How literally should we take the Qur'an ?

[Pat Mustard]

It's an impossible challenge. 

The problems you'll encounter if you accept the challenge are the following.

1) Not even Muslims who speak Arabic know what the quran is talking about.  According to Muslims the quran predicts evolution, and different Muslims say the quran refutes evolution. 

2) This is related to point 1, most people who argue against the quran can't speak Arabic so are at a disadvantage anyway.  The people who can speak Arabic can't agree on the minute details of the quran anyway.

3) There's so many illogical miracle claims and claims about what the quran is talking about, I'm sure new ones have probably been thought up since I last took an interest in debating Islam.

4) No one will listen to you anyway because when someone wants to believe they won't stop just because you've pointed out some little petty contradiction.

5) Abrogation means that even if there's a crystal clear contradiction then it was done on purpose by Muhammad.  Some verses do contradict others but it's fine because it's in time order or something.  This is just going off the top of my head from when I wasted about a year debating Islam.  (I did learn a lot about evolution and other topics though in the process of all this arguing so it wasn't all a waste I suppose.)

Don't forget the hadiths. For each one of the myriad of myriads of things that the inventer of Mohammed either didn't give one fuck about or was too confused to take a consistent line on, a later cleric had to come along and make up a phrase and attribute it to their fictional prophet.

Should tell anyone what they need to know about the reliability and veracity of the qu'ran.