The lastest Jesus and Mo strip, “Prey” came to me by email with one extra line:
Have I mentioned what a dreadful book the Koran is? I can’t remember.
If you haven’t read the Qur’an, or looked into it, you should. Of course adherents claim that one can’t fully grasp its nuances without a reading in the original Arabic, but “The Skeptic’s Annotated Qur’an“, free online, will do. Of course it’s annotated by a nonbeliever, but that will help you judge the relative frequency of “nice” versus “nasty” verses. Relevant verses are labeled in the margin with certain “trigger warnings”, to wit:
If you want a version without annotations, go here. The versions are nearly identical.
Should get one for those long winters. I was waiting for the movie to come out but then wouldn’t go anyway.
They’re having a hard time finding someone to play the lead.
Good strip. It’s hard to whitewash the Quran into being about love and tolerance. It’s only about love and tolerance if you use the same framework as that guy who beheaded journalists, filmed it, and explained that he did it to help create a more loving, peaceful world … in the long run. It’s about the joy that comes through total submission. Lovely.
Technically speaking though, Jesus could have been reading any religious text — including the “nice” ones — because given the nature of the subject they all create divisions among people at the most intimate level.
God (or Spirit) is always presumed to be vitally, critically important, and nothing in life matters more than how we relate to it. Some people love God and some people reject God. Why? According to religion it’s not for rational reasons. Instead it’s ultimately explainable by invoking a difference in moral character and/or inherent disposition between the groups. And it’s a difference which matters like nothing else.
We are all vulnerable to a black-and-white narrative like this. We all want to be on the side of the Good Guys who don’t reject the source of all worth and value. Thus the appeal to our emotional hot buttons. That’s not persuasion — it’s conversion.
Sounds like the brain tricks I was just reading about in John Loftus’s new book, How to Defend the Christian Faith. A very good read so far.
That’s also why it’s so very important for us to unhesitatingly point out that these holy texts are vile and the heroes — especially the favorites — are evil and the enemies of humanity.
It’s probably the greatest tragedy of religion…here we have the absolute worst being sold as the ultimate good, and people unquestionably believe that lie.
Somebody came to you promoting Mein Kampf as the greatest book of humanitarian virtue ever written, you’d tell them where to shove said book, no?
The Torah, the New Testament, and the Q’ran all make Mein Kampf read like Goodnight, Moon. How dare anybody use terms like, “The Good Book,” to refer to such filth as the holy texts!
b&
IMO, it’s considerably harder to cherry pick texts which are actually all by one author such as the Koran or the Book of Mormon. (The latter claims to be by over a dozen different authors, but readers here know better.)
Since the Jewish and Christian Bibles really ARE by dozens of authors they are easier to cherry-pick.
Valerie Tarico (at her exchristians.net website) reports that in a recent poll of secular humanists, the Book of Ecclesiastes was voted the wisest book of the Bible, an outcome I would have predicted- BkofE also makes no mention of God until the very last closing paragraphs in a section widely believed to be added by a later editor.
Groups like Humanistic Judaism (which admit boldly the are cherry-picking) can focus on the (relatively) humane concept of God pervasive in the second half of Isaiah, and largely ignore the barbarism of the Book of Judges.
I don’t think any corresponding group can easily emerge which has as Scripture the far more uniform and consistent (not necessarily logically consistent) writing as does the Koran.
However, the fact that they can be (and *always* are) cherry-picked is most useful–you can tell what kind of a person you are dealing with by what parts of the holy book they stress and (pretend to) believe, and which parts they ignore. Details are left for the reader’s imagination.
Proverbs 16: 4 (NIV): “The LORD works out everything for his own ends — even the wicked for a day of disaster.”
Luke 19: 27 (NIV): “‘But those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them — bring them here and kill them in front of me.’” [a quote from Jesus describing his policy when he returns to earth as Prince of Peace.]
The message of the koran is universal – applicable to all people of all times. Best way to make the message known is to reveal it in a supposedly untranslatable language.
God is not a very pragmatic man, is he?
Touché!
Just imagine if someone tried to publish books like the Qur’an and the Bible for the first time today.
Mind you, the authors would probably escape a charge of incitement to murder on the grounds of diminished responsibility by virtue of insanity.
+1
I am a good deal into Richard Carrier’s “On the Historicity of Jesus”, which is both fascinating and cumbersome, as books of this type tend to be for me. I am already wondering if something similar has been or will be written regarding Mohammed and the Kuran as I would be interested in the details. I haven’t yet taken the time to research the possibilities of existing literature yet, though.
