse 65 says "To Ad we sent their brother Hud". He was a prophet, sent to the great grandchildren of Noah, in the city of Iram (Quran chapter 89: 6-13). Regarding this city:

The December 1978 edition of the National Geographic Magazine records that in 1973, the city of Ebla was excavated in Syria. The city was discovered to be 4,300 years old. Researchers found in the library of Ebla a record of all of the cities with which Ebla had done business. On the list was the specific name of the city of "Iram" (and not the name of the general region of Ubar). The people of Ebla had apparently done business with the people of "Iram".

Yes, the ORIGIN of 'Ad (and its capital of Iram) is thousands of years deep; but its DOWNFALL was between 100 and 200 CE: that is when the archaeologists find that Iram was buried by sandstorms. Hud is said to have been sent to 'Ad to warn them of their imminent downfall. This is the "didactic" order: the Qur'an talks about Noah, and that connects to 'Ad, because 'Ad was founded so long ago just a couple generations after Noah, and that connects to the fall of 'Ad, much more recently, and that connects to Thamud, because Salih reminded the people of Thamud to remember what had happened to 'Ad, and then it jumps back in time to Sodom, because that is another famous case of sudden destruction; this is not a chronological order. If other Muslim commentators before you have been misled into thinking that Hud and Salih must have been in between Noah and Lot, that is not actually the Qur'an's fault: it does not, in general, pretend to tell us who came before whom; it does say that the founding of 'Ad was a few generations after Noah, and of course the fall of 'Ad is after the founding, although the Qur'an does not clue us in that this is many thousands of years later, and then the story of Salih references the fall of 'Ad as an event which had already happened, but does not say how long previous.

After this, the next section mentions Thamud, and their prophet Salih (pbuh). Ptolemy has mentioned in his writings.

Ptolemy lists all the peoples of the world, as best he knows, and where they live, as of the time that he is writing which is in the 1st century CE, and 'Ad and Thamud were still going then. Ptolemy never wrote any ancient history.

This tribe flourished two+ centuries after Ad.

Thamud flourished from ~1000 BCE to ~500 CE overlapping with 'Ad, starting well over a thousand years later than the start of 'Ad and ending a few centuries later than the end of 'Ad.

Then Lot (pbuh) is mentioned, then Shuaib (pbuh) who is mentioned as being sent to Midian. He was a decendent of Abraham (pbuh) in the fifth generation, according to my footnotes.

Commentators have said that; the Qur'an does not.

Ptolemy has mentioned Midian by the name of Modiana on the Red Sea

As I said, there were still Midianites in the 1st century CE; "Midianites" were "destroyed" many many times, since the word was a generic term.

Still relying on "Silas" eh?

Not paying any attention to what I said, eh? Quite the contrary, I said FORGET "silas" and rely on Imam Muslim, Siddiqi, Budzaiwi, Husain, and the Qur'an itself. Do all those sources become bad because "silas" correctly recapitulated what they say? Can you answer any of the points I said were "clear" from those sources?

Yea, I am sure "silas" has

If you agree that it is unreasonable to expect someone to read every Jewish text, then the burden of proof is on your side: show me one example of the claimed usage. It is not reasonable to say, "However many texts you have looked at and not found one, maybe maybe maybe there is an example of such a usage hidden somewhere you haven't checked yet." Nor is it reasonable to demand that I find some source who will claim the "universal negative"; such a source would have to have read everything before he makes such a claim. Find me an academic source that says "Sister" has never been used to mean "hermaphroditic clone"; I bet you can't! That is why I originally said I didn't believe that any book would "talk about what never happens"; because I didn't think anyone would claim to have read everything.

Now look: in the Bible, unlike in the Qur'an, it is perfectly clear that David was in between Moses and Jesus; Jesus is called the "son of David". If you demand of me, "Show that there was any such usage of 'son' to mean a distant descendant," I can easily answer, "Yes, yes, of course: here are examples of such usages by the bushel-load." Why can't Muslims come up with even ONE example of the usage they claim, after this question has been asked for fourteen centuries?

 

[bob x]

this doesnt help you dude. At most you can try and argue that the interpretation has shifted to another derivative, even that is shaky. The actual word is still the same even then.

Another "derivative" is NOT the "same word". Will you please understand that "sticky" and "stacked" are not the same word, and that "st_ck_" is not a word at all, just the consonantal framework of a word? Both the root (consonantal framework) and the derivation (vowels and optional prefixes/suffixes) are required before you have a "word", and both are essential to the meaning.

Gimme a break. Those idiots would have been led astray one way or another. With or without the Quran. Their idiots! And idiots do idiotic things.

But we would much prefer that they were led astray "another" way, not the way they are led astray "with" the Qur'an. The particular idiotic thing they do with the Qur'an is to commit large numbers of random pointless murders, and threats of murders, and we are tired of it. If you will not do anything about it, we will.

What's bizarre is that you actually think most people on the bottom of the social ladder are better off then the chieftans of Ubaid... but whatever.

What is bizarre is that you cannot understand: any people who eat a variety of foods, wear clothing, have weatherproof shelter, can get transportation to somewhere they cannot walk, can read or write or at least hear on the radio about faroff places, or own any tools or other possessions made of anything but rock and mud is better off than anybody in the Stone Age, chieftains included, who had none of those. Of course there are people who are hungry, unclothed, homeless, trapped, uninformed, and/or destitute of possessions; but few suffer from all of those conditions. Those who are hungry, to be sure, are worse off than Mr. Ubaid, and no other advantages can offset that; but that is not most people. Those who have nothing to wear but an inadequate wrap they can barely clamp together are equal to Mr. Ubaid in that respect; only the stark naked are worse off in that respect. Those who live in a leaky mud hovel are equal to Mr. Ubaid; those utterly homeless are worse off; those whose space is cramped rather than roomy, but at least dry, are partly better off, partly worse. Those who cannot go anywhere outside walking distance are equal to Mr. Ubaid; it is not possible to be worse in this respect. Those who are illiterate and know nothing beyond their own village except for occasional visits to relatives elsewhere are equal to Mr. Ubaid; it is scarcely possible to be worse. Those who have a few dishes to eat off of and a reasonably sharp knife to cut with and maybe a few nice-looking things are equal to Mr. Ubaid; those who have no things at all are worse off.

Muhammad doesn't ask you not to look into the universe. Infact many places [the Qur'an] actually asks people to go out & understand how universe works.

Fine. And we may discover some things that Muhammad didn't know and the Qur'an mis-states. Do you have a problem with that?

You think human values are man-made, that human can device a value by voting.

As long as there are judges, shielded from public pressure, to decide when a majority should not be allowed to impose a collective will on the minority; in such cases, individual freedom should decide. Look, the more I listen to you and c0de, the more I think George W. Bush (though I can hardly type his name without flinching) was on to something when he said you "hate freedom". I believe in a God who created a world in which we are all free to choose what we want; we do so imperfectly, but we have the right to pursue happiness; to figure out how to let as many people as possible find their happiness is what the good consists of.

I think humans are too hopelessly capricious & prone to emotional fits to be capable of doing that. I believe human values are absolute, & they come from other-than-man sources.

Unless God speaks to you every day, you too are deriving all your values from human judgment. You have decided you will believe Muhammad, as opposed to all other people who claim to speak for God, and that you will believe this or that "expert" who claims to know what Muhammad was saying on behalf of God, as opposed to all other people claiming to know. You think you need to surrender your own judgment because you do not trust it, but that, too, is an exercise of your own judgment.

You have experimented with them, your civilization is dying. There are signs everywhere.

My civilization is doing fine. Yes, George W. Bush f***ed us badly, but we are recovering from that. There are positive signs everywhere, if you were willing to see them.

Religion didnt oppose every major new discovery, christianity did. Taoism didnt oppose gunpowder or paper, neither did hinduism oppose zero. Buddhism is in its core experiential. Islam & science went together for a long time. The church was obviously against anything new. Which causes a common western scientist to oppose anything spiritual.

I agree with you. The West has mostly not known anything "spiritual" except Christianity, so scientists who have reason to mistrust Christianity develop a blanket prejudice against any "spiritual" talk.

Any new ideology kills people. Thats how things happen among humans. Ahinsa is suicide around here.

This is more realistic than c0de's position. He is trying to pretend that there was no violence at all.

It took me almost 5 years to unlock it. Most probably you are reading too shallowly.

Or too deeply. The Qur'an to me looks like a crude understanding that I am already past.

To my knowledge its not possible. But their are many other words where substitution can be done. Like Sayyra means both planet & car

Both are the derivation of the form "something that (does the action)" here "something that moves"; from the same root with different vowels or affixes you could get a causative derivative like "driver" (who causes something else to move) or an abstract derivative like "motion" (the state of moving) and these would be rather different words. If we had a case where the sentence had always been thought to mean "The car is black", re-interpreting it to mean "The planet is black" is acceptable, but re-interpreting it to mean "The driver is black" would be wrong, since that would be a different word, even if from the same root.

Alaqa back then & still now is used for anything that clings. Aliqat nafsuhu shayin (His mind clung to that thing), Qad aliqal kibru ma'aliqatu (Old age has taken hold in its holding places), Aliqat marasiha (their anchors have clung), Alaq ashshayin khalfahu (he hung the thing on his back)......there are lots of example.

Your examples are of the verb "to cling" which is not "the same word" as any noun. The derivation "_a_a_" for the 3rd-person-singular verb "he does the action" (like alaq here) may look like the derivation "_a_a_ah" (like alaqa) but this is a noun, "something that does the action to itself".

Muhammad didnt say bloodclot.

He did not say it was made of dam "blood"; that is true.

In his parlance he said clinger, which was understood by his people as bloodclot

No, in his parlance he said "congealed thing" (something that sticks to itself) which could have been a clump of mud (but it was understood to be of blood).

I gave the example of muallaq only to describe that if a word thats more formed has crossed two languages & sustaines its root meaning, why cant a word thats less formed sustain its orignal meaning in its orignal language.

Neither of the words is any "more formed" or "less formed"; they are made from a root and a derivation, like almost all the Arabic words. It is no more correct to say that two words with the same root and different derivations are interchangeable than to interchange two words with the same derivation and different roots: muallaq is not muhammad although they share the "mu_a_ _a_" derivation.

AFAI remember, OT was resurrected from some IE language

I thought everyone knew that Hebrew is a Semitic language, closer in fact to Arabic than to Aramaic.

SO if Bible has traveled well throughout the IE peoples, that's no big deal. The original language & poetry is lost for ever.

It IS a big deal. The poetry of it does NOT get lost in translation, which is very rare: as you agree when you cite Rumi etc. most poetic works lose their heart when they are translated. The Bible has spoken powerfully to people all over the world in their own languages; by contrast, the Qur'an only speaks in Arabic, and is dull and flat when translated, which make me think of it as a work intended only for a particular people in a particular time and place, with nothing really to say to me.

Jews asked who was DzulQarnain, Muhammad answered satisfactorily, thats all. Back then it was a miracle, because Jews knew an Arab cant know this. Now was he Alexender or Hulagu is a non-issue from guidance POV.

According to modern scholars he was Cyrus.

I cannot agree that his answer was "satisfactory" if you can't even figure out who he was talking about!!

Egyptian records don't say anything about Moses incident either.

Which is strong evidence that the Moses incident really was not that big. So, some slaves at a big construction project rebelled and ran away into the Sinai desert: Egyptian records DO mention that kind of thing, often; not unusual. That these slaves, once out in the desert, organized themselves under a law code which their leader said was from God: now THAT turned out to be a big deal, in the long run. But these stories about massive catastrophes ravaging the Egyptian land and decimating the population? That is all fairy-tale propaganda; if it were true, we would have heard about it.

Why are three quarter of humans hungry?

Gross, gross exaggeration: the actual figure is 15% of the world population undernourished. Worse in some places and among some people, of course: the source gives 32.5% of children in Africa and Latin America undernourished; the figure would be higher if you single out the poorest countries in those continents and the most miserable groups in those countries.

Remember its the economic system you imposed upon the world.

Maldistribution is indeed the cause: the source also says if we distributed it all, the food in the world would feed everyone and to spare. But the situation improves over the long term: it used to be that every country everywhere had killing famines from time to time. What system has done better?

Why are people fighting everywhere?

Fewer people (as a fraction of population) are fighting in the world now than at any time in all of previous history. In classical times it was taken for granted that every state conducted a military campaign every year. I doubt we will ever eradicate violence from the human condition, but we are in a long period of relative peace.

Also, good ride isnt right ride. Enjoying the journey is not equivalent of reaching the right place (or anyplace)

I could not disagree with you more strongly. God made us to be happy.

Polytheists werent harmed unless they start harming the state. For example after the conquest of Mecca there was no pressure upon them to convert.

Their shrines in Mecca were completely destroyed so that it was impossible to continue practicing their religion.

Uptill 10th-12th century there were Zoroastrians in Persian territories

It is only hadith not Qur'an which says Zoroastrians should be treated as "people of the book"; so when Shi'ites took over, they were expelled.

There is no proof that Babri Masjid was made upon some Ram Mandir site.

That's very dishonest. Look, as I am no Hindu either, I have no dog in that fight, but I have to tell you that to completely destroy their holy places and then use the completeness of the destruction to say "Holy places? What holy places? Prove to me they ever had any holy places!" looks very bad. OF COURSE they had holy places, and you are the reason they don't anymore.

