Was Prophet Mohammed a caravan thieve?

[R00tKiT]

For you, I guess?  You'd have to limit those comments to yourself and people who believe that countries exist for the reason that you do. 

That's quite a lot, I'm afraid. I'm still waiting for you to present your reasons to believe these countries exist.

I don't know what a pure source has to do with anything.  Which of the two of us believes in such a thing..do you imagine?  I'm just trying to help you understand why what bob told jim doesn't cut it for me.

You didn't actually explain why it doesn't cut it for you. If you're worried that bob or jim may be unreliable, then we usually have more people telling the exact same thing bob told jim. If you think -as you mentioned before- that crowds of people can still get it wrong, I already said it's highly unlikely given the stakes - someone they're convinced is a prophet talking to them + their language proficiency -, and after that you just started making comparisons to christians.

Hell, we can just assume..as I always suggest, that bob told jim exactly what magic book says and that it's all true.  These would still be poor demonstrations of that truth. 

I didn't claim they are demonstrations of truth at all. Their truth is, above all, contingent on the existence of a personal god.

If what you want people to understand about islam is that it's full of sloppy thinking and poor choices...by all means, proceed.  If you want a thoughtful person to hear what you have to say and think "I can understand why he believes that" - then you're going to have to find some way to overcome common obstacles that involves more than the absurd denial of their existence alongside a refusal to hold to your own chosen metrics.

The problem is, again, it's not clear at all what standards you would accept. We're talking about preserving history here, not proving some theorem, this has nothing to do with reasoning and sloppy thinking, only what confidence one has in some body of texts. Put yourself in their shoes, how would you reliably report someone's sayings to future generations..?