It's unsurprising to find a pitch that appeals to young men arising from the religious standardization of a warlords divine warrant. They're appealing to recruits. The same thing is happening in the bit about the sun and the moon. It's an appeal to an audience that would have already expected and believed that celestial events could be portents of doom. Learning more about those events may have disabused us of the notion, but in doing so it rendered the narrative element meaningless, vacuous, and so it has to be filled up. In the case of Winter and many muslims, ironically, it gets filled up with fairy themed pseudo science.

(December 11, 2020 at 5:34 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: It's unsurprising to find a pitch that appeals to young men arising from the religious standardization of a warlords divine warrant.  They're appealing to recruits.  The same thing is happening in the bit about the sun and the moon.  It's an appeal to an audience that would have already expected and believed that celestial events could be portents of doom.  Learning more about those events may have disabused us of the notion, but in doing so it rendered the narrative element meaningless, vacuous, and so it has to be filled up.  In the case of Winter and many muslims, ironically, it gets filled up with fairy themed pseudo science.

That explains most of it, yes, but except the pseudo science part.  Even pseudo science implies that a person has some understanding of underlying scientific fact or phenomenon but when you're dealing with meteorites as weapons thrown at jinns and demons as means to shoo them away, whereas jinns are made up of fire (here is another element to go into chemistry elementary table, and people yet providing explanations for it then it's really beyond pseudo science.  It's simply mental contortion of the stupid kind. There is not even basic science at play here.

Winter does have an understanding of a scientific fact - and it's his understanding of that scientific fact that he seeks to employ in order to fill the void in magic books narrative.

Its not about a god using it's god magic to move some discs in the sky, as the authors had imagined and as the audience would have expected. Just the completely natural death of a star. That lets magic book continue to be magic, without waxing on about all of that embarrassing magic.

(December 11, 2020 at 6:00 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Winter does have an understanding of a scientific fact - and it's his understanding of that scientific fact that he seeks to employ in order to fill the void in magic books narrative.  

Its not about a god using it's god magic to move some discs in the sky, as the authors had imagined and as the audience would have expected.  Just the completely natural death of a star.  That lets magic book continue to be magic, without waxing on about all of that embarrassing magic.

Devil (or god in this case) is in the details.  While there are various points of logical failures in the debate about god itself, Islam further has notions that add to it exponantially.  For example, the whole religion itself hinges on a very narrow narrative that Mo supposedly spoke to an angel in a cave.  That's it. That's the whole premise of Islam on which it further builds the quranic and hadith and everything else.

This narrative in itself is never really questions.  Kinda like virgin birth (or some other stupid shit-fact) in Christianity.  It's just taken on it face value and never really questioned the very possibility of it.

What is an angel? What is he made of? The travel mechanism. I mean, if someone knows some science, at the very least they will have some respect towards gravity, E = mc^2, theories  of specially and general relativity and how existence and flight of an angel can be explained within the parameters of Newtonian/Einsteinian reality.  So this claim of having spoken (and don't get me started on linguistic ability of a flying alien with vocal cords etc.) to an angel becomes a laughable fantasy totally fits worldview of a 7th century bedouin but hard to swallow for someone who actually have some basic scientific understanding of the world.

I strongly doubt that religious adherence is premised on the supernatural details. Let's ask our friends, small sample size..but it's worth a go.

If the supernatural details of your religion (or your interpretation) were false, would you break up with big mo, would you abandon islamist ideology?

(December 11, 2020 at 6:19 pm)Apollo Wrote:

(December 11, 2020 at 6:00 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Winter does have an understanding of a scientific fact - and it's his understanding of that scientific fact that he seeks to employ in order to fill the void in magic books narrative.  

Its not about a god using it's god magic to move some discs in the sky, as the authors had imagined and as the audience would have expected.  Just the completely natural death of a star.  That lets magic book continue to be magic, without waxing on about all of that embarrassing magic.

Devil (or god in this case) is in the details.  While there are various points of logical failures in the debate about god itself, Islam further has notions that add to it exponantially.  For example, the whole religion itself hinges on a very narrow narrative that Mo supposedly spoke to an angel in a cave.  That's it. That's the whole premise of Islam on which it further builds the quranic and hadith and everything else.

This narrative in itself is never really questions.  Kinda like virgin birth (or some other stupid shit-fact) in Christianity.  It's just taken on it face value and never really questioned the very possibility of it.

Apparently, swarthy men having involved theological discussions with flowery bints in caves was a lot more common then than it is now.