I didnt want to say this, but Jesus didnt do anything.

Jesus taught the true basis of morality: that you must recognize that others are people like yourself, that you are in no privileged position, that whatever you do to others is as if you were doing it to God. The Qur'an has no basis of morality except "Do what you are told" and, while it is nice that the Qur'an tells you to be charitable to the poor etc., if someone is convinced that the Qur'an is ordering cruelty to others, that is what they will do: and this is the problem that we are having. Jesus spread his message to twice as many people as Muhammad: of course a lot of Christians have gotten the message garbled as well, and done "idiotic" things as c0de puts it, if somewhat different in particulars from the idiotic things done by misguided Muslims.

 

[c0de]

No, I will not excuse you. I would never have the freaking nerve to lecture a Pakistani about how things really are in Pakistan. It is very rude, and makes you look stupid.

Oh now that's cute, especially since THAT IS ALL YOU'VE BEEN DOING. Lecturing Muslims on the Quran and Islamic history.

the public opposition to this was intense and violent.

I know very well the historically racist mindset of the American, you don't have to prove that to me.

My contention is that by the time Brown rolled around, you can not prove that the majority of Americans were against actual segregation. That's all I am saying.

Even in the article you cited it showed a "radical" minority making the fuss which was not welcome by the majority. Even the leader of the opposition that Irene Mcabe chick wouldnt say she was actually supporting segregation.

further down on the article it says:

But the afternoon rally her supporters predicted would attract 30,000 drew only 1,000.

​

And in Michigan, and in Indiana, just to name the states where I lived back then. The states you name may have been the only ones to put it in the law books that schools were required to open the day with prayers, but elsewhere in the country similar customs were taken for granted: before we ate, we had to chant, "God is great! God is good! Let us thank him for our food!" No, it doesn't rhyme, and always sounded stupid, but that's what everyone did until the courts said that wasn't allowed; and the change was not popular, though nowadays few would want to go back.

---

You were claiming that the courts rule out of fear of violence from mobs; it is not relevant to your claim which way the majority sentiment is, but which side commands the violent mobs. All the threats of violence come from, and always have come from, the anti-abortion side.

You have obviously little understanding of your opposition's point (as always). My claim was that based on the court appealing to public opinion in general, not to the violent mobs. Every single verdict which you cited (abortion, segregation, school prayers) can be shown to favor the majority's trend.

First of all, they weren't "Nazi" courts, just "the courts" as they had existed in Germany from before. And secondly, I already pointed out that they did not survive: their functions were taken away from them, until they were not allowed by the Nazis to decide anything anymore, precisely because they were not "politically reliable".

I was talking about the actual Nazi courts for the show trials!! Listen to what I am saying before responding!

It is indeed a fact. And that is what makes it amazing that the judges had the courage to acquit all the defendants in the "show trials"; which is why the Nazis did not let the judges handle political cases, ever again, and eventually would not let them handle anything.

Acquit who? The Nazi party set up the courts to conduct the show trials. Do you have any idea how many people they sent to their execution??? These were the judges handpicked by the Nazi party.

You do not understand the concept of "separation of powers". The courts are not the legislature.

Yea, so judges don't make the laws, the people do. How does that help your argument that the Judges lead the way or influence public opinion?

You are telling me "Israel discriminates against the Arabs in the occupied territories"? Yes, of course that's true; who could possibly say otherwise? Are you also saying that nothing should be done to change that?

Depends on what that something means. If the Arabs want full benifits of living in Israel then they have to do everything that Israelis have to do, like serve in the Army. And the same goes for the religious jews who reject army service but still get all the benefits.

Well, tell that to Palestine. They won't hear it from Americans; God knows we have tried to explain it to them over the years, but maybe if they started hearing it from other Muslims they might listen. If they accept that they lost the war, and that there is no purpose served by re-fighting and re-re-fighting the war they already lost, so that they lose again, and again and again: THEN it would become possible to give them some territory back and let them live in peace. The keys to their prison are in their own hands, and always have been.

The Muslims have no interest in telling them that. Just as the Pakistanis have no interest in telling the Kashmiris to accept their place in India. It's a headache for the West and the Muslims are using the Palestinians as their pawns, they always have.

If the Palestinians don't wise up themselves, there is no hope for them. In fact, there is no hope for them, period. Consequently, there is no hope for Israel either.

The situation will only get worse. Especially if the U.S starts to ignore Israel like it has started to do, as its interest in the Mid East fades with its dwindling oil supplies.

What you are suggesting is that everyone hold hands and walk to the future together, some hippie fantasy that will never be. These people are idiots, and like I said, idiots do idiotic things.

I'll take your word for it. I don't know much about the Medinah period, as I have admitted; I was just back-projecting what the later Muslim rulers acted like on to the original situation, and that is unfair, then I stand corrected.

Thanks. I appreciate that.

It goes from the decay of Israel, to the emergence of Muhammad, and then to Jesus, without indicating that there is a backtrack here (of course, we already know that Jesus has to be before Muhammad) or telling us where in the timeline Jesus fit. It was rude of me to call the Qur'an's order "random" (farhan's word "didactic" is better: what comes next depends upon what moral is being drawn from the story just told) but it is not "chronological"; and in particular there are never any time-spans given (quite unlike the Bible, which gives year-counts all the time).

Tell me something, if the Bible already gives the year counts, then why does the Quran need to? The only times when the Quran repeats things in the Bible is to correct its mistakes (according to the Muslim perspective). The fact that it doesn't bother with the dates means that it accepts those dates as accurate.

The Qur'an never SAYS that Solomon and David were "between" Moses and Jesus. It is only because we have the Bible that we have any idea about the ordering or the timeline; if all we had was the Qur'an it would be hard to tell who came before whom.

See above.

But the fact that Noah is mentioned first would not, if we did not have other sources, tell us that chronologically he came first; anymore than the mention of Muhammad before Jesus meant that Muhammad preceded Jesus.

By the same argument there is no reason to suggest that just because it is not specifically stated that Noah came first, is there sufficient reason to suggest that the Quran confuses the timeline, as it is percisely because those sources were already there and well known by the time the Quran was revealed that everyone understood what the Quran was talking about and these things did not have to be repeated.

The numbers you gave me did not direct me to the verses you were talking about; I really cannot figure out what system you are using.

Which copy of the Quran do you have? How can this copy not be divided into sections and parts? All mainstream copies of the Quran are divided the same way. Are you just looking at the Quran online?

Yes, the ORIGIN of 'Ad (and its capital of Iram) is thousands of years deep; but its DOWNFALL was between 100 and 200 CE: that is when the archaeologists find that Iram was buried by sandstorms. Hud is said to have been sent to 'Ad to warn them of their imminent downfall. This is the "didactic" order: the Qur'an talks about Noah, and that connects to 'Ad, because 'Ad was founded so long ago just a couple generations after Noah, and that connects to the fall of 'Ad, much more recently, and that connects to Thamud, because Salih reminded the people of Thamud to remember what had happened to 'Ad, and then it jumps back in time to Sodom, because that is another famous case of sudden destruction; this is not a chronological order. If other Muslim commentators before you have been misled into thinking that Hud and Salih must have been in between Noah and Lot, that is not actually the Qur'an's fault: it does not, in general, pretend to tell us who came before whom; it does say that the founding of 'Ad was a few generations after Noah, and of course the fall of 'Ad is after the founding, although the Qur'an does not clue us in that this is many thousands of years later, and then the story of Salih references the fall of 'Ad as an event which had already happened, but does not say how long previous.

Fine, you can scratch that argument for now as it is not really crucial to my main point, and I dont have time to research the archeology of these sites in detail.

Not paying any attention to what I said, eh? Quite the contrary, I said FORGET "silas" and rely on Imam Muslim, Siddiqi, Budzaiwi, Husain, and the Qur'an itself. Do all those sources become bad because "silas" correctly recapitulated what they say? Can you answer any of the points I said were "clear" from those sources?

His arguments on the subject don't prove your point until he brings evidence from "all primary sources" and has his research peer reviewed. As for the hadith and the Quran, that is what we are discussing already.

If you agree that it is unreasonable to expect someone to read every Jewish text, then the burden of proof is on your side: show me one example of the claimed usage.

You are the one making the claim that there is a contradiction in the Quran. So your the one who should bring valid academic sources to back up your point. (I am not asking you to prove anything for now)

Up till now, all you have brought is this "silas". Why have you not been able to produce a single academic source? Think about that.

Another "derivative" is NOT the "same word".

You don't get it!!!

The word "stick" (as in glue) and "stick" (as in a wooden stick) is spelled the same way, is it not? Even if you can prove (which you can't) that the Muslims of the time understood the first version of "stick" but today due to our shift in understanding, the second definition is used, it does not prove a contradiction in the Quran, but only shows how God chose a word that is still correct and allowed for the shift in understanding to occur.

What Farhan has told you is that the prophet did not mean anything specific by "alaqah" to begin with. He just used the word that was revealed to him by God. It was the latter comentators who attached the meanings according to their understanding. The Prophet was not a physician. He would not know what an embryo looked like either way.

But we would much prefer that they were led astray "another" way, not the way they are led astray "with" the Qur'an. The particular idiotic thing they do with the Qur'an is to commit large numbers of random pointless murders, and threats of murders, and we are tired of it. If you will not do anything about it, we will.

(LoLz)

Yea, we've seen what your capable of doing...

You can't even handle the Taliban!

You think your gonna win this fight, but your not.

NO ONE is going to win.

What is bizarre is that you cannot understand: any people who eat a variety of foods, wear clothing, have weatherproof shelter, can get transportation to somewhere they cannot walk, can read or write or at least hear on the radio about faroff places....

What's bizarre is you actually think these things matter to a person who has no idea of what these luxuries are. You really think an Ubaid chieftan was thinking that he would look better in jeans? They didn't even have mirrors. He had everything he ever wanted. Food, women, wine, whatever.

The people on the bottom today are dying of hunger, thirst and disease.

My civilization is doing fine. Yes, George W. Bush f***ed us badly, but we are recovering from that. There are positive signs everywhere, if you were willing to see them.

Yea, if your delusional enuff, you can see anything.

This is more realistic than c0de's position. He is trying to pretend that there was no violence at all.

Excuse me? When did I "pretend" any such thing? I said that violence was defensive and totally justified, unlike your hippie position.

The Qur'an to me looks like a crude understanding that I am already past.

and your crude idealistic understanding looks like that of a naive teenager.

Which is strong evidence that the Moses incident really was not that big

No it isn't actually. Why would any Pharoah encarve his greatest defeat in his own records? This is the level of amateur arguments that you are making.

Jesus taught the true basis of morality:

You ignored mine and Farhan's argument completely. The point is that the Prophet's situation was different then Jesus (pbuh). When the Prophet faced similar situations, he was told by God to act the same way (while he was in Makkah, before the flight). When he went to Medinah, the situation was different, and Jesus (pbuh) was never in any such position.

 

[Saltmeister]

You do not understand the concept of "separation of powers". The courts are not the legislature. A judge cannot look a law and decide whether to uphold it or strike it down on the basis of "If I were writing the law, is this how I would decide?" If the majority has supported a law, it is uphold unless it can be struck down on the basis of "invidious discrimination": that is, the judge can only look at whether this is the sort of law which a majority does not have the authority to impose on the minority. The first question, as I explained before, is: does the law discriminate against an immutable characteristic, or against a voluntary action? The law discriminates against pot-smokers, a voluntary class, so one can avoid being discriminated against by: choosing not to smoke pot. Therefore, the judge only asks for the weakest kind of justification for the law: is there any "rational basis"? Any intoxicants can make people lazy or do damage: that is enough of an argument; of course there are arguments for allowing them (intoxicants give enjoyment) but it is not up to the judge to weigh which considerations are stronger or weaker (that is the legislature's job), just to see that there exists at least one rational consideration in favor of the law the majority chose.

Yea, so judges don't make the laws, the people do. How does that help your argument that the Judges lead the way or influence public opinion?

I think a point bobx neglected to mention was what I think motivated judges to oppose or avoid discrimination: the Constitution and Bill of Rights. It's a set of laws in the constitution that requires judges to decide in favour of whatever maintains the integrity of the country's inherent values. To discriminate against a minority is unconstitutional, so the judges are interpreting another law, or put another way, the discriminatory law is overridden by a more important law.

I didnt want to say this, but Jesus didnt do anything. He was send as a sign, his people didnt take the sign, so the deal was off. His people were severely tortured & then were Hellenized. Muhammad left his people with a united nation & a sustainable state. That lateron conquered huge portions of land. Who is greater, ofcourse its a matter of opinion.

Jesus didn't do nothing and he was more than just a sign. He was a way of life. He taught his people to value their humanity. That is the credit I give him and it makes him comparable to Islam. Jesus' teachings were an alternative to Islam's political system.

My gripe with the statement "Jesus did nothing," is that it overlooks the significance of Jesus' teachings.

Having a united nation and a sustainable state means little if the people aren't happy. Look at the United States of America. It's the world's largest economy and has the world's most powerful military and yet, its people aren't happy despite the poorest of Americans being better off than the majority of those living in Third World countries. The hunger in America is insignificant and trivial compared to the Third World majority.

People have been formulating and implementing political and economic systems since the beginning of the human race, but an organisational framework can't make people happy. Humans have already demonstrated the ability to formulate and implement an organisational framework for the distribution of energy and resources.

