[Quranic Reflection]: moon absorbed by the sun in the Quran: far future.

[Pat Mustard]

I've gotta ask, what's the point?  Let's say that magic book did predict the future?  Are we supposed to join your club on account of that?  Is that what you think the problem is, Winter?  That, if only more people believed that magic books were crystal balls...there'd be more islamists and sharia in the world?  

I'd like to point out that a huge number of people already do believe that magic books are crystal balls, and still don't have any interest in joining your club.  I have even less interest than those people..and I suspect that the majority of the people here at AF are in that boat with me.

You couldn't go about this in a worse way if you tried - and that's why you've been failing.

No, I think he wants us to accept it for his own sake—it provides validation to his beliefs which usually most of the believers are inherently insecure about.

When more people believe in something you do, it gives strength to the belief which is otherwise standing on fragile stilts. This exercise is no more than strengthening his own self-justification—the more he looks around the more he sees a world different than from his belief system and this creates dissonance—the greater the dissonance (that is, reality is different than magic book) the greater the anxiety/pain.

To reduce that pain he needs to self-justify things that may not be true but still help to reduce the dissonance.

This.

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or that the revelations really came from some agent outside of him.

Yes Quran did come from outside of Mohammed, that is it mainly came from Jewish rabbis, and since Mohammed was illiterate he probably hang out with Jews a lot. The only prophets (with few exceptions) mentioned in the Quran are the Jewish prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures. The most important of these were Noah, Abraham, Jacob and, as one Quranic passage lists them, “David and Solomon, Job and Joseph and Moses and Aaron . . . Zacharias and John, Jesus and Elias . . . and Ishmael, Elisha, Jonah and Lot” (6:84–87).

What I don't understand about the Mohammed mythos is his supposed illiteracy. He was a merchant, a class of peeople for whom some ability to read and write would have been an advantage back in the day.