(July 21, 2022 at 5:51 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Are you really sure you want anyone to take the quran literally, Kloro? I take it literally..and look at what happened to me.
lol, you can't be serious. Let me rehearse to you what I was always being saying when it comes to atheists discussing the Qur'an:
If you don't believe in God, it's pointless to try and refute any religious scripture, what's the point? You might say you're just trying to expose some purported flaws in these books, but that doesn't help in the case of the Qur'an. The problem of language barrier is very serious and important when it comes to reading the holy book of Islam, given that the Qur'an's chief feature is its linguistic merit. I grew up in an Arabic speaking country and followed formal courses in Islam with (obviously) arabic speaking people, and I can't count the number of times when someone misunderstands the meaning of simple and popular verses, sometimes because they don't know what a given word means, and sometimes because they are unable to parse the sentence as a result of weak understanding of Arabic grammar.
People experiencing difficulty writing/reading/understanding classical/standard arabic is a ubiquitous problem in the Arab World. For non-native speakers, it's (obviously?) a non starter to directly try to study the Qur'an, let alone criticize it, it's laughable, seriously. It's as if you ask someone who is struggling to know the keyboard of a piano to play Mozart's sonatas. This is true of course for any book in Classical Arabic, not just the Qur'an. The religious significance of the latter, however, and its multiple references to places, cultures, beliefs, etc. makes it impossible for an amateur to study it seriously. It's just not possible, not something you do in your spare time.
I will probably never understand why some people try to come across as very knowledgeable when it comes to assessing religious texts, and always end up making very basic mistakes in their hasty criticisms.