Jesus' philosophy was that you can survive on very little if you are happy. If you aren't happy, nothing will satisfy and complete you. You may be alive and well physically, but spiritually, you are dying. Jesus taught people to look within themselves. By embracing your own inner humanity, you would eliminate your dependence on a political and economic system.

Jesus taught internal reform and inner change. A nation state is external so if Islam teaches people how to formulate and implement a political and economic system, it doesn't make it greater than Jesus. The internal is more important than the external. (Well, as has already been said multiple times, it's a matter of opinion which is more important.)

A lot of people in the West suffer from depression and mental illness. The Western world meets all our physical needs, but not our emotional ones. Don't fall for the trap of thinking a political and economic framework will provide utopia. The utopia can only be created from within. The integrity of an organisation is only as good as the individuals that form it.

By saying Jesus did nothing you are dishonouring a 2,000 year old spiritual leader. You're disregarding his contribution. It is disrespect to the Christians who admire him. All credit would be given to Islam if it fully appreciated his contribution. The least I can say is that you, as an individual Muslim are not giving him full appreciation. On the one hand you acknowledge his existence, but on the other, you make him seem insignificant. Why?

Is this some kind of zero sum game? In every game where one party wins does the other have to lose? So the merits of Islam must be promoted at the expense of the merits of Christianity? The pessimism and cynicism disturbs me.

You ignored mine and Farhan's argument completely. The point is that the Prophet's situation was different then Jesus (pbuh). When the Prophet faced similar situations, he was told by God to act the same way (while he was in Makkah, before the flight). When he went to Medinah, the situation was different, and Jesus (pbuh) was never in any such position.

Jesus was arrested and crucified. He didn't recant his beliefs. He faced death, just like the followers of Mohammed. The difference was the way he dealt with the threat.

The point was not that Jesus' beliefs weren't worth fighting for, but rather that he didn't need to because he had already said and done what was required. He had already completed his mission. The message was out. It was then just a matter of letting the message speak for itself. His beliefs didn't need defending.

The trouble with Mohammed's philosophy on "fighting enemies" was that it set a bad precedent. Mohammed's teaching was to "fight those who fight you." Do you know what the problem is with that? In the event that a family feud breaks out, a conflict may last for centuries without anyone actually understanding why or how the conflict started.

Another problem I see with the idea of Mohammed fighting back was that, just like with Jesus, there was always the option of surrendering or even giving oneself up as a martyr. That way, sympathy rather than conflict would decide whether a person adopted Islam. Islam would receive credit for being an ideology that didn't need defending. Our opinion of Islam would be higher, more favourable and positive.

It is the simple recognition that you don't have to fight because you have already won. The fact that your enemy is so desperate that he has to kill you is evidence that you have the moral high ground. You have the advantage. There is no need to fight back. If they kill you, it destroys their honour and legitimacy. So . . . go right ahead, pull the trigger, you say, make my day. I have God on my side. Losing is winning.

Obviously the Muslim view of Mohammed was that his people were being persecuted and that he retaliated after exhausting all options. Well, fine . . . Mohammed was obviously a good diplomat and politician and was able to make his moral position clear, but the "warriors for Islam" that we see today don't seem to have the same prudence. What am I to make of people who don't even want to sit down at the table and talk? What happened to the cool-headedness?

What a pity you don't even have a Caliph anymore to serve as a diplomat. At least then there'd be a commander-in-chief to order the terrorists to stop. There would be a voice of reason in the Muslim collective. Why has this role deprecated?

 

[bob x]

Oh now that's cute, especially since THAT IS ALL YOU'VE BEEN DOING. Lecturing Muslims on the Quran and Islamic history.

You weren't there when the Qur'an was written. You weren't there a thousand years ago. What you are doing would be like me lecturing you about how Pakistanis supported Pervez Musharraf and telling you that you don't know anything about Pakistan.

My contention is that by the time Brown rolled around, you can not prove that the majority of Americans were against actual segregation.

You mean the opposite, I'm sure. I am having difficulty finding old polls (Gallup wants money to search their archives) but found a few. Regional differences were extreme, of course. A paper on the history of the Southern Baptists cites a poll from South Carolina with 90% of the white population against desegregation; but these split into radical opponents, favoring every kind of resistance, and moderates, opposed in principle but in not in favor of openly defying the court, the Southern Baptist Convention originally fighting for the moderate position but getting its whole leadership tossed out and replaced by the radical opponents. A wider poll by Gallup from 1954 just after the Court's Brown found only 20% support for the Court's decision in the South, but 61% in the Midwest (states like Michigan and Indiana).

You might take that as meaning you are right: but again, you must understand how the segregation actually worked in the Midwest; Brown itself only struck down the parallel white-school and black-school systems within each neighborhood as found in the South, where the Midwest instead had segregation by neighborhood. Once it was clear that the courts actually wanted to mix up kids from black and white neighborhoods, the hostility was intense: a Gallup poll from 1970 conducted in various Northern cities (Boston, Detroit, etc.) where busing had been ordered found 6% of the white population in favor, 83% opposed, comparable to Fifties South Carolina. Many, like that bitch Irene McCabe, claimed that they weren't opposed to integration, just to inconveniencing the kids, but this was not honest. Once it was settled that there would be no busing across city lines, whites voted with their feet, abandoning the major cities in droves: Detroit went from majority-white to three-quarters black; ironically, many of these whites moved to far-flung suburbs where their kids had to ride buses to school for much longer than if they had stayed put, so much for the supposed concern about convenience.

You have obviously little understanding of your opposition's point (as always). My claim was that based on the court appealing to public opinion in general, not to the violent mobs.

Your claim was "judges in practice are always more inclined to give the verdict that they think the mob is most likely to accept... the judges in the US are afraid to pass the law [on same-sex marriage] for fear of, well, a heap of rotten eggs at the least, and assassination at the most."

This was wrong in some very basic ways: same-sex marriage only exists in some US states because judges did rule in our favor, quite against the majority opinion; and egg-throwing death-threatening mobs have never gotten their way with the courts.

Every single verdict which you cited (abortion, segregation, school prayers) can be shown to favor the majority's trend.

On abortion, a 1973 poll (around the time of Roe v. Wade) found 46% in favor, 45% against allowing abortion in the first three months of pregnancy only; the court went further, to the point where a plurality would no longer approve; how the question is asked makes a great deal of difference on the abortion issue, where many people see shades of grey. The people who are intense enough about the issue to throw eggs and threaten death (Justice Blackmun, author of Roe v. Wade, received a letter from an angry woman "I pray to God every day that you die"-- and another letter the next day and the next, every day for the rest of that woman's life; he survived her) were all on the "anti" side.

Opposition to the Engel decision on school prayer is stronger than I thought. In 2005 Gallup found 76% in favor of overturning Engel even if a constitutional amendment is required, down slightly from 81% in 1983; opposition was 70% in 1962 (just after it was ruled) and 79% in 1963 (after the Court reaffirmed its decision in another case); this all looks like random sampling fluctuations, no real trend at all, but the people may be perceiving the issue differently over time. There have been a lot of proposals for a "moment of silence" during which the kids won't actually be told "this is the time to pray" and, importantly in some people's view, will not be told what to say, so when asked if Engel should be overturned this may be what they have in mind: still, if the question is phrased explicitly, "Do you favor legislation requiring prayer in schools?" we still get 55% for compulsory school prayer.

Some data on another controversial decision, Loving v. Virginia (1967) striking down the ban on interracial marriage: 96% of the white population opposed allowing interracial marriage in 1958, and in 1983 it was still 50% opposed, 46% in favor of allowing it (but this is not whites only); not until 1991 do we finally see 42% opposed, 48% in favor. As generations have grown up after the segregation fights, who wonder what the big deal was, racism has gradually faded (it's not gone, of course, by any means, but survives in less intense forms, less commonly, and the racists hide their attitudes as they know it is no longer socially approved); but the older generation was never "convinced", they just died out.

I was talking about the actual Nazi courts for the show trials!! Listen to what I am saying before responding!

Acquit who? The Nazi party set up the courts to conduct the show trials.

I AM listening to what you are saying; I am telling you that you have the history WRONG. After the Reichstag fire, Hitler whipped up the people into a frenzy, cowed the politicians into letting him suspend the legislature for the duration of the "emergency" and rule by decree, and the armed forces into taking a personal oath of allegiance to the Fuehrer instead of to the nation, and expected the courts, too, to go along with his show trials (in the regular, pre-existing courts, not anything new that the Nazi party set up). It was quite a shock when the courts acquitted all the defendants, saying there was a lack of evidence. So, in 1934 Hitler set up a new "People's Court" for political cases, with hand-picked true-believer Nazis as judges (their rulings were not based on "popular opinion" either but on their firm racialist beliefs), but as there weren't enough true-believers with any legal background, this remained a small institution that could only handle a few cases (the "Red Chapel" and "White Rose" cases, about student groups passing out subversive flyers and helping Jews find exit routes, were handled this way), so in 1936 it was decreed that courts weren't needed at all for any case in which the Gestapo or SS was involved.

Do you have any idea how many people they sent to their execution???

The courts? Hardly any. The people who were killed mostly got no semblance of judicial process whatsoever; if you were picked up by the Gestapo, it was explicit that you had no right to a trial.

Yea, so judges don't make the laws, the people do. How does that help your argument that the Judges lead the way or influence public opinion?

"Listen to what I am saying before responding!" Some things, the majority is allowed to decide; some things, the majority is not allowed to impose on the minority. I gave you a long description of the principles governing this.

 

[bob x]

Depends on what that something means. If the Arabs want full benifits of living in Israel then they have to do everything that Israelis have to do, like serve in the Army. And the same goes for the religious jews who reject army service but still get all the benefits.

We are talking past each other again: I was talking about the Palestinians in the occupied territories, as opposed to those within Israel.

there is no hope for them, period... The situation will only get worse...These people are idiots, and like I said, idiots do idiotic things...

My, you're a determined pessimist. Have some faith!

if the Bible already gives the year counts, then why does the Quran need to? The only times when the Quran repeats things in the Bible is to correct its mistakes (according to the Muslim perspective). The fact that it doesn't bother with the dates means that it accepts those dates as accurate.

I was responding to your argument that the Qur'an itself is clear about the chronology, which it just isn't, and "proves" that Muhammad did know the difference between events a few hundred years before his time (like Jesus or the downfalls of 'Ad and Thamud) and events from thousands of years earlier (like Moses or the downfall of Sodom). If we do not read it with any presupposition about what Muhammad did or didn't understand, it just looks like he has only the blurriest knowledge of the Bible or history in general; in particular, to get back to the original subject that set us off on this tangent, there is nothing in the text of the Qur'an itself to indicate that Muhammad did understand that there was long time between Moses and Jesus, or that David and Solomon came in between them.

Which copy of the Quran do you have? How can this copy not be divided into sections and parts? All mainstream copies of the Quran are divided the same way. Are you just looking at the Quran online?

The online Qur'an is divided into suras, which are divided into verses, which look to be numbered the same way as in the printed Qur'an I used to have; but when you say "So in section 3 of chapter 3, God talks about the fall of the israelites" and I look up sura 3, verse 3, I get "I sent you the book, agreeing with what came before, sent the Torah and the Gospel"; and you say "verse 32 mentions Adam, Noah, Abraham and Amran (peace be upon them) in chronological order" but 3:32 is "Obey the prophet, for if you turn away God does not love unbelievers"; so I really have no clue what system you are using but it is not the way citations are usually given.

His arguments on the subject don't prove your point until he brings evidence from "all primary sources" and has his research peer reviewed. As for the hadith and the Quran, that is what we are discussing already.

You are refusing to discuss the hadith and the Qur'an. I drew three points from them, which you did not answer at all; do you dispute any of these?

1. The "sister of Harun" conundrum is one that was raised way back; even if you don't trust Imam Muslim's word that it was raised to Muhammad himself, it was pointed out at least as early as the writing of the hadith. This and the other conundrums mentioned by farhan are why Christians and Jews did not find the Qur'an very convincing as the purported infallible word of God.

2. Neither the Christian nor the Muslim speakers of Arabic in Muhammad's day knew anything about any usage of "sister" except for contemporaries; the Qur'an itself doesn't use it or "brother" except for contemporaries, anywhere else; and Muhammad is said to have called it a usage from older times, at least by the simplest reading of what the hadith says.

3. Early commentators were already having a problem with the interpretation of "sister" as relating to someone from the deep past, and read the hadith in a different way, giving Sale's favored explanation with two Haruns (and optionally two Imrans as well).

So your the one who should bring valid academic sources to back up your point. (I am not asking you to prove anything for now)

ONE MORE TIME: it is up to the side who claims "there exists at least one such-and-such" to show it, not the side who claims "there exist no such-and-such" because asserting a universal negative requires looking at all the cases. There isn't going to be any academic source claiming the universal negative "no usage of 'sister' for a distant descendant exists in all of literature"-- unless an academic source was willing to claim to have read all of literature, which is unlikely (and you wouldn't believe him anyway). All I can say is: we have not seen your side produce one single solitary example. As long as you don't show me a giraffe on the moon, there is no reason to believe there is one. Fourteen centuries, and you can't come up with one.

The word "stick" (as in glue) and "stick" (as in a wooden stick) is spelled the same way, is it not?

This is like: alaqa "congealed thing; something sticking to itself" could mean "leech" as well as "bloodclot" or "mud-clump". I said way back that a substitution of the "leech" meaning, though a little problematic, at least would be faithful to the actual word in the text.