You know what was super common back in the day? Girls wandering off alone at night and returning pregnant. You know, mysteriously. Spirits or djinn or whatever coming upon them in the night. IIRC, there is no culture on earth without exactly this sort of story.

Virgin birth and besetment stories are kindof a pressure valve in that regard. A way to allow a loved daughter to break a taboo and not pay the full price, but also as a cautionary tale to the same.

(December 7, 2020 at 6:30 am)WinterHold Wrote: In the Quran, a very strange verse is describing Judgement Day, it says:

Quote:Sura 75, The Quran:
https://quran.com/75

(1) I do swear by the Day of Judgment!
(2) And I do swear by the self-reproaching soul!
(3) Do people think We cannot reassemble their bones? 
(4) Yes ˹indeed˺! We are ˹most˺ capable of restoring ˹even˺ their very fingertips.
(5) Still people want to deny what is yet to come, 
(6) asking ˹mockingly˺, “When is this Day of Judgment?” 
(7) But when the sight is stunned, 
(8) and the moon is dimmed, 
(9) and the sun and the moon are brought together,
(10) on that Day one will cry, “Where is the escape?”

Judgement Day is the day of resurrection; it will come after our deaths, we shall rise from the dead to be judged by God and then receive our judgement for our deeds in this life.

Shockingly; verse 9 of Sura 75 is predicted exactly by science; when the sun turn into a "red giant" in the far future, it is expected to swallow the moon:

Eclipse and zombies. Stolen from the Christians. Or more accurately, stolen from the same credulous pagans that the Christians stole it from.

You can tell that it has nothing to do with the Earth-Moon system being engulfed by the Sun billions of years from now as it becomes a red giant by the verse immediately before it. "And the moon is dimmed" is precisely the opposite of what would happen as the Sun expanded to engulf it.

(December 9, 2020 at 9:41 am)Klorophyll Wrote:

(December 8, 2020 at 9:40 pm)polymath257 Wrote: Because I'm not trying to force a bizarre interpretation to keep the text saying something true.

It's not a bizarre interpretation, it's the main interpretation, dude.

It's still bizzare.

Oh and it's also a post-hoc explanation as this explanation only gained currency after we began to understand celestial mechanics and that the final phase of the sun's existence would likely be rapid and massive expansion followed by collapse

(December 11, 2020 at 12:28 pm)WinterHold Wrote:

(December 11, 2020 at 12:20 pm)Klorophyll Wrote: You provided nothing in the post. Another important anecdote, more than 70 huffaz - Muslims who memorized the Qur'an - were martyred at the Battle of Yamama, Abu Bakr feared the Qur'an may be lost and ordered its collection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Yamama

THEREFORE, they clearly were relying on these Huffaz. This battle is the irrefutable proof that there was no written Qur'an before Uthman took over the mission of collecting it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of..._tradition 

[/url]

Quote:Sunni and Shia scholars generally believe that the Quran was written down in its entirety at the time of Muhammad's death.[citation needed] Muhammad's cousin Ibn Abbas describes the way in which the final version of the Quran was fixed: "the prophet recited the book before Gabriel every year in the month of Ramadan, and in the month in which he died he recited it before him twice."[18] It is believed that the term "reciting the Quran twice" means compiling all the Quranic revelations into a complete and final version. It is understood[citation needed] that toward the end of Muhammad's life a special act of revelation occurred in which a final and complete version of the Quran was created. The term 'recite', which is used here, is referring to the custom where a Quranic scholar recites the entire Quran from beginning to end a number of times before a senior scholar. According to this tradition the act of recital is being performed by Muhammad, with the angel Gabriel playing the role of superior authority.[19]

[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Quran#cite_note-19]



I enlarged the text for you.

What a bunch of fanatical religious apologists believe and what is true are two different things. Did you know that the islamic hierarchy supresses the fact that the quran in its current form didn't appear until the 9th century CE and that it's about as heavily edited as the bible is.

---

(December 11, 2020 at 2:27 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Their being astute military leaders also goes a long way to explaining the content of the text.  Anywho, magic book plugged along for awhile as a limited act in a mostly illiterate culture until those astute warlords managed to conquer their neighbors, capturing and enslaving the means of literary production.  It was then that magic book as an item really took off.

Primary islamic sources...150-300 years after the events described.

And to add to this, the contemporary sources which describe those who invaded out of Arabia to create what was later called the caliphate described them as being jewish. At least some of these sources are from jewish writers living in Jerusalem when it was captured.