Ken, Tom Holland’s “In the Shadow of the Sword” goes into this in some depth. It’s not cumbersome, though.
Outstanding. Thank you. Not cumbersome works for me.
It is now in my kindle library. Thanks again.
Apparently not – Richard Carrier himself addresses what would have to be done on his website somewhere.
Yes — he’d need another doctorate or three in ancient Arabic, the mythology of the period, Islam itself…basically, everything that he already has that he needed to write the stuff on Jesus he’d have to re-do for Muhammad, with nothing but the academic skills carrying over.
…and, were he to do all that and publish, he’d face credible death threats….
b&
Not necessarily. He might come to the conclusion that Mohammed really existed.
Supremely unlikely. Muhammad fits the fictional pattern far too well.
b&
Actually, merely investigating the question might prove somewhat dangerous, though I have no idea how much.
Richard’s approach with Jesus was to think of the most minimal claim of historicity he could come up with for Jesus and investigate that. He went with Jesus being an Haile Selassie type of figure: a real person with an entirely invented fantastic overlay to his biography believed by a minority of devoted followers. Were there evidence of such a man, you could then take the next step and investigate if the fantastic claims did or didn’t have any merit; however, if the man himself couldn’t be found, any further claims would be irrelevant.
But even suggesting the possibility that Muhammad could have been a real human who didn’t actually commune with the Archangel Gabriel and ride off into the sunset on the back of a flying horse and so on…simply suggesting that as a possibility is enough to get a price on your head in the Islamic world.
And if you demonstrated the existence of such an individual? It’s guaranteed he wouldn’t be very much like the Muhammad of the Q’ran. That’d be even more deserving of a fatwa.
b&
The language has changed so much that even the most learned modern Arabic scholars cannot catch every nuance. In any case, a Great Universal Truth that is not substrate independent is a bizarre concept. I have a copy of a translation, and I gave up after about a third of the way through sheer boredom: even worse than the Bible.
One might argue that if Allah (or YHVH or whomever) is as smart or wise as he-she-it claims, he-she-it could have composed a text with more clarity, less ambiguity, no self-contradictions, no need for later corrections and revisions, and just maybe a couple of predictions of actual events-to-come (not vagaries as “there shall be wars and rumors of wars”). Plus it would be a “ripper” of a yarn.
I actually waded through the entire mess and nothing in it makes much sense and is deadly boring. I worked with Saudis from 1981 to 1984 but it wasn’t until 9/11 that I investigated Islam itself. I also read the Book of Mormon and the Pearl of Great Price. At least they had a minimal plot and some fairly decent action. I also waded through the Bible, again. Much of it is boring, much of it is vicious and a small portion is entertaining. I noticed that the only stories about actual love in the whole thing was woman/woman – Naomi and Ruth and man/man – David and Jonathan.
The Qur’an is dreadful in more ways.
– It is based on a blatant brainwashing scheme, where 3 magical myth figures stupidly repeat the text with little variation.
– It starts out with a rationally unacceptable ‘vaccinated’ ‘vaccination’ scheme, where if they get criticism it is ‘proof’ of how correct and above criticism they are, because they describe that it could [likely will] happen.
– They refer to the abrahamist myth, which modern text description starts out with 2 conflicting ‘creation’ stories. So much for veracity.
Interesting, that is what Don Johanson described as a religious argument this week in his Human Origins course. He makes the (empirically unacceptable) Gouldian claim, FWIW.
Don’s usual dig site in the Afar region is mohammedanist, so there would be some give and take. And of course he depicts the mohammedanist blood letting slaughter of goats, while he describes the other staff kitchen as “christian”. [I am not certain what slaughter method is less cruel under those circumstances, but that is pretty much besides the curious point.]
Sorry, it is the locale (Afar region) that is mohammedanist, not Don’s dig site. Braino.
Don’t forget the principle of Abrogation in Koranic exegesis whereby earlier more pacifistic and less violent passages are invalidated by later more violent and hate-ridden passages “revealed” to Mohammed by the angel after Mo had become a very rich, very successful warlord and didn’t need to be nice to anyone any more. So if by chance you find something in the Koran that is not urging hatred, violence and death for all non-muslims it has been superseded and does not apply.
Major gripe. All Holey texts omit all stuff that matters:
Evolution. Not a word.
Gravity. What the hell is that?
Atoms. Nada.
Photons. Zilch.
No religious person has ever provided an explanation why any useful knowledge is absent from their texts.
And what about germs! Poor germs, not even a hat tip.
Great strip as usual.