Even if you can prove (which you can't) that the Muslims of the time understood the first version

YOUR OWN SOURCES, along with EVERY translation of the Qur'an until the late 20th century, agree that all Muslim scholarship understood "bloodclot" as the meaning. In fact, even the recent Sahih International translation that substitutes "clinging substance" in there still entitles that sura "The Clot"! It does so, of course, because that is what the sura has always been called, and someone trying to look it up will need to be able to find the traditional title.

but today due to our shift in understanding, the second definition is used

But you're not substituting a second definition of the same word, you are substituting a definition for a related but different word: it's not like the multiple meanings of "stick", rather like saying "stack" instead of "stick".

The Prophet was not a physician. He would not know what an embryo looked like either way.

You got that right.

Yea, we've seen what your capable of doing...
You can't even handle the Taliban!
You think your gonna win this fight, but your not.
NO ONE is going to win.

The Taliban are going DOWN. Watch.

What's bizarre is you actually think these things matter to a person who has no idea of what these luxuries are. You really think an Ubaid chieftan was thinking that he would look better in jeans? They didn't even have mirrors. He had everything he ever wanted. Food, women, wine, whatever.

Before, you were asking me to compare in terms of where I live and how much security I have and so on; in these material terms obviously I am better off than Mr. Ubaid. Now you ask the blurrier question "Was he any less happy?" which of course is harder to answer: but, his poorer diet, minimal clothing, and inadequate shelter, along with lack of knowledge, left him prone to disease, and if he did not have the back-breaking labor of the commoners, he did have to fight from time to time, all adding up to a short life-span; I have already mentioned that above all other advantages I have over Mr. Ubaid, his chances of even being alive at my age in the first place were poor. Was Mr. Ubaid unhappy about that? Mr. Uruk certainly was: the Epic of Gilgamesh is all about how distressed they were about their short life-span.

The people on the bottom today are dying of hunger, thirst and disease.

Some, about 15% of the world's population. Certainly those people are worse off than Mr. Ubaid; and there are others who are ill-clothed or homeless, but those largely overlap with the hungry. I would say about 80% of the world is better off in terms of food, clothing, and shelter than Mr. Ubaid; in the other respects I listed, transportation, communication, and rudimentary technology (I just mean basic objects; leave advanced technology out of this), just about everybody in the world is better off. In terms of "happiness", who can say? Personally, of course, if you offered me a swap with Mr. Ubaid, no way would I consider it for an instant, but I cannot speak for everyone in the world.

Excuse me? When did I "pretend" any such thing? I said that violence was defensive and totally justified, unlike your hippie position.

Here farhan and I were talking about Moses not Muhammad; you responded to "Moses is said to have killed a lot of people for rejecting his revelations" with "Not according to the Quran" and "The Prophets are not supposed to be like you or me, that's why. The Muslim position is that the charges against the prophets in the bible are false."

Why would any Pharoah encarve his greatest defeat in his own records?

We know that Egypt went into centuries of disastrous civil war after the fall of the Old Kingdom, was conquered by the Hyksos after the fall of the Middle Kingdom, and was conquered by the Libyans and the Nubians after the fall of the New Kingdom, only because the Egyptian records themselves tell us so. And even if there was some desire on the Egyptians' part to hide such calamities as are described, that really couldn't be hidden: after Rameses II, Egypt continues to be prosperous, wealthy enough to send out conquering armies far afield all the time; the supposed devastation of their land and decimation of their population didn't seem to have any impact on them.

You ignored mine and Farhan's argument completely.

I was responding to farhan's sneering remark that Jesus didn't do anything. That only appears so to Muslims because the Qur'an leaves out everything about his teachings, draining the story of any moral point.

The point is that the Prophet's situation was different then Jesus (pbuh).

I understand that; I wasn't responding to that because I have no argument against that point. Muhammad became a political figure, where Jesus was a teacher of ethics; I am not trying to accuse Muhammad of behaving badly or denying the importance of his foundation of a state that grew to a wide and long-lasting civilization, but Jesus had his importance in another way, and it is a matter of judgment which is "greater".

 

[c0de]

..

Post #1 of 2




@ Salty


If the Muslims of Medinah didn't fight back, you would never have heard there was such a thing as the "Quran". Now for some this might have been a good thing, but not for us Muslims.


@ Bob

By the way, you know what I just realized? If I lose the argument on segregation, it makes YOUR country look like a bunch of racist red-necks! (LoLz)

I am actually getting double-minded now, maybe I should just concede the segregation issue and stick to the rest... ?

Once it was clear that the courts actually wanted to mix up kids from black and white neighborhoods, the hostility was intense: a Gallup poll from 1970 conducted in various Northern cities (Boston, Detroit, etc.) where busing had been ordered found 6% of the white population in favor, 83% opposed,

First of all, how are you crediting the courts and not the civil society for that? The measures taken after the decision were all due to public administration and civil pressure, was it not?

This was wrong in some very basic ways: same-sex marriage only exists in some US states because judges did rule in our favor, quite against the majority opinion; and egg-throwing death-threatening mobs have never gotten their way with the courts.

Do you have the figures?

On abortion, a 1973 poll (around the time of Roe v. Wade) found 46% in favor, 45% against allowing abortion in the first three months of pregnancy only; the court went further, to the point where a plurality would no longer approve; how the question is asked makes a great deal of difference on the abortion issue,

Looks like you loose here. Whichever way you cut it, the numbers are close enough for me to make it clear the courts were not taking any big risks. Their verdicts obviously were not that radically opposed. In fact, like half the people supported the courts here.

Opposition to the Engel decision on school prayer is stronger than I thought. In 2005 Gallup found 76% in favor of overturning Engel even if a constitutional amendment is required, down slightly from 81% in 1983; opposition was 70% in 1962 (just after it was ruled) and 79% in 1963 (after the Court reaffirmed its decision in another case); this all looks like random sampling fluctuations, no real trend at all, but the people may be perceiving the issue differently over time. There have been a lot of proposals for a "moment of silence" during which the kids won't actually be told "this is the time to pray" and, importantly in some people's view, will not be told what to say, so when asked if Engel should be overturned this may be what they have in mind: still, if the question is phrased explicitly, "Do you favor legislation requiring prayer in schools?" we still get 55% for compulsory school prayer.

By any estimation, you can not claim that the courts were issuing a radical verdict here either. This again supports my point.

The courts? Hardly any. The people who were killed mostly got no semblance of judicial process whatsoever; if you were picked up by the Gestapo, it was explicit that you had no right to a trial.

"hardly any" ???? !!!!

Dude, my class was shown a movie on the subject. I would recommend it to you if I could remember its title. But here's a list of just some of the people it sentenced from wiki:


Notable people sentenced to death by the Volksgerichtshof

• 1942 - Helmuth Hübener. At the age of 17, he was the youngest opponent of the Third Reich to be executed as a result of a trial by the Volksgerichtshof.
• 1943 - Otto and Elise Hampel. The couple carried out civil disobedience in Berlin, were caught, tried, sentenced to death by Freisler, and executed. Their story formed the basis for the 1947 Hans Fallada novel Every Man Dies Alone.
• 1943 - Members of the White Rose resistance movement: Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl, Alex Schmorell, Willi Graf, Christoph Probst, and Kurt Huber.
• 1943 - Julius Fučík. A Czechoslovakian journalist, Communist Party of Czechoslovakia leader, and a leader in the forefront of the anti-Nazi resistance. On August 25, 1943, in Berlin, he was accused of high treason in connection with his political activities. He was found guilty and beheaded two weeks later on September 8, 1943.
• 1943 - Karlrobert Kreiten. A German pianist. Nazi Ellen Ott-Monecke notified the Gestapo of Kreiten's negative remarks about Adolf Hitler and the war effort. Kreiten was indicted at the Volksgerichtshof, with Freisler presiding, and condemned to death. Friends and family frantically tried to save his life to no avail. The family was never notified officially about the judgment. They only accidentally learned that Kreiten had been executed with one hundred and eighty-five other inmates in Plötzensee Prison.
• 1944 - Max Josef Metzger. A German Catholic priest. Metzger was the founder in 1938 of the "Una Sancta Brotherhood," an ecumenical movement for bringing Catholics and Protestants to unity. During the trial Freisler said that people (meaning clergy) like Metzger should be "eradicated."
• 1944 - Erwin von Witzleben. A German Field Marshal (Generalfeldmarschall). Witzleben was a German Army (Wehrmacht) conspirator in the July 20 Bomb Plot to kill Hitler. Witzleben, who would have been Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht in the planned post-coup government, arrived at Army Headquarters (OKH-HQ) in Berlin on July 20 to assume command of the coup forces. He was arrested the next day and tried by the People's Court on August 8. Witzleben was sentenced to death and hanged the same day in Plötzensee Prison.
• 1944 - Johanna "Hanna" Kirchner. A member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD).
• 1944 - Lieutenant-Colonel Caesar von Hofacker. A member of a resistance group in Nazi Germany. Hofacker's goal was to overthrow Hitler.
• 1944 - Carl Friedrich Goerdeler - Conservative German politician, economist, civil servant and opponent of the Nazi regime, who would have served as the Chancellor of the new government had the 20 July plot of 1944 succeeded.
• 1944 - Otto Kiep - the Chief of the Reich Press Office (Reichspresseamts) which became involved in resistance.
• 1944 - Elisabeth von Thadden, as well as other members of anti-Nazi Solf Circle.
• 1944 - Julius Leber - German politician of the SPD and a member of the German Resistance against the Nazi régime.
• 1944 - Johannes Popitz - Prussian finance minister and a member of the German Resistance against Nazi Germany.
• 1945 - Helmuth James Graf von Moltke - German jurist, a member of the opposition against Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, and a founding member of the Kreisau Circle resistance group.
• 1945 - Klaus Bonhoeffer and Rüdiger Schleicher - German resistance fighters.
• 1945 - Erwin Planck. Politician, businessman, resistance fighter and son of physicist Max Planck. Planck was an alleged conspirator in the July 20 plot.
• 1945- Artur Nebe. An SS-General (Gruppenführer). Nebe was a conspirator in the July 20 Bomb Plot to kill Hitler. He was the head of the Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo, and the commander of Einsatzgruppe B. Nebe oversaw massacres on the Russian Front, and at other locations as he was commanded to do by his superiors in the SS. After the failure to assassinate Hitler, Nebe hid on an island in the Wannsee until he was betrayed by one of his mistresses. On March 21, 1945, Nebe was hanged, allegedly with piano wire (Hitler wanted members of the plot to be "hanged like cattle"[4]) at Plötzensee Prison.

Some things, the majority is allowed to decide; some things, the majority is not allowed to impose on the minority.

Were the Japanese interment camps during WWII part of those "things" the majority is not allowed to impose on the minority?

We are talking past each other again: I was talking about the Palestinians in the occupied territories, as opposed to those within Israel.

The Palestinians in the occupied territories obviously can not be given the same rights as the Israeli citizens, or else why did Israel fight all those wars to begin with?

Don't get me wrong, my side would love for that to happen, but for the Israelis, that would be like saying our 50 year history was a joke, and we might as well have never bothered.

Everyone knows a 2 state solution is the only way to go, but everyone also knows it wont happen.

My, you're a determined pessimist. Have some faith!

Compared to you, most people are pessimists dude... But seriously, there is ZERO hope for the mid-east. Don't believe me? Just wait.

The Taliban are going DOWN. Watch.

Err... going "down" like where ???
They already live in CAVES !!! (LoLz)

You're fighting an enemy who has nothin to lose...
You Americans on the other hand....

Anywayzz... the rest of this century isn't about the
Taliban. It's about a ressurgent Russia... its contacts
with Germany, possible break up of the EU, and collapse
of Europe, a more assertive Turkey, energy crises,
water crises, population crises, depopulation crises....
and lets not forget the defacto scratching of the bretton woods
if obama follows through on his export plan...

The world has bigger problems than the middle east
now pal... the US wasted an entire decade in the
Mid East... while the rest of the world was laughing
their asses off at your dubya... Welcome to the
21st century... everyone thinks they have a shot now,
and whenever this happens, everyone always loses.

 

[c0de]

.


Post #2 of 2

The "sister of Harun" conundrum is one that was raised way back; even if you don't trust Imam Muslim's word

I don't actually. You already know what my policy is on the hadith.

it was pointed out at least as early as the writing of the hadith.

Which was like six centuries after the Prophet (lest we forget).

Neither the Christian nor the Muslim speakers of Arabic in Muhammad's day knew anything about any usage of "sister" except for contemporaries;

Yea, if you trust the hadith.

We know that Egypt went into centuries of disastrous civil war after the fall of the Old Kingdom, was conquered by the Hyksos after the fall of the Middle Kingdom, and was conquered by the Libyans and the Nubians after the fall of the New Kingdom, only because the Egyptian records themselves tell us so. And even if there was some desire on the Egyptians' part to hide such calamities as are described, that really couldn't be hidden: after Rameses II, Egypt continues to be prosperous, wealthy enough to send out conquering armies far afield all the time; the supposed devastation of their land and decimation of their population didn't seem to have any impact on them.

Maybe the disasters and plagues were not as bad. I know that as far as the Quran is concerned, there are some commentators who take a metaphorical approach to the miracles of Moses (pbuh). I myself think, for example, with regards to the "parting of the seas" it was a low tide event. (But it was still caused by God though.)

it is up to the side who claims "there exists at least one such-and-such" to show it,

I am not claiming any such thing. I am not even asking you to prove anything (yet). Now, "ONE MORE TIME": please provide a valid academic, peer-reviewed source which supports your claim on the issue.

