It wasn't Mohammed who founded Islam.

[pocaracas]

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

Do go on...
I wonder why you didn't answer my very direct question...

Of course not all the information is accurate, but I believe that a vast majority of it is true.

How can you tell which is factual, and which is fictional?
And, since we're at it, what parts of muslim tradition and religion do you personally consider to be fiction?

Anyway... let's see what we have here...

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 But when you're asked to provide evidence or some historical documents about Abd-Al-Malik being the founder of Islam, you conveniently start tossing in Bayesian arguments ("most likely" blah blah blah) because you admitted that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.

Had you been paying attention, you'd seen that I've gone from what the videos that Min posted, suggesting that no Mohammad ever existed, to a middle position where this Mo, or whatever his name was, did exist, but solely as a tribal leader, with all the perks that come along with the job:
- Military leader
- Ruler

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.

huh?
Aren't you mixing two "he"s?
I don't recall saying that "Abd-Al-Malik had to convince a lot of people throughout the empire that he was the one true prophet"... I fail to even see how I could have hinted that.

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.

I seem to recall providing a rational and natural explanation for such absence...
Did you miss it?

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)

ERrr..... so the criticism is debunked just because there's no evidence of how things really happened?
Doesn't that sort of debunks any other account, including the traditional muslim one?

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

I'm going Drich on this one:



Your argument:
- Oral tradition
- Qur'an
- Hadiths

FFS!!!

1. Oral tradition - have you ever played the broken telephone game? don't know about it? Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers... oh, you guys call it something different... oh well. That's a small scale representation of what happens to oral tradition...
   
2. Qur'an - weren't we discussing about its origin? not valid as a source of information about itself, I guess.... Sort of the same we do with the Bible for the Christians. Claims after claims and none of it has any evidence to back it up, although it does reference some real locations and rulers to try to establish some credibility... doesn't work for the christians, doesn't work for the muslims either. Memorization of the Qur'an after it's been compiled and taught in madrassas established by Abd-Al-Malik? So, who made the textbook?
   
3. Hadiths - Didn't these come well after the fact? let's look at what our biased friend the wiki says:
   "Traditions of the life of Muhammad and the early history of Islam were passed down mostly orally for more than a hundred years after Muhammad's death in AD 632. (pocaracas: Remember how oral transmission can easily lead to a story very different from the original?) Muslim historians say that Caliph Uthman ibn Affan (the third khalifa (caliph) of the Rashidun Empire, or third successor of Muhammad, who had formerly been Muhammad's secretary), is generally believed to urge Muslims to record the hadith just as Muhammad suggested to some of his followers to write down his words and actions.[16][17]
   Uthman's labours were cut short by his assassination, at the hands of aggrieved soldiers, in 656. No sources survive directly from this period so we are dependent on what later writers tell us about this period.[18] (pocaracas: biased later writers, I'd add.. no evidence either way)
   By the 9th century the number of hadiths had grown exponentially (pocaracas: hu-ho, oral tradition seems to be troublesome). Islamic scholars of the Abbasid period were faced with a huge corpus of miscellaneous traditions, some of them flatly contradicting each other. (pocaracas: buhahahaha, told you!) Many of these traditions supported differing views on a variety of controversial matters. Scholars had to decide which hadith were to be trusted as authentic and which had been invented for political or theological purposes. To do this, they used a number of techniques which Muslims now call the science of hadith.[19]"
   
   Yep... science of hadith... sounds a lot like what the christians did when they had to decide which gospels to turn into canon... in the 300's.
   Why is it that, the more I dig, the more islam looks exactly like christianity, with a 600 year delay?
   

You ask me for evidence of my guess that Abd-Al-Malik was the real implementer of Islam... I have none, but present a few arguments from human psychology as prior inputs to a Bayesian approach.
I could factor in other prior inputs, like history of religion, connection of religion and politics and control of the populace, and cite examples from the ancient Egyptians to the Mayas.

You, on the other hand, in order to establish the veracity of the qur'an, present me with pre-written-qur'an oral tradition from a long lost arabian tribe.

None of us have actual hard evidence, either way. I'm aware of that. Are you?