Today’s Jesus and Mo, titled “Proof,” came in an email with this note from the artist: “Someone Tweeted this argument for the miraculous nature of the Koran the other day, but I can’t remember who it was.”
There are also timely revelations about science, for some Muslim “scientists” maintain that all scientific advances, including the discovery of oxygen, the fusion reactions in the Sun, and quantum mechanics, were all anticipated in the Qur’an. See page 105 of FvF.
I think for that strip the author should’ve had Joseph Smith’s body double put in an appearance. Mormonism has some timeliness/self-serving whoppers that IMO rival anything other major religions might put up. You want me to reproduce my earlier translation verbatim? Sorry, a new revelation says I can’t ever translate that tablet again. The US army is here? Tell them that God is now telling me monogamy is actually A-OK. Geez, we look racist…hey, thanks God for clarifying the bit about blacks!
For example, Joseph Smith’s “translation” of Egyptian papyrus documents in which he “discovered” the Book of Abraham (in 1880, it was adopted as canonical scripture by what is now the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), the record of Joseph of Egypt and a tale of an Egyptian princess Katumin or Kah tou mun.
Unbeknown to Joseph Smith was the fact that Jean François Champollion had already deciphered Egyptian script and the “translations” were quickly exposed for the frauds that they were, not that this made any difference to rank and file Mormons.
This subject is explored in great detail in “The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Editon” by Robert K. Ritner Ph. D who also works at the University of Chicago.
God also revealed that Smith’s wife would go to hell if she didn’t accept Smith marrying other women.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve got this memory that the Carter administration was threatening the tax-free status of the Mormons because of their racist doctrine, and that’s when the “revelation” about equality came.
Yes, the convenient revelation to the Mormons concerning black people was the first thing this cartoon brought to mind.
The religious accommodationists are nearly always funny, maybe even to themselves. The ones that are not so humorous are many of our own liberal persuasion that seem to roll over at the call of religious freedom and rights.
” On one such instance, Muhammad’s “announcement of a revelation permitting him to enter into marriages disallowed to other men drew from her [Aisha] the retort, ‘It seems to me your Lord hastens to satisfy your desire!'”[
“The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God. I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do to their fellows, because it always coincides with their own desires” (Susan B. Anthony, sourced here).
I heard a story from a rancher in Wyoming years ago (which may not be true) about Brigham Young leading the Mormons through the desert: they’d run out of coffee, and asked him what they should do. He went out into the wilderness and prayed on it and returned to tell them that God had told him they weren’t to drink coffee anymore!
That he forbade coffee just demonstrates how powerfully evil a man Smith really was….
b&
Here’s one of my favourite Quranic “miracles”, courtesy of the risible Dr. Zakir Naik:
Let us apply this theory of probability to the Qur’an, and assume that a person has guessed all the information that is mentioned in the Qur’an which was unknown at that time. Let us discuss the probability of all the guesses being simultaneously correct.
At the time when the Qur’an was revealed, people thought the world was flat, there are several other options for the shape of the earth. It could be triangular, it could be quadrangular, pentagonal, hexagonal, heptagonal, octagonal, spherical, etc. Lets assume there are about 30 different options for the shape of the earth. The Qur’an rightly says it is spherical, if it was a guess the chances of the guess being correct is 1/30.
The light of the moon can be its own light or a reflected light. The Qur’an rightly says it is a reflected light. If it is a guess, the chances that it will be correct is 1/2 and the probability that both the guesses i.e the earth is spherical and the light of the moon is reflected light is 1/30 x 1/2 = 1/60.
Further, the Qur’an also mentions every living thing is made of water. Every living thing can be made up of either wood, stone, copper, aluminum, steel, silver, gold, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, oil, water, cement, concrete, etc. The options are say about 10,000. The Qur’an rightly says that everything is made up of water. If it is a guess, the chances that it will be correct is 1/10,000 and the probability of all the three guesses i.e. the earth is spherical, light of moon is reflected light and everything is created from water being correct is 1/30 x 1/2 x 1/10,000 = 1/60,000 which is equal to about .0017%.
Imagine! Some guy living in the desert figuring out that living things are made up of water, rather than concrete or aluminum. He could only have learned that from God!
http://www.irf.net/Atheism.html
It is all wrong. If there is any truth to anything in the koran, the ancient Greeks knew it first.
Exactly, and it is the Greeks they stole it from and added it to the koran. In modern times the Islamic world doesn’t add much to contemporary science…as is known, belief smothers reason, and the greater the belief, the bigger the pillow.
Love that last line!
Me too!
Eratosthenes “guessed” the Earth was spherical and then made a remarkably accurate “guess” of its size and the tilt of its axis. Take that Allah, ya johnnie-come-lately loser!
“Even a blind pig finds an acorn, once in a while.”
I’d say there are only TWO likely options for the shape of the Earth. Either approximately flat (whether flat and square, flat and circular, flat and octagonal or what doesn’t really matter, they’re just subdivisons of flat); or approximately spheroidal.
Flat is just a subdivision of approximately spheroidal (for large values of r).
<i."for some Muslim “scientists” maintain that all scientific advances, including the discovery of oxygen, the fusion reactions in the Sun, and quantum mechanics, were all anticipated in the Qur’an."
One of the most hilarious instances of foot-in-mouth “self-pwnage” I’ve seen in religious apologetics came from the Muslim apologists debating with P.Z. Myers
(easy to find the video on youtube).