This is like: alaqa "congealed thing; something sticking to itself" could mean "leech" as well as "bloodclot" or "mud-clump". I said way back that a substitution of the "leech" meaning, though a little problematic, at least would be faithful to the actual word in the text.

Well, the jury's still out on that one (until we get an expert on the Arabic language in on the discussion). Maybe you can provide an expert to back up your opinion on the issue (oh that's rite... you can't... too bad, huh>?)

If we do not read it with any presupposition about what Muhammad did or didn't understand, it just looks like he has only the blurriest knowledge of the Bible or history in general; in particular, to get back to the original subject that set us off on this tangent, there is nothing in the text of the Qur'an itself to indicate that Muhammad did understand that there was long time between Moses and Jesus, or that David and Solomon came in between them.

The fact is that no academic authority takes such a line of argumentation against the Quran seriously. That's just the way it is bud...

Before, you were asking me to compare in terms of where I live and how much security I have and so on; in these material terms obviously I am better off than Mr. Ubaid.

I still think you aren't better off than him, you just think you are. But in any case, you are after all living in the richest nation in the world, so by no means are at the bottom of the social ladder.

Some, about 15% of the world's population. Certainly those people are worse off than Mr. Ubaid; and there are others who are ill-clothed or homeless, but those largely overlap with the hungry. I would say about 80% of the world is better off in terms of food, clothing, and shelter than Mr. Ubaid; in the other respects I listed, transportation, communication, and rudimentary technology (I just mean basic objects; leave advanced technology out of this), just about everybody in the world is better off. In terms of "happiness", who can say? Personally, of course, if you offered me a swap with Mr. Ubaid, no way would I consider it for an instant, but I cannot speak for everyone in the world.

How many "third world" countries have you ever traveled to? And if you have, have you ever visited areas outside the specified tourist zones??

 

[bob x]

If the Muslims of Medinah didn't fight back, you would never have heard there was such a thing as the "Quran".

The Christians in the Roman Empire didn't fight back, but eventually prevailed anyway. We have still heard of the New Testament because, as Tertullian put it, "the blood of martyrs is seed."

By the way, you know what I just realized? If I lose the argument on segregation, it makes YOUR country look like a bunch of racist red-necks! (LoLz)

We certainly used to let the bunch of racist red-necks dominate our politics; even those who didn't share their views weren't motivated to stop them. But our society has changed radically in this respect within my lifetime.

First of all, how are you crediting the courts and not the civil society for that? The measures taken after the decision were all due to public administration and civil pressure, was it not?

The public administrators tended to implement the court orders with as much foot-dragging and obstruction as they could get away with, all while reassuring the voters that they didn't really want to be doing this but had to obey the law. The "civil pressure" was all the other way, I assure you: 83% opposed is as close to a unanimous consensus as you ever get in politics.

Do you have the figures?

In 1996, Gallup found 27% in favor of same-sex marriage, 68% opposed while ICR Survey Research found 30% in favor, 57% opposed; 1998, Princeton found 33% in favor (no "opposed" figure listed). There has been some shift after same-sex marriage was court-ordered in some states; the young have more approving attitudes than the old, so continued shift can be expected as the former generation dies out; but still: 2005, Boston Globe found 37% in favor, 50% opposed; 2006, Gallup found 39% in favor, 57% opposed. Religion is still an even more important factor than age: the 2006 Gallup results found that among those who attend religious services "seldom or never", 51% are in favor, while among those who attend "every week", 77% are opposed.

On a related topic, the 2005 Boston Globe found a rapid shift after the Lawrence v. Texas decision (striking down criminal laws against homosexuality) on the question of whether homosexuality itself should always be illegal: only 41% said so, contrasting with 58% who said so in 1998 (before the court's decision).

When courts in Hawai'i made the first ruling in favor of same-sex marriage (1998), a popular referendum came out 29% in favor, 69% opposed. In California, a statute banning same-sex marriage passed by popular referendum with 62% (those who bother to vote are not always the same as the population at large, of course, but Gallup poll just before the vote found 57% opposed to same-sex marriage). This was struck down by the court, so that for almost a year same-sex marriage was legal here. Another referendum then amended the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage with 52% of the vote (probably understating the opposition to same-sex marriage, since not everyone who opposes us is willing to go so far as to write that discrimination into the constitution), forcing another court case. The California Supreme Court ruled that the equal-protection clause in the state constitution had been abolished by this "Proposition 8" but that should be read as narrowly as possible, leaving the marriages that had already happened in place, and requiring "domestic partnerships" to be granted all the same rights as married couples so far as that can be done without going against the language of Prop 8. On the issue of whether Prop 8 violated the equal-protection clause of the federal constitution, the state court "punted" saying that would be up to the federal courts. So the case in federal court now: stay tuned.

By any estimation, you can not claim that the courts were issuing a radical verdict here either. This again supports my point.

??? The courts have persisted for half a century in a position which the public has consistently opposed by a 3-to-1 margin the whole time. The most extremist position opposing the court ruling, that schools should actually be required to dictate a prayer to their students, still has majority support; and the opposition is often absurdly intense, often taking the form of a belief that the Engel decision is precisely when America removed itself from God's protection, causing all of our moral decline and dooming us. How can see this as "supporting your point" that courts always go along with the mob's wishes?

"hardly any" ???? !!!!

You list two dozen: your list is not exhaustive, beginning only after the war started (the "White Rose" cases that I mentioned are in there, but not the "Red Chapel" cases of the late 30's; it was of course stupid of me to forget the July 20 coup-plotters, especially since I watched "Valkyrie" with your favorite actor, Tom Cruise, just a couple months ago) but let's say in total there were from 50 to 100 sentenced to death by the Volksgericht ("People's Court"). First of all, that's a drop in the bucket (your site mentions that the same day one of these defendants was shot, 185 others in the same prison were shot, with no court sentence): the Volksgericht was a small institution (note that one judge, Freisler, presided over the majority of these cases) because, as I said before, the Nazis just couldn't find all that many true-believer Nazis with legal background. And secondly, this was not the regular court system, which never, in contradiction to your original claim that courts "always" just go along with the "mob" sentiment, rubber-stamped any show trials even after the Reichstag Fire uproar when they were strongly expected to.

Were the Japanese interment camps during WWII part of those "things" the majority is not allowed to impose on the minority?

They certainly should have been, and practically everyone now agrees that Kobayashi was wrongly decided: remember, I'm the one saying things do get better with time? Note that during the post-9/11 hysteria (and 9/11 killed almost three times as many as Pearl Harbor), even W would not have dared to round up all Arab-American citizens. I do not approve of what W did do, rounding up a couple hundred non-citizens with visa problems (without any individualized-suspicion of terrorist connections), but at least a repetition of Kobayashi would be unthinkable nowadays.

Everyone knows a 2 state solution is the only way to go, but everyone also knows it wont happen.

And everyone knew Egypt and Israel would never stop going to war, and even after Camp David, polls showed that the majority thought it would never last.

Err... going "down" like where ???
They already live in CAVES !!! (LoLz)

They won't be LIVING in caves much longer...

possible break up of the EU, and collapse
of Europe,

Get real.

a more assertive Turkey

If Turkey makes it way up to the ranks of the middling-prosperous, that would be great, but there is no way Turkey becomes a "great power" again.

You already know what my policy is on the hadith.

You said you accepted hadith interpreting the Qur'an, which I thought this might fall into.

Which was like six centuries after the Prophet (lest we forget).

Gross exaggeration: Imam Muslim lived 202-261 AH.

Yea, if you trust the hadith.

OK, amend the statement to "Neither the Christian nor the Muslim speakers of Arabic in Imam Muslim's day knew anything about any usage of "sister" except for contemporaries"; the point about the Qur'an's lack of such usages still stands.

Maybe the disasters and plagues were not as bad.

I would say "obviously" rather than "maybe".

I know that as far as the Quran is concerned, there are some commentators who take a metaphorical approach to the miracles of Moses (pbuh).

In my essay "Torah Torah Torah" I point out a Psalm b-Tzeath Yisrael mi-Mitzraim / Beth-Ya'aqov me-'am lammim... "At the Exodus of Israel from Egypt / house of Jacob from a stuttering people / the mountains danced / the hills jumped for joy" which could have been turned, by the dull-minded, into a literal story about dancing mountains if more time had gone by before the book of Exodus was reduced to writing.

I myself think, for example, with regards to the "parting of the seas" it was a low tide event. (But it was still caused by God though.)

bananabrain has cited rabbinical Jewish commentators with exactly that view.

Now, "ONE MORE TIME": please provide a valid academic, peer-reviewed source which supports your claim on the issue.

ONE MORE TIME: it is absurd to expect a source to claim a universal negative like "Nobody knows of any usage of 'sister' for a non-contemporary." That requires having previously read everything. All I can claim is the universal negative "Nobody that I have ever read knows of any usage of 'sister' for a non-contemporary." I have read a lot, if not everything.

Well, the jury's still out on that one (until we get an expert on the Arabic language in on the discussion). Maybe you can provide an expert to back up your opinion on the issue (oh that's rite... you can't... too bad, huh>?)

You keep forgetting: my "opinion" that blood-clot, mud-clump, and leech were the only definitions ever used for alaqa by ANY Muslim scholar from the time of Muhammad up to the 20th century, and that finding a new meaning for it requires abandoning the word itself and going back to the root, came from the embryology paper YOU cited.

How many "third world" countries have you ever traveled to? And if you have, have you ever visited areas outside the specified tourist zones??

In none of my travels did I EVER go to "specified tourist zones"; way off the beaten track is where I wanted to be: you've known me all this time, and don't think I'm "off-beat"? I'm hurt

I have never been to sub-Saharan Africa or to Latin America, to be sure. I was out in the boondocks of Kurdistan when I was trying to surrender to Khomeini: light from kerosene lanterns, no electricity; many houses of mud-wattle; people obviously accustomed to hard labor; everybody very friendly and hospitable. I was in Morocco for a little bit: some beggars on the streets of Tangier; they seemed to get enough alms to stay fed, though it must have been humiliating for them.

I have not been overseas for almost 30 years now, alas.

 

[c0de]

The Christians in the Roman Empire didn't fight back, but eventually prevailed anyway. We have still heard of the New Testament because, as Tertullian put it, "the blood of martyrs is seed."

And like I said, the Muslims were not in the same position as the Jesus's (pbuh) followers once they moved to Medinah. That was a Muslim state, that Jesus (pbuh) never had.

This is all besides the point anyway. You say Jesus (pbuh) offered a better example than Muhammad (pbuh) but it's not like his example stopped his followers from committing heaps of violence in his name, did it? In fact, as soon as they got into a position of power in Rome they started hunting down the Jews.

Therefore, the point that Jesus's (pbuh) example was more effective is already dead in the water. But I would not like to pursue this argument, as Muslims are not supposed to compare prophets. You were the one who started comparing Jesus (pbuh) to our Prophet, and I think this was a silly move on your part. I have already stated that the actions of their followers are not their responsibility (once they are no longer their to lead them).

We certainly used to let the bunch of racist red-necks dominate our politics; even those who didn't share their views weren't motivated to stop them. But our society has changed radically in this respect within my lifetime.

Okay, fine. I'll concede the point about the courts always being a slave to public opinion (for now.) It's not all that important to me to begin with.

And everyone knew Egypt and Israel would never stop going to war, and even after Camp David, polls showed that the majority thought it would never last.

The dynamics which solidified the status quo in the mid east are changing. If the US loses interest in the Middle East following a drop in its oil reserves, it wont have any reason to support Israel.

And if that happens, the entire region will fall back into the state it was before the Yanks decided they wanted to be on Israel's corner.

They won't be LIVING in caves much longer...

you yanks are adorable, u know that?

Get real.

Do you know what the figures are for the next two decades? Europian nations are suppose to start losing a percentage of GDP ever year starting in a decade because of the collapse of their populations.

Unless they allow immigration, they are finished. Basically, they are choosing to commit harakiri. They are so stubborn and racist, they're like "we'll take all our luxuries to our graves, but were not passing them on to those darkies!"

Europe is history dude... Only Germany and the UK are viable.
Germany is looking to Russia, and the UK to the US...
And the US and Russia dont exactly get along.

If Turkey makes it way up to the ranks of the middling-prosperous, that would be great, but there is no way Turkey becomes a "great power" again.

Turkey already is the greatest regional power in the ME. It's military is in superb condition, its economy is growing, its population is stable and young, but the most important point is its historical advantage. The Muslims are already used to the Turks taking a lead, and if Turkey decided to raise the flag again, the game is on.

Now, I am not getting all emotional here. I know this wont be any return to the caliphate. But the point is that most Muslims care more about the "image" of Islam than actual Islam itself. If they feel like they have a shot, they'll go for it.

And that's not just my personal analysis. Check out StratFor's intell brief's on the issue.

Gross exaggeration: Imam Muslim lived 202-261 AH.

Oh that's rite, my bad.

OK, amend the statement to "Neither the Christian nor the Muslim speakers of Arabic in Imam Muslim's day knew anything about any usage of "sister" except for contemporaries"; the point about the Qur'an's lack of such usages still stands.

