It wasn't Mohammed who founded Islam.

[Rayaan]

I thought I wouldn't argue but I couldn't resist.

Can we agree that these can, and most likely do become, skewed?

Some of them can be skewed, yes, but I believe that most of them are reliable, especially when the traditions or hadiths have many different narrators to corroborate and if they are mentioned in the Quran as well.

But I want to just point out some of your contradictions here because I'm really finding it hilarious.

Posthumous... lends credence to posterior insertion, instead of actual existence.... at least, existence as claimed.

But later in the post you said that Bayesian methods "work far better than you'd expect when actual information is terribly difficult to access."

So, your preposterous double standard lies in the fact that whenever you're trying to discredit Muhammad's actual existence, you point to the lack of contemporary writings about him (as if the posthumous writings are all unreliable). But when you're asked to provide evidence or some historical documents about Abd-Al-Malik being the founder of Islam, you conveniently start tossing in Bayesian arguments ("most likely" blah blah blah) because you admitted that none of this stuff is actually recorded in history - none whatsoever.

Here:

When you say "claim", it sounds like I affirmed it really happened that way... I remember taking a bit of care in there and using a "most likely", directly telling you that there's no hard evidence for it.... just conjecture and a guess.
Conjecture from human psychology, from human power hunger, from human leadership history (remember Napoleon's [or was it Marx?] opium of the masses).

And here:

Is any of that recorded? I doubt it. He'd be shooting himself in the foot, if he'd recorded any of the techniques used to subdue the people and impose a new belief system onto them.
In light of this, I can only say that I have no evidence whatsoever that this happened. I shouldn't expect any... and none surfaces.... which makes sense.

Even though:

He had to convince a lot of people that what they believed, prior to his establishment, was wrong and this new prophet was the one true prophet.

So, per your Bayesian assumption, Abd-Al-Malik had to convince a lot of people throughout the empire that he was the one true prophet (meaning he received revelations from God) and yet none of this is recorded in history? Sounds highly, highly non-Bayesian to me.

Also, earlier, you wrote about Muhammad (with an emphasis added):

If he was as leader as islam likes to claim, then some contemporary, as in while he was alive, writings about him would be likely...
I mean, we're talking about a guy who's the leader of all arabia... and expanding!... how could he accomplish that without writing orders and dealing with local tribal leaders and other stuff.... you know, like what the romans were doing 600 years earlier!!

So using the same argument, if Abd-Al-Malik as a leader had to the same thing in order to call people to this new religion, isn't it more likely that at least some of those events would have been recorded? Yes, and yet there is none.

Oh, but look here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_...l_scholars:

They've been all debunked as well.

"Reviewing these recent studies on the Qur'an mainly published during the last decade, it is clear that, despite the clamor in the press, no major breakthrough in constructing the Qur'an has been achieved. The ambitious projects of Lüling and Luxenberg lack decisive evidence and can reach no further than the realm of possibility and plausibility." (Gerhard Bowering, The Quran in its Historical Context, p. 81))

"To this day no-one has put forward a defensible explanation of how an unlettered caravan merchant of the early seventh century might have been able, by his own devices, to produce a text of such inimitable beauty, of such capacity to stir emotion, and which contained knowledge and wisdom which stood so far above the ideas current among mankind at that time. The studies carried out in the West which try to determine the 'sources used by Muhammad', or to bring to light the psychological phenomenon which enabled him to draw the inspiration from his 'subconscious', have demonstrated only one thing: the anti-Muslim prejudice of their authors." (Roger DuPasquier, Unveiling Islam, p. 53)


I've already discussed the history of the Quranic transmission and compilation in greater detail in the following posts:

https://atheistforums.org/thread-21997-p...#pid543636

https://atheistforums.org/thread-5678-po...#pid111522