It wasn't Mohammed who founded Islam.

[pocaracas]

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

Well, I didn't quote that part of the post but the answer to that is already contained in my response to your first question, which is the part in bold:

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.

Does that answer your question or no?

I was hoping for something a bit more concrete... like which are unreliable and what do they claim that makes them unreliable, to you.
Remember that I'm mostly ignorant of Islam, so that would be a great opportunity to instruct me further.

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

So then you believe that the oral traditions and posthumous writings are at least somewhat reliable since it is exactly those things which inform us about who Muhammad was, right?

There is evidence of tribal societies in that area.
There is evidence that all the tribes became united under the rule of someone towards the end of the 1st millennium.
Something happened in there, more or less at that time. Call it what you will, I don't care much.
Starting with Abd-Al-Malik, there should be far more evidence of everything... isn't there?

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.

Let's see if some adding a little color to the font helps everyone to see this. You wrote the following:

Yes, you're right... but it is likely that this guy, Abd-Al-Malik, in order to extend the reach of that limited religion, had to include extra bits of wonderment, and rules for the cases of failure to accept this new religion.
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.
He had to do this leg work. And he used very real and human tricks to accomplish it.
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.

So, two questions, just to clarify:
1. Who is the "he" right below the first sentence? Abd-Al-Malik or Muhammad?
2. Who is this "new prophet"? Abd-Al-Malik or Muhammad?

O.o....
How many prophets are you considering?
I always thought there was only one prophet, Mo. And that's the one I meant.
The first "he" is Abd-Al-Malik, the guy who spread the religion on the peninsula.

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

That was a really poor explanation. You just mentioned a few people in history who had a lot of power hunger, but that has nothing to do with Abd-Al-Malik let alone the assumption that the he is the one who established Islam.

Like I also said, no hard evidence is available...
And that works both ways.

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?

The traditional Muslims accounts have actual eyewitnesses behind them.

Oh, do they?
"actual eyewitnesses"... amazing!!
Actual eyewitnesses "recorded" through the amazingly accurate medium of oral storytelling!
Come on, Ray... I've told you how unreliable that is.

So those accounts are generally reliable since I don't think that most of them would be lying about what they saw or heard.

Whaaaatt?? Who saw or heard what?

The skeptical scholars, on the other hand, who are desperately searching for rational theories of the origin of the Quran are simply using their own heads to figure things out, and their arguments put forth also do not conform with the earliest Muslim traditions about the Quran, so yes their arguments are pretty much debunked.

These scholars seem to be ignoring those amazingly accurate and reliable eyewitness accounts... I wonder why?....

I don't have time to give a lecture on the science of hadith and all the many technical issues at the moment. Maybe I'll get into that later.

A lecture! I'm actually looking forward to it.