---

ONE MORE TIME: it is absurd to expect a source to claim a universal negative like "Nobody knows of any usage of 'sister' for a non-contemporary." That requires having previously read everything. All I can claim is the universal negative "Nobody that I have ever read knows of any usage of 'sister' for a non-contemporary." I have read a lot, if not everything.

You do realize that even if the Quran used a word that isn't/wasn't commonly used to describe a decedent of a family tree, it still doesn't follow that there is necessarily a confusion in personalities? It is a hypothesis. A hypothesis which isn't taken seriously by any academic source.

You keep forgetting: my "opinion" that blood-clot, mud-clump, and leech were the only definitions ever used for alaqa by ANY Muslim scholar from the time of Muhammad up to the 20th century, and that finding a new meaning for it requires abandoning the word itself and going back to the root, came from the embryology paper YOU cited.

So what? They went back to the root. It's still the root of the same word. No academic source cares about such issues because such objections aren't serious enough to cause any real damage.

Your attacks up till now have been like bullets bouncing off armor plates dude.

ping!

ping!

ping!

I have never been to sub-Saharan Africa or to Latin America, to be sure. I was out in the boondocks of Kurdistan when I was trying to surrender to Khomeini: light from kerosene lanterns, no electricity; many houses of mud-wattle; people obviously accustomed to hard labor; everybody very friendly and hospitable. I was in Morocco for a little bit: some beggars on the streets of Tangier; they seemed to get enough alms to stay fed, though it must have been humiliating for them.

I have not been overseas for almost 30 years now, alas.

Most people in the world (not 15%) are accustomed to hard labor just to make ends meat. That's a far cry from the Ubaid chieftans who sat on their ass "administrating". Thats the way it always was, and thats the way it will always be. .

And once again: they were NOT warriors.

 

[bob x]

You say Jesus (pbuh) offered a better example than Muhammad (pbuh) but it's not like his example stopped his followers from committing heaps of violence in his name, did it?

The "divinity" of Jesus was an even worse doctrine than the "finality" of Muhammad. Turning any man into a replacement for God is the source of much evil.

Muslims are not supposed to compare prophets.

You are supposed to ignore anything that any other prophet said, except for what Muhammad tells you about them, which is only, "They all agreed with me." You don't really understand what Jesus was about, because Muhammad really doesn't tell you much of anything about him, and probably didn't know very much about him.

If the US loses interest in the Middle East following a drop in its oil reserves, it wont have any reason to support Israel.

Quite the contrary. If it was only about oil, we would be entirely on the Arab side. Indeed, it was to keep on good terms with the oil-producing nations that we embargoed any arms to Israel in 1948 (while selling arms to the Arabs), ordered Israel out of Sinai and Suez in 1956 (even though England and France took Israel's side), and gave intelligence to Egypt in 1967 (though LBJ had to pretend "neutrality"). It is hard now to remember that before 1968 we were not Israel's ally. That came about, DESPITE our economic interest in the oil, because of popular disgust at the Palestinian behavior. LBJ had to conceal his oilman connections with the Arabs and pretend to be neutral because the US popular opinion shifted decisively against the Arab side during the buildup to the 1967 war, due to the exterminationist rhetoric and murderous conduct. After that war, the great wave of Palestinian plane hijackings and bombings, the Munich Olympics, and other famous terrorist atrocities cemented our sympathy for Israel. The oil is the only reason we have wanted to listen to the Arab side and make (generally thankless) efforts to broker a peace; as it declines in importance, while the Muslim world continues to generate idiots who murder and threaten murder, while your sensible people do little or nothing to contain them, America is bound to become even more one-sided.

you yanks are adorable, u know that?

Why thank you

Europian nations are suppose to start losing a percentage of GDP ever year starting in a decade because of the collapse of their populations.

Human population all over the globe needs to retreat to a more tolerable density. Doing this gradually by having fewer children is far preferable to having the Four Horsemen (famine, plague, war, and despair) do it.

Turkey already is the greatest regional power in the ME.

If it can remain secular, and learn to be honest about its history, its prospects are good.

You do realize that even if the Quran used a word that isn't/wasn't commonly used to describe a decedent of a family tree

Was it EVER used? I'm not asking you to show "commonly": ONE example is all I have asked for.

it still doesn't follow that there is necessarily a confusion in personalities? It is a hypothesis.

It is the simplest hypothesis. There is nothing in the Qur'an to indicate that the author knows the Bible very well. It confuses patriarchs (like Abraham), priests (like Aaron), and kings (like David) with "prophets", although those roles were very different in Israelite society; except for Moses and Elijah, it does not even mention the major prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. The stories which it does tell are drained of any complexity or context, with little detail.

A hypothesis which isn't taken seriously by any academic source.

What does "academic" mean to you? Just: somebody who agrees with you? You called that "George Sale" guy an academic, but his little piece did not name his sources, leaving you in confusion about where he got his information (you thought it must have been from the Qur'an, when it was a hadith, one you don't even accept).

So what? They went back to the root. It's still the root of the same word.

That's changing "stick" to "stack". Apparently God only revealed to Muhammad the consonants, and did not tell him the vowels and affixes? That leaves the Qur'an open to some massive rewrites.

Most people in the world (not 15%) are accustomed to hard labor just to make ends meat.

The 15% are the ones who AREN'T making ends meet. Yes, I know most people work hard.

That's a far cry from the Ubaid chieftans who sat on their ass "administrating".

Your conception of Stone Age life is bizarrely surreal.

Until recent times, we had some people living not unlike the Ubaidis. In the heart of Papua, in the Grand Dani valley they practiced agriculture, with artificial management of the water flow, achieving fairly high population density; but they didn't have large absolute numbers of population, because of the restricted territory hemmed in by jungle, and this retarded their development because it meant fewer people coming up with new ideas; no village had a large enough territory to impel the development of mathematics; their identification markings, with more sophisticated design actually than the Mesopotamian seals, never developed into writing, without the impetus of trade. The major technological difference from Ubaid was the use of wood and reed, instead of mud and clay, in their buildings and artifacts.

The outside world first discovered them in the 1930's. World War II did not bring any troops that way, so there was not any renewed contact until the '50s. By now of course the native cultures are completely contaminated: oddly, they would rather be among the "poor" in the modern age than among the "rich" of the Stone Age.

And once again: they were NOT warriors.

Remember that town you showed me? The elites traded in only one material, obsidian, the stuff Aztecs used to cut hearts out of their victims, until copper became available, and a little while after copper blades appear, all the inhabitants of the town disappear, totally. That may sound like a peaceful Shangri-la to you, but it tells a rather different story to me.

 

[c0de]

The "divinity" of Jesus was an even worse doctrine than the "finality" of Muhammad. Turning any man into a replacement for God is the source of much evil.

Obviously, we don't believe Jesus (pbuh) ever claimed divinity.

You don't really understand what Jesus was about

From our perspective, neither do Christians.

Quite the contrary. If it was only about oil, we would be entirely on the Arab side.

The US was mostly on the Arab side, like you stated yourself at one time. The reason why things changed was because the stability of the Saudi Kingdom was threatened by pan-arab-nationalism. In the beginning the US wouldn't have thought the Israelis could actually serve as their stooges, but their victory in the war impressed everyone. That is when the US started taking an interest in Israel. It basically replaced and took over British Imperial strategy in the region.

The fact is that Israel has always been an indirect ally of Saudi Arabia. Muslims don't dare to admit this, but thats the way it has been for a while. That is why what the Saudis are threatened most by are people like Nasser, and radicals like Al Qaida. Both are threats to its stability, and both are enemies of the US-Israel.

The oil is the only reason we have wanted to listen to the Arab side and make (generally thankless) efforts to broker a peace; as it declines in importance, while the Muslim world continues to generate idiots who murder and threaten murder, while your sensible people do little or nothing to contain them, America is bound to become even more one-sided.

Your idealism knows no bounds, does it?

Public opinion doesn't determine foreign policy dude. Public opinion is generated by the media, which is always controlled and directed by the establishment. Nation states have no "sympathies," only interests.

If the oil runs dry, the dynamics change completely. If the US loses interest, it has no reason to support anyone in the region, the Israelis or the Arabs.

Why thank you

no worries

Human population all over the globe needs to retreat to a more tolerable density. Doing this gradually by having fewer children is far preferable to having the Four Horsemen (famine, plague, war, and despair) do it.

Actually, depopulation is just as bad as overpopulation. What you need is a stable demographic. Russia is stabalizing, the US is stable due to immigration, and so is Canada. Japan and Europe are not reproducing and face serious economic challenges due to a loss in productivity.

On the other hand, the pressures generated in the rest of the world due to over population might drag everyone down. The human population will peak by 2050 at over 10 billion (by the way, incidentally, thats the year Isaac Newton predicted would be the end of the world, spooky eh?)

If it can remain secular, and learn to be honest about its history, its prospects are good.

Who is ever honest about history?

Was it EVER used? I'm not asking you to show "commonly": ONE example is all I have asked for.

Did you read what I wrote? Even if there isn't a single example of it, it still doesn't necessitate a contradiction. That's YOUR opinion, and it isnt worth much.

It is the simplest hypothesis. There is nothing in the Qur'an to indicate that the author knows the Bible very well. It confuses patriarchs (like Abraham), priests (like Aaron), and kings (like David) with "prophets",

The Quran talks about them in their proper capacities. It doesnt use words like "prophets" or "patriarchs" at all, to my knowledge.

The stories which it does tell are drained of any complexity or context, with little detail.

By complexities you mean of course character flaws? So for you, a prophet who slept with his own daughter is more believable?

What does "academic" mean to you? Just: somebody who agrees with you?

How about someone who is peer-reviewed??

That's changing "stick" to "stack". Apparently God only revealed to Muhammad the consonants, and did not tell him the vowels and affixes? That leaves the Qur'an open to some massive rewrites.

Once again: your opinion on the issue is not worth much, considering you are no expert on arabic. Bring me any academic source which agrees with you, any expert on Arabic, he doesnt have to be a muslim.

Your conception of Stone Age life is bizarrely surreal.

How was the ubaid period the "stone age" ??

That may sound like a peaceful Shangri-la to you, but it tells a rather different story to me.

You were proven wrong on the issue already.

You want me to quote my sources again?

 

[bob x]

Obviously, we don't believe Jesus (pbuh) ever claimed divinity.

I don't believe so either. But he did teach ethics, and it would be better for Islam to understand that. All you get in the Qur'an is that he was a miracle and told people to believe in God. Did Muhammad even know what Jesus taught?

The reason why things changed was because the stability of the Saudi Kingdom was threatened by pan-arab-nationalism.

I don't understand why you think an alliance with Israel was at all helpful, rather than hurtful, in dealing with that problem. In the wake of the war, in 1968 the Baathists took over Iraq and the Libyan monarchy fell, giving rise to Colonel Qadhafi in 1969. Allying with Israel seriously injured our standing with such regimes, particularly after the 1973 war: our oil was completely cut off, Qadhafi finally brokering a deal that we could buy again, but at four times the previous price, tanking our economy for the rest of the decade; we were just starting to recover when Iran also went extremist-Muslim, with a new oil price-spike that sent us into another recession. All that Israel does is to help recruiters for the radical groups, who get new talking points every time Israelis take some excessively violent action; all our alliance with them gains us is that anti-Israeli anger is also directed against us.

In the beginning the US wouldn't have thought the Israelis could actually serve as their stooges

Israel is not at all our "stooge": when a US President asks them to do something that would help our interests, the Israelis are quite likely to say, screw you, we have to act in our own interests. This pattern is so frequent that the more usual conspirationalist view is that the US is Israel's stooge.

but their victory in the war impressed everyone. That is when the US started taking an interest in Israel.

You are misunderstanding how American politics works. Our politicians, unlike our judges and unlike the politicians you may be more used to, need to be exquisitely sensitive to public opinion if they want to keep their jobs. The massive shift in public sentiment against the Arabs, driven by Nasser shouting "We'll push all the Jews into the sea!" and Saiqa raining missiles down on farms, occurred before the war.

The fact is that Israel has always been an indirect ally of Saudi Arabia.

Again, I don't understand how the existence of Israel is supposed to be helpful to Saudi Arabia in your view of how things are working. Israel can't do anything to limit the spread of extremists in the Muslim world; Israel can only aid their recruiters.

Your idealism knows no bounds, does it?

Certainly compared to YOU, Gloomy Gus: is the threat of hellfire all that keeps you from suicide? I mean gee, you think almost everybody is in wretched misery and always will be until the end of the world. I know you're planning for infinite bliss afterward to make up for it, but: if you really believe God screwed the pooch so badly when He made this world, what gives you confidence that His second attempt will be any better? Isn't that a little like an American voting in 2004 to re-elect Dubya, thinking that his first term was so horrid he couldn't help but do better next time?

Public opinion doesn't determine foreign policy dude.

Not in your country, maybe.

Public opinion is generated by the media, which is always controlled and directed by the establishment.

It is controlled by businessmen who are solely concerned with making money; opinion-manipulation is not their motive. "Vanity press" outlets controlled by opinionated wealthy people who want to push their viewpoint are rare, because they are costly. Intellectuals who just want facts with minimal spin are a niche market, served by the likes of McNeil-Lehrer and NPR. Mass media is driven by "if it bleeds, it leads" (that is, start off with a juicy murder if you can, anything that will be shocking) and are happy to have outrageous-sounding statements from politicians, which they will repeat without critical examination because they excite interest: certainly some politicians are skilled at using this tendency for manipulative purposes. Fox News has done very well dishing out right-wing pablum because it suited the pre-existing prejudices of many people who were not being "served" by existing media.