The apologists were of course arguing that the Koran revealed scientific knowledge impossible for anyone to know at the time of it’s writing. They brought out the hoary old
claim of the Koran accurately describing the development of the embryo. The amount of waffling was head-spinning to watch. First they said the Koran was the only book that gives you the tools to interpret itself. Which, if true, is exactly what you’d expect of a set of claims that wouldn’t hold up to outside scrutiny. Secondly they then say that words in Arabic can be interpreted in many different ways. Which already does not bode well. THEN while arguing that the Koran
accurately describes bones forming first, muscles etc later, they say the Koran is particularly SPECIFIC about that claim, that it “exactly” what the Koran claims. One apologist says it’s just too specific for a desert nomad to have guessed: “Word in Arabic MEANS strait after…”
Then P.Z. says, if that’s what the Koran claims then you’ve just shown it’s false.
One of the apologists asks for P.Z.’s credentials and when P.Z. explains he is an embryologist, it takes the apologist by surprise. He’d stepped right into it with no idea who he was dealing with.
P.Z. then goes on to describe how the various bones/tissues of the embryo form simultaneously, not separately as described in the Koran.
THEN the apologist in an amazing 180 degree spin before your eyes says: “Even if that’s the case, the Koran is right, linguistically (the same word) can mean things happening simultaneously as well!”
And he says this with an air of triumph!
There couldn’t be a better real-time demonstration of the type of post hoc data spinning re-interpretation used by all such religious claims.
The main apologists engaging Myers in that video was a well known apologist named Hamza Tzortzis. He later produced a sort of change-of-mind statement, saying it’s best not to argue that the Koran contains scientific claims. Apparently this confrontation with Myers instigated this change of mind.
Though, of course, it’s not a true, full changing of mind. See here if interested:
http://www.skeptical-science.com/religion/islamic-apologist-change-mind/
Change the subject, or change the channel? And why can’t Mo use the remote, himself?
b&
In ‘Gullivers Travels’ Jonathan Swift writes about the discovery, by the Laputans, that the planet Mars had two moons.
Swift’s story, however, was written was over 150 years before telescope technology had progressed to the point that allowed Phobis and Deimos to be visualised.
Was Swift channeling the word of God, who revealed Himself (it’s usually a Him, isn’t it?) by means of a scientific revelation?
Or was it just an interesting coincidence?
We, I hope, tend to go with the latter alternative and yet we see that this coincidental overlap of fiction and later science is a far better example of the type of thing that religious people should expect if it’s true that holy books reveal knowledge of science from above.
More to the point, what’s there should be devoid of idiotic bullshit. Genesis is more than enough words to have given a good, concise history of humanity in the Universe from the Big Bang through to the invention of agriculture, in language perfectly accessible to a young child. But, instead, we get a fourth-rate faery tale about an enchanted garden with talking animals and an angry wizard.
I’m sorry, but if your big opening involves singing snakes, and it’s not followed by “Ha, ha! What a joke!” then you are the joke.
b&
Well, Swift was not idiotic, but Gulliver’s Travels was, if it were to be taken literally, full of bullsh*t. So it would not pass that test any more than the bible.
Not that that’s particularly bothersome, as nobody (AFAIK) is trying to use it as a guide to geography or earth history.
Maybe some people took it literally back when it was written. Though most knew it was political satire IMO. The satirical essay ‘Modest Proposal’ was taken literally though.
Also, it turns out some of Swift’s recipes for the preparation of Irish children are not that tasty or nutritious!
That’s only because barbecue sauce hadn’t yet been invented. Yum!
b&
Yeah, but at least Swift’s bullshit is a can’t-set-it-down pageturner. And some damned insightful sociopolitical satire, to boot. Anybody who’s ever been stymied by a petty bureaucrat or a doctor’s after-hours answering service or the like knows exactly how frustrating Swift’s “flappers” are.
The Bible?
Okay, show of hands. Who here has actually made it all the way through each and every one of the begats?
Unh-huh.
b&
If only the Bible were satire & irony.
(If you imagine a few winks and smirks here and there, some parts can be read that way.)
E.g. most of Abraham’s career, though the humour gets a bit dark at one point.
No need to imagine!
http://www.lolcatbible.com/
b&
Well, *every* piece of fiction is full of ‘bullshit’, if you regard it narrowly enough. (Not the word I’d use, by the way). That’s why it’s fiction.
But then there’s interesting fiction and tedious boring fiction. The Bible definitely falling in the latter class.
When alpha, the fine structure constant, was described as a very important dimensionless number, some Jews said it (1/137) is right there in the Torah.
And when physicists (after Bethe, Feynman, Schwinger, Tomonaga) said it is not exactly 1/137, but closter to:
7.2973525698(24)×10−3
I think the same religiously motivated numberphiles said that number is in the Torah too! Somewhere….
Maybe ya gotta be fluent in Bible Code to see it.
I’m not a Qu’ran scholar (haven’t even read it), but it’s my understanding that there’s very little mention of Mohammed (or even Mecca) in the Qu’ran. Most of the details about Mohammed come from a biography of Mohammed written 150 years after his purported death. Or from one of the numerous hadiths, which were fabricated for centuries after the 7th century, ‘explaining’ the historical context of enigmatic passages in the Qu’ran, and also conveniently justifying whatever actions a particular ruler wanted to take.
The Qu’ran is timeless. It isn’t written as history, set in a particular period. Unlike the New Testament, which is written as history, naming known historical figures as actors in the story. And then proceeding to get the history wrong.
I think the Qur’an was supposed to have been revealed directly to Muhammad by the archangel Gabriel — the way the Golden Plates were supposedly revealed to Joseph Smith by Moroni.
There, see? Could that be mere coincidence?!
One of the most insidious things about the Koran is that it IS considered, “timeless”, in the sense that its rules for living are considered by many to be equally valid for today’s world as for the times in which it was written/fabricated. Technically, if are a Muslim and don’t believe that every word of the Koran came directly from Allah, you are an apostate and thus worthy of death.