The only portion of the Koran I’ve read is the few pages of loathsome quotes in Harris’ The End of Faith. I could barely get through those pages, and actually just started skimming…just shear hate and xenophobia. I agree with the Jesus ‘n Mo creator: a dreadful book.
Not that the other Abrahamic “holy books” are much better.
I read the Koran about 20 years ago, and found it a marvelous soporific. Much like the “begats” section of Genesis, it works wonders at putting one to sleep.
I didn’t care for the endless references to “the fire.” It seemed like every page contained a threat that if you didn’t shape up, it was into “the fire” for you.
When reading the Koran – a practice I recommend if only for its sleep-inducing magic as mentioned above – it is very useful to apply a little deconstruction to the text. Look for clues as to just what kind of person(s) wrote this thing.
An ignorant, sexually repressed, misogynistic, xenophobic, revenge fantasist? Just a guess…
Close enough. Add wife-beater.
I ploughed through it about 10 years ago, in the wake of 9/11 and all that came after. I was curious to know just what made the jihadists tick, and whether there really is any theological justification for their actions in its pages.
It took me best part of a year to get through the Koran. As others have noted, it’s a dull, repetitious, rambling mish-mash of what are basically sermons. There’s none of the narrative element you find in the Bible, like those parts of the OT which can actually be quite readable, provided you treat them as seriously as you would “Lord of the Rings” or “Game of Thrones”.
The Koran is quite stultifyingly boring, hateful in many places, and entirely devoid of anything I would regard as moral insight – again unlike parts of the Bible. It also has a really confusing arrangement of chapters which don’t follow any linear timeline, and with verses “revealed” at different times apparently cut-and-pasted together for no obvious reason. Of course, I couldn’t read it in the pure beauty of antique Arabic, so I may have missed some of the key ideas, but as noted by others, the idea of a universal deity who can only make himself understood in one human language is beyond ridiculous.
For some bizarre reason, except for the first surah, the surahs are organized based on length only, longest to shortest.
Yes, and if you follow them chronologically you’ll find most of the, “peace, love, and tolerance” suras were written early on when Mohammad didn’t have his, “power-base” established. He HAD to get along as he hadn’t done away with all his enemies and competitors, yet. The, “Slay the infidel wherever you may find him” type occur later when his rule was secure.
What “nuances?” In Sura XXXVI, verse 69, we read, “We have not taught him (Mohammed) poetry, nor would it beseem him. This book is no other than a warning, and a clear Koran.”
Here’s some “nuance” for you (Sura IV, verse 59): “Those who disbelieve in Our Signs We will in the end cast into the Fire: so oft as their skins shall be well burnt, We will change them for fresh skins, that they may taste the torment. Verily God is mighty, wise.
That Sura, by the way, is entitled “Women,” and should be interesting reading for the dedicated feminists out there.
Here’s what one of our own, Jean Meslier, had to say about the “merciful and beneficent” gods who would be capable of anything so vile in his “Testament”:
“…for having portrayed their God to us as a horrible monster of anger, fury, and indignation against human sinners, pitilessly punishing them for their vices and sins with the dreadful punishments of hell,…they then portray him to us as a wonderful prodigy of kindness, gentleness, clemency, and mercy.”
It seems obvious enough, but almost 300 years later, the true believers still don’t get it. The fight goes on.
“If you haven’t read the Qur’an, or looked into it, you should.”
With respect, why?
Books I haven’t read (and never intend to):
The Bible (most of it)
The Koran
The Torah
Mein Kampf
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung
The Book of Mormon
… and anybody else’s sacred books.
Also, Fifty Shades of Grey, Ulysses, and the 1997 Chicago phone book.
None of those are likely to contain anything of interest to me. Well, maybe 50 shades of Grey, but with the Internet around, who needs to *read* pr0n?
There are many interesting books on my not-yet-read list (but which I do intend to) – Origin of Species, WEIT, Matthew’s book on DNA, Feynman’s QED, Extended Phenotype, Greatest Show on Earth, a couple by Bill Bryson, several Victor Canning novels, some significant early-detective novels such as The Moonstone, and so on. Currently, halfway through The Most Beautiful Molecule, about the discovery of C60 (aka Buckminsterfullerene), which is quite fascinating and no, I’m not a chemist.
Why would I bother with a collection of badly-told primitive superstitions believed by medieval sheep-herders and modern-day nutters? If I wanted to do that I’d re-read Aesop’s Fables, which has the great virtue that nobody in the entire world thinks I ought to believe it.
For the purposes of the present discussion, I’m quite prepared to take everyone’s word for it that the Koran is crap, without needing to prove it myself. Just as I’m quite prepared to stay away from the back end of a skunk.
cr