Actually, depopulation is just as bad as overpopulation. What you need is a stable demographic.

Gradual decrease is better for most places in the world today.

The human population will peak by 2050 at over 10 billion (by the way, incidentally, thats the year Isaac Newton predicted would be the end of the world, spooky eh?)

Isaac Newton predicted the end of the world for 1776, I heard.

Who is ever honest about history?

Some are more so than others. The Kurdish problem will continue to generate low-level violence until the Turks can admit they have treated the Kurds badly over the years; the Armenian genocide continues to hurt their reputation in the world worse than the Holocaust hurts Germany's because Germany has shown repentance and Turkey has not.

Did you read what I wrote? Even if there isn't a single example of it, it still doesn't necessitate a contradiction.

It makes simple "error" far more likely as the explanation. If God specifically invented this singular usage just for that passage, it looks like God didn't want Jews or Christians to take the book seriously.

The Quran talks about them in their proper capacities. It doesnt use words like "prophets" or "patriarchs" at all, to my knowledge.

It never speaks of "patriarchs"; it uses "prophets" all over the place, for people who were not at all considered "prophets" in their own culture.

So for you, a prophet who slept with his own daughter is more believable?

Like this, for example: who ever told you that Lot was a "prophet"??? He was nothing of the kind.

How about someone who is peer-reviewed??

I don't know the specialized journals in this field, and don't know if there are any that are not run by Muslims who would never accept papers questioning the veracity of the Qur'an. You haven't been citing anything from journals either.

How was the ubaid period the "stone age" ??

Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages are defined by the material used to make cutting tools. Stone Age is divided into Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic based on what else the people had going for them: "Mesolithic" people might have pottery, basket-weaving, net-traps, etc. Ubaid was "Neolithic" (defined by mastery of some plants and/or animals) turning into "Chalcolithic" (knowing the existence of copper, but not yet how to work with it).

Stone-only tools limit the material culture in many ways you would not immediately think of. Mr. Eridu was nude except for a codpiece stitched out of leaves and bark fiber (Mrs. Eridu would be a bit more modest in some kind of bark skirt). Mr. Ubaid kept some animals, so he had rawhides: holes were punched with a flint awl, so the hide could be clamped around his body with fired-clay studs; still not "clothing" as we understand the word. Only Mr. Uruk could shear sheep, run the wool through the new-fangled spinning wheel, and tailor the cloth into robes: all this requires decent blades. Mr. Uruk also grew some flax, for linen. Mr. Ubaid, even if he could afford the acreage and water, did not have the manpower to harvest any non-food crops: Mr. Uruk's scythe was vastly more efficient that plucking each ear of grain individually, as Mr. Ubaid had to. Mr. Uruk, if of high rank, sat on a finely-carved throne. Mr. Ubaid could not cut wood well enough to make any kind of chair, or table, or bed (though even Mr. Eridu knew how to make log boats). Mr. Ubaid could not make any kind of cart (and Mr. Ubaid I did not even have cows to pull them; sheep and goats are not much use for that), so he could only transport goods to the extent he could carry them (overland, at least: water transport was an exception).

People in Papua or Amazonia etc. who still live like Mr. Eridu or Mr. Ubaid are sometimes called "Fourth World"; even to their chiefs, joining the Third World looks like a step up.

You were proven wrong on the issue already.

You want me to quote my sources again?

I quoted one of your sources right back at you, that the chief occupation of the elites was monopolizing weaponry. Why do you imagine that the commoners allowed the elites to monopolize food? Every kind of overlordship ultimately rests on threat. Are you picturing Ubaid as an anarcho-syndicalist collective? Come and see the violence inherent in the system!

What the "Ubaid versus Uruk" papers were about was the frequency of violence. Keegan studied the Papuans, and such fragmentary data as we have on Native Americans outside the areas where encounters with whites were the dominant factor, and found that about 10% of tribes were engaged in war at any given time, the wars often escalating to genocidal level. This is consistent with Mendenhall's The Tenth Generation (I had professor Mendenhall for Biblical History) on the late-Bronze and Iron Age Mideast, finding that a typical war was a generation long, but 9 out of 10 generations were spared this. This is very different from the "Uruk" period in the early Bronze Age, when warfare was nearly constant; I have acknowledged that I was mistaken in thinking that this was a continuation of "Ubaid" conditions. It is better seen as a temporary (though centuries-long) disequilibrium brought about by the discovery of metal weapons, analogous to the six-century spasm of devastating violence from the Hundred Years' War through World War Two driven by the discovery of explosives.

In the "Ubaid" period your sources indicate that we did not have towns constantly sacking each other and replacing the native populations. This certainly indicates a lesser rate of violence, but your impression that there was "zero" violence is not what this is saying; I expect they were fighting roughly 10% of the time, like most people. I do not believe the authors of your paper are ignorant about the defensive purpose of "towns" or about the weaponry owned by the elites: rather, I assume they are taking it for granted that any readers will understand that much. They are simply stressing that the "Ubaid" period was not the war-of-all-against-all that the "Uruk" period became.

 

[xcvbxcvb]

I think, if one reads the Quran in light of rationality and science (including consideration for history and locale), it can be found in accordance... like any sincere religious text.

My greatest concern is the varying translations of such texts and the interpretations which people are demanded to accept.

We begin with stories by the fire but, basically, with the books which follow, we are trying to achieve a free channel between our thoughts and our actions, a clear conscience/consciousness. Each culture has its own book for this, but our conscience comes with the package when we are born.

Science becomes tricky in that genuine scientific theories can also be disproved. It seems to be a question of where the arithmetic meets up.

Point A can not be enforced for each individual so, there comes the point when we must agree to disagree and let live.

 

[c0de]

.



You know bob, keeping up this circular conversation with you, in which you actually have the "nerve" to start talking about the Ubaid again, after YOU yourself suggested we move on after your initial position on the issue was refuted, is unacceptable.

As for the Israeli tangent and media influence, there is just too much information on the issue that you are either ignoring, or are simply unaware of (I suspect the latter.) I would put together a proper bibliography for you like I did in our last argument, but what's the point? You might just concede the point and then a couple of posts down start arguing the same subject again from a different angle... Besides, it is much simpler to just say: "don't take my word for it, just wait and see what happens."

Now, I know that arguing for the sake of arguing is something you need to do right now to provide you with mental stimulation, as you obviously have nothing else to do. I sympathize with your situation, but I do have things to do (sorry.)

If you ever come up with any academic (i.e. peer reviewed) sources to back up your attacks on the Quran, let me know. Until then, have a good one, and good luck on the interview.

 

[Saltmeister]

If the Muslims of Medinah didn't fight back, you would never have heard there was such a thing as the "Quran". Now for some this might have been a good thing, but not for us Muslims.

You mean they were completely cornered? What I'd like to ask is why anyone would want to wipe out an entire group and also why nobody tried to escape to another city. Surely this would have been possible. Someone would have had a horse or a camel. They could flee and spread the message to the rest of the continent.

The "divinity" of Jesus was an even worse doctrine than the "finality" of Muhammad. Turning any man into a replacement for God is the source of much evil.

I think you're confusing "divinity" with "deity." A deity is a god/God. Divinity can refer to anything that is spiritual, heavenly, religious or sacred. Jesus definitely possessed "divinity" in the sense of having originated from heaven:

And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so shall we bear the likeness of the man from heaven. 1 Corinthians 15:49

No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven--the Son of Man. Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up. John 3:13-14

Apart from this distinction, there are certainly people arguing in favour of "deity," but turning a man into a replacement for God doesn't inspire evil. What inspires evil is arrogance and such a doctrine doesn't actually generate the arrogance you are identifying. There has definitely been arrogance among Christians over the centuries but it was not caused by people believing he was God. It was the belief in the rationality of the Gospel, a belief that went a bit too far. I have to blame Paul for this. Paul's writings were full of rhetoric about the heroics of Jesus and his place in the divine scheme of things. The arrogance of Christians comes from the way he ridiculed non-believers. Christians learnt from his bad example.

Quite the contrary. If it was only about oil, we would be entirely on the Arab side. Indeed, it was to keep on good terms with the oil-producing nations that we embargoed any arms to Israel in 1948 (while selling arms to the Arabs), ordered Israel out of Sinai and Suez in 1956 (even though England and France took Israel's side), and gave intelligence to Egypt in 1967 (though LBJ had to pretend "neutrality").

I think I'm starting to understand now the reason for bananabrain's comments a few months ago about Israel not wanting to trust or rely on any single group or country. Its most powerful ally conceded to the wishes of its enemies. It's now more likely to find allies elsewhere: ie. Russia and China. I've heard that America can't trust Israel to keep its military secrets from those two powers.

 

[bob x]

You know bob, keeping up this circular conversation with you, in which you actually have the "nerve" to start talking about the Ubaid again, after YOU yourself suggested we move on after your initial position on the issue was refuted, is unacceptable.

Let us recap: as you know, I consider your "refutation" of my position to be, in fact, a gross misunderstanding on your part of what your own sources have to say. I wrote a (typically long-winded) description of what the Ubaid period was actually like on the rodgertutt thread, and you declared that you would not read it. I asked if you wanted to drop the matter, and you said fine. Then, in the course of answering your profound misapprehension that I was a "favored son" from the upper classes by describing my actual situation, I made a JOKE, a THROWAWAY LINE, that "I'm still better off than Mr. Ubaid [smiley]" to which you responded by asking me to give a point-by-point comparison of my material situation to his, and you have continued to argue about it-- although, apparently, you never even understood until just now the basic point that "Neolithic" means "late Stone Age" and what that implies about the dire impoverishment, compared to anyone not outright starving, of the Ubaidis.

As for the Israeli tangent and media influence, there is just too much information on the issue that you are either ignoring, or are simply unaware of (I suspect the latter.)

I will remind you again that I actually live in America, and am old enough to remember the buildup to 1967. You don't show any understanding of how anything really works in America, and I am astonished at the arrogance of your presumption that you know better than I do.

I would put together a proper bibliography for you like I did in our last argument, but what's the point?

How much willingness I would have to read your stuff would depend on what kind of stuff it is: the paranoid polemics of Noam Chomsky?

"don't take my word for it, just wait and see what happens."

Indeed. Before Obama is out of office I would expect to see some form of Palestinian independence (accompanied, of course, by continued dissatisfaction that it is not enough). You probably consider that impossible. We'll see.

Now, I know that arguing for the sake of arguing is something you need to do right now to provide you with mental stimulation, as you obviously have nothing else to do. I sympathize with your situation, but I do have things to do (sorry.)

I hope your job goes well for you.

If you ever come up with any academic (i.e. peer reviewed) sources to back up your attacks on the Quran, let me know.

This site gives the following list of academicians (more or less ordered from most to least respectable) who think "sister of Harun" is just a blunder (along with the Islamic reply):
H.A. R. Gibb, J.H. Kramers, Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam, Cornell University Press: New York, 1953, p. 328 [back]
S. Vernon McCarland, Religious of the World, Random House: New York, 1969, p. 321 [back]
D.S. Margoliouth, Muhammad and the Rise of Islam, (London 1905), Voice of India: New Delhi, 1985, p. 61 [back]
N.A. Newman, Muhammad, The Qur’an and Islam, I.D.B.I.: Pasadena, 1996, p. 371 [back]
William Montgomery Watt, Muslim-Christian Encounters: Perceptions and Misperceptions, Routledge: London, 1991, p. 17 [back]
C.C. Torrey, The Jewish Foundation of Islam, Scribners: N.Y, 1933, p. 108 [back]
Karen Armstrong, Muhammad, Victor Gollanez: London, 1995, p. 131 [back]
Ibn Warraq, Why I Am Not A Muslim, Prometheus Books: New York, 1995, p. 63 [back]
It mentions a "Gerock" (unknown to me) as well as George Sale (whom you cited before) as non-Muslim academicians who think such a blunder improbable. The list is not exhaustive: in this chapter of a recent book (there are links to the other chapters), "sister of Harun" is discussed along with other oddities in the Qur'an which the author ascribes to a garbled knowledge of miscellaneous folklore.

Until then, have a good one, and good luck on the interview.

Oh, there's very little chance it will turn into a job, but the guy is well connected, so he may turn me on to somebody else who will know of somebody... who actually has a job for me. All will work out as it should, inshallah.

 

[c0de]

Let us recap: as you know, I consider your "refutation" of my position to be, in fact, a gross misunderstanding on your part of what your own sources have to say. I wrote a (typically long-winded) description of what the Ubaid period was actually like on the rodgertutt thread, and you declared that you would not read it. I asked if you wanted to drop the matter, and you said fine. Then, in the course of answering your profound misapprehension that I was a "favored son" from the upper classes by describing my actual situation, I made a JOKE, a THROWAWAY LINE, that "I'm still better off than Mr. Ubaid [smiley]" to which you responded by asking me to give a point-by-point comparison of my material situation to his, and you have continued to argue about it-- although, apparently, you never even understood until just now the basic point that "Neolithic" means "late Stone Age" and what that implies about the dire impoverishment, compared to anyone not outright starving, of the Ubaidis.

selective memory loss eh?

Your original point was that the best of the Ubaids, were worse off then the poorest today. You cited the level of violence and availability of food. You also tried to claim the elite was made up of a warrior class. All these points of yours were refuted by up-to-date sources, against your decade old ones.

You then proceeded to drown out the thread by posting one essay after another. I ignored your complaints completely, at which point, you were the ones who offered to DROP the issue by admitting that you "learned a few things".

I will remind you again that I actually live in America, and am old enough to remember the buildup to 1967.

A lot of other thinkers also lived in the same era as you, and they disagree with your idealistic delusions.

You don't show any understanding of how anything really works in America, and I am astonished at the arrogance of your presumption that you know better than I do.

Yea, my "arrogance" ..

How much willingness I would have to read your stuff would depend on what kind of stuff it is: the paranoid polemics of Noam Chomsky?

I am not that big a fan of chomsky, but I know even he is much more credible then you on the issue.

Indeed. Before Obama is out of office I would expect to see some form of Palestinian independence (accompanied, of course, by continued dissatisfaction that it is not enough). You probably consider that impossible. We'll see.

I am talking about half a century down the line... guess you'll probably be 6 feet under by then : P

I hope your job goes well for you.

Thanx

This site gives the following list of academicians (more or less ordered from most to least respectable) who think "sister of Harun" is just a blunder (along with the Islamic reply):
H.A. R. Gibb, J.H. Kramers, Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam, Cornell University Press: New York, 1953, p. 328

This is straight from Gibb and Kramers, your "most respectable" authors on the list:

Sale, Gerock and others think such a confusion improbable.

H.A.R. Gibb, J.H. Kramers, ibid., p. 328

I think this settles the issue. This age old attack remains just a hypothesis. The web page also brings up some other points in support of the Muslim position which were not mentioned on this thread, so thanks for that.

in this chapter of a recent book (there are links to the other chapters), "sister of Harun" is discussed along with other oddities in the Qur'an which the author ascribes to a garbled knowledge of miscellaneous folklore.

that isn't an actual book dude. Mr. John gilchrist isn't an actual author. (His books aren't exactly the kind you can find on amazon.) go ahead and follow the links, and it seems you can only get a hardcopy via a vanity publisher, and his publisher's website isnt even functional.

He's a christian missionary writer who publishes on the internet... not worth yours, or my time.

Oh, there's very little chance it will turn into a job, but the guy is well connected, so he may turn me on to somebody else who will know of somebody... who actually has a job for me. All will work out as it should, inshallah.

inshAllah

 

[bob x]

Salty: indeed I should have said "deity" rather than "divinity"; what is wrong is not to emphasize that Jesus was very inspired, but to claim him as the exclusive source of good. That means that the "experts" who can exclusively give you information about Jesus must be obeyed, or else you are evil by definition, and anything that is done to such evil "enemies of God" can therefore be justified.

selective memory loss eh?

Your original point was that the best of the Ubaids, were worse off then the poorest today.

Worse off than the "poor" of today (I have always acknowledged that those who are actually starving are, of course, worse off than the Ubaidis, but that is far from being everybody among the poor), and I stand by that.

You cited the level of violence and availability of food.

I was in error about the level of violence and acknowledged that early. The availability of food I have always cited as a plus for the Ubaidis as compared to those of the poor who are going hungry; although the Ubaidi diet was very limited, contributing to their ill health and short life-span. As far as every other kind of very basic material goods is concerned, the Stone Age was a time of extreme poverty, to which only pre-contact Papuans and Amazonians can be compared in the modern world. This is such an elementary point that I am astonished that anyone could dispute it: I feel as if I am arguing to you about whether Mt. Everest is big, or whether the Sun is far away.

You also tried to claim the elite was made up of a warrior class. All these points of yours were refuted by up-to-date sources, against your decade old ones.

YOUR OWN SOURCE confirmed that the elite was a warrior class, concerned with trading in weaponry to the exclusion of everything else. It was not a period of unusual, chronic violence like "Uruk" but surely had as much violence as any ordinary period of human history; why you want to fantasize that this was a singular period of perfect peace is beyond me, and I have asked you several times how you think the society worked, why you think that the commoners would let the elites snatch food from them for no apparent reason, and you have never even attempted to answer.

And a source is generally considered a GOOD source when it has been out there for over a decade, not shot down by anybody but instead coming to be respected as the go-to source on its topic.

You then proceeded to drown out the thread by posting one essay after another.

I point out to you, in detail, just how seriously deprived Stone Age people were. That is something that you already ought to know.

I ignored your complaints completely

Indeed. Your inability to answer sounded like a concession of the point.

A lot of other thinkers also lived in the same era as you, and they disagree with your idealistic delusions.

Idealistic? I point out that Americans in general, starting from the mid-Sixties, developed a hatred of the Arabs (and "hatred" is by no means too strong a word for it) based on the rhetoric and actions of the Arabs. No-one who lived through that time, or the times since, could have failed to notice this. Blaming it on media portrayals of the Arabs will not do: the rhetoric and actions were despicable, and there would be no possible way of depicting them otherwise. This is just part of a general trend in the Arab world to blame anybody but themselves for the consequences of their behavior.

As to your assertions that the alliance with Israel is somehow supposed to help us in dealing with pan-Arab nationalism or other anti-Western movements, I am not expressing anything except confusion about how you think that works. It seems evident to me, as I would have thought it was evident to practically anybody, that our alliance with Israel instead worsens our problems in that regard. I am just asking you to explain what you mean, since apparently I am not getting what your point is.

Yea, my "arrogance" ..

Yes, indeed. I would not lecture you about how Pakistan works.

I am not that big a fan of chomsky, but I know even he is much more credible then you on the issue.

I knew of Chomsky (have not met the man) in the early Seventies when he was still working in linguistics (one of my interests from childhood). His theories about how the brain internally processes language were a significant contribution, but he treated them as infallible Scripture, angrily accusing everybody who made even minor suggestions of modification to his views that they were engaging in malicious plots to destroy him. Once he had alienated absolutely everybody in the field (including those who were trying to agree with him), he left academe for his second career in political polemics, where he had no need for anybody to agree with him. This work shows the same traits as before: insightful intelligence mixed with an utter incapacity for perceiving the motivations that drive other people. His story-telling often suffers from what in literacy criticism is called the "motiveless malignancy" plot-failure, ascribing to the villains actions which do not serve their self-interests in any way, bad actions undertaken seemingly for no reason except that they are bad people. Not to put too fine a point on it, Chomsky for all his intellect suffers from a sad mental illness, and all serious researchers in political science recognize that just as well as researchers in linguistics were forced to.

This is straight from Gibb and Kramers, your "most respectable" authors on the list:

Sale, Gerock and others think such a confusion improbable.

It shows Gibb and Kramers acknowledging the existence of other scholars who disagree with them. That's a respectable thing to do, but they don't defer to Sale or Gerock as authorities. It is noteworthy that they have to go back all the way to 1923 in the case of Sale and 1839(!) in the case of Gerock to find any scholars arguing the other side (I thought you didn't like reliance on old sources?); more recent scholarship doesn't tend to regard Sale and Gerock very highly, at least on the specific point of how they treat this particular Qur'anic passage.

The web page also brings up some other points in support of the Muslim position which were not mentioned on this thread, so thanks for that.

It does have a lot of interesting information wandering far afield from just the specific "sister of Harun" issue. While it favors the "distant-descendant" explanation over the "two-Haruns", it posits a second Imran, literal father of Mary, with some excuses: why do this, when nobody has any problem understanding "daughter" as a distant descendant? It gives tons of examples of "daughter" used for distant descendants, which to my mind cuts the other way (underlining how odd it is to be calling her a "sister" of Harun when "daughter" would be by far the commonest way to put it), but only one purported example of "brother" used analogously, claiming that members of the large Banu Tamim tribe are called "brother of Tamim" (although "sons of Tamim" is what Banu Tamim means). There is, as usual, no footnote to any actual example of somebody saying "brother of Tamim" and we are left to wonder whether this is some usage they actually know about, or whether they are giving it as a hypothetical example of what they think people might say.

So I tried Googling "brother of Tamim" and almost every hit was a literal brother of a person named Tamim. But I did find this "tafsir" (elaboration on the passage) which might be the website's source on this:
(O sister of Harun!) referring to the brother of Musa, because she was of his descendants. This is similar to the saying, `O brother of Tamim,' to one who is from the Tamimi tribe, and `O brother of Mudar,' to one who is from the Mudari tribe. It has also been said that she was related to a righteous man among them whose name was Harun and she was comparable to him in her abstinence and worship.
Again there is a wavering between the "distant-descendant" and the "two-Haruns" explanations.

And I found a message-board discussion, but this:
And unto (the tribe of) A'ad (We sent) their brother, Hud. He said: O my people! Serve Allah. Ye have no other Allah save Him. Will ye not ward off (evil)? [Qur'an 7:65]
brothers-yet Hud was NOT the literal brother of Ad...or excuse me the TRIBE AD
saying "sister of" is fine IN ISLAM...as the "ONE BROTHERHOOD"
actually hurts your case. Hud is called "their brother" (brother of the contemporary members of the tribe) and not "his brother" (he is not "brother" to the long-ago ancestor); and similarly referring to a contemporary Muslim woman as a "sister" is another example of using it for people living at the same time. Then it gives this again:
in the semitic usage...its perfectly normal to be referred to as the brother-or son of a renowned ancestor...just for instance Banu Tamim....a man from this tribe may be called "the brother of Tamim"...not really a big deal in Arabic
and again I have to wonder if "brother of Tamim" has ever actually been used this way by anybody (can't we get just ONE example? instead of claims that somebody sometime said this, but we can't say who?) or if this has become a standard "talking-point" that always gets recycled whenever this conundrum is raised.

that isn't an actual book dude. Mr. John gilchrist isn't an actual author.

He has done an impressive amount of actual research, and cites actual primary sources. It is difficult to publish books attacking Islam nowadays since the Rushdie affair. I remember how hard it was to get a copy of Hagarism (whose thesis I found very dubious) since Muslims were buying up the press run to destroy it (to be fair, Jews did the same to The Thirteenth Tribe which I was only able to obtain in French).

 

[c0de]

I was in error about the level of violence

Damn rite u were !

YOUR OWN SOURCE confirmed that the elite was a warrior class, concerned with trading in weaponry to the exclusion of everything else.

Err, no, actually. My sources clearly said the elite was ONLY administrating, and the Ubaidis lived in an era which was "peacefully expansionist".

It was your own twisted interpretations which tired to contradict those conclusions. And I reject them completely.

why you want to fantasize that this was a singular period of perfect peace is beyond me,

LoLz

You still haven't understood a thing about what I was trying to argue, have you?

My entire paradigm is based on the idea that things were ALWAYS crap. The world sucked then, and they it sucks now. Most people are are screwed, one way or another. That is the state of man.

Indeed. Your inability to answer sounded like a concession of the point.

Why should I answer objections which dont relate to my actual argument?

And a source is generally considered a GOOD source when it has been out there for over a decade, not shot down by anybody but instead coming to be respected as the go-to source on its topic.

Hmmm.... "shot down" ... like YOUR 10 year old source ?? and let me know when my source gets "shot down"... till then, take the beating.

I point out to you, in detail, just how seriously deprived Stone Age people were. That is something that you already ought to know.

The technical term is "New Stone Age" and the Ubaid's lived right at the border of the Bronze age.

As to your assertions that the alliance with Israel is somehow supposed to help us in dealing with pan-Arab nationalism or other anti-Western movements, I am not expressing anything except confusion about how you think that works. It seems evident to me, as I would have thought it was evident to practically anybody, that our alliance with Israel instead worsens our problems in that regard.

Do you have any idea how stupid that sounds? Considering that EVERYONE knows Israel is the only thing that kept pan-Arab nationalism in check?

This isn't even a controversial point. It is MAINSTREAM textbook history! LBJ broke the trend of American impartiality that Eisenhower had adopted in the region during the 6 day war precisely because of Nasser and his dreams of Arab unity under a "United Arab Republic". Nasser was the leader of Arab nationalism. With his defeat, the project was dead in the water.

Blaming it on media portrayals of the Arabs will not do: the rhetoric and actions were despicable, and there would be no possible way of depicting them otherwise. This is just part of a general trend in the Arab world to blame anybody but themselves for the consequences of their behavior.

another yank lecturing others on "rhetoric" and "actions"?? amusing, as always...

What about the "despicable" actions of Israel? What about its attack on the USS Liberty? What about Sabra and Shtilla? What about EVERYTHING it has done in the occupied territories for the past half century??

more recent scholarship doesn't tend to regard Sale and Gerock very highly, at least on the specific point of how they treat this particular Qur'anic passage.

The fact that all your sources are listed as "protestant" or "christian" authors isn't what really bothers me. But the fact that there is nothing "original" or especially concerning about their scholarship is what should concern you since you are basing your entire point on this and the ukht thing. There is nothing to conclusively prove anything here. That is why it hasn't created any big waves (in contrast to issues in authorship of the Bible).

So in the end, you can keep your hypothesis, but it is not disturbing enough for Muslims like me to pay attention to it. (bullets off armor dude ;-)

He has done an impressive amount of actual research, and cites actual primary sources. It is difficult to publish books attacking Islam nowadays since the Rushdie affair.

This has turned into your "standard talking point" hasn't it? Just pretend like the only reason there isn't much there is because people are afraid to publish Nothing is hard to publish these days. Something which conclusively proves a contradiction in the Quran would be an instant best seller and that author would be lauded in academia.

Let me know when that happens