Benevolent Creator God?

[R00tKiT]

Because it wasn't a minor detail and because the Pharaohs advertised the fact. 

Do you have any reliable source supporting this assertion ? We all know pharaohs are kings, but kings who specifically claim they are the lord, most high... not really.

It's a little odd that you're even trying to maintain this position while simultaneously quoting portions of the Quran that clearly borrow heavily from Exodus/Shemot. It's clear that the Jews knew this. It would have been rather tricky for them to have missed it. It's equally clear that Muhammad had more than passing acquaintance with both Jewish and Christian societies. How then is it even vaguely unlikely that he couldn't have known about the god kings of Egypt from mundane sources?

I don't feel like repeating it again: the Qur'an borrowing something or having a specific story in common with the Bible isn't really a threat to its validity, all Muslims believe the Bible was originally the word of God, there is even an authentic saying of Muhammad specifically forbidding Muslims to repudiate anything in the corrupt bible, because it's mixed with what we regard as genuine divine inspiration.

It's not clear at all that Muhammad is familiar with Christianity or Judaism, there was no Arabic bible in his time, the arabic translation of the bible came long after his death. Once again, all Muhammad had was hearsay from christian or jewish people, which were as vulnerable to committing an error or broadcasting a myth as he was, and yet, he seemed to get these details right. Why take the risk for someone who knows he's making up the Qur'an? Why not simply mention the pharaoh wihout any additional details that threaten his credibility as a prophet?

I have no way to tell one way or another, but my disbelief in an afterlife is very, very close to 100%.

How do you get to this probability?

It's an aggregate of several things:

• A lifelong lack of religious belief, and zero belief in gods -- any gods.

That can't be a deciding factor, you're trying to argue from your personal experience -invalid argument. I too held a lifelong belief in an afterlife, and I think you would agree that me believing in an afterlife wouldn't increase its probability of being real.

• No empirical evidence for a "spirit world" of any sort.

I told you more than once that a spirit world or a god is a non-emprical being by definition, an so to rule it out on the grounds of lack of empirical evidence is a category mistake.

I know you think non-empirical being is equivalent to non-existence, but you have no way to prove that, and therefore, at best, you're stuck with agnosticism. 

A very strong lay knowledge of neurology, including typing hundreds of EEG reports.  In order to be conscious, the brain wave frequency has to be above a certain level.  The slower the waves become, the less aware and awake someone becomes.  Below about 4 Hz, in the delta frequency range, we don't even dream.  Brainwaves stop altogether at brain death.  Therefore, once someone dies it's vanishingly unlikely that there will be any "self" remaining to experience life after death.

It's obvious to me that tales of heaven are wishful thinking to assuage the fear of nonexistence, and that tales of hell are Machiavellian threats specifically concocted by priests and rulers to frighten the population and keep them in line.


In my eyes the concept of life after death is a childishly absurd concept, and I simply can't take it seriously.

Vanishingly unlikely isn't equivalent to impossible, especially if we assume God exists. It's true though that, absent a God, there is positively no good reason to think there is an afterlife. 

Are either of us pretending that it would be at all useful to point out the times your magic book gets something wrong and why?  I know for fact that we've already had this discussion, and more than once.

And what exactly were you expecting, that we applaude your unsubstantiated assessment about the Qur'an being a book full of errors, without bothering to make a full case for even one of them?

We can assume gods exist all we like, but that won't repair the actual contents of your magic book.  It's not actually unlikely that a god never wrote a book, it;s certainly not logically forced that a god ever communicated a message to anybody, and there's no reason to assume that by not writing the contents of your magic book or any magic book god has either "left us astray" or would be responsible for our current state.  I point all this out to show that not only are you demonstrably wrong, but that even if we granted these non arguments, magic book is still the flaming garbage heap that it is.  It fails on fact, it fails on principle, and it fails on grounds of your own contentions.  Magic book has lead us astray and was communicated by no god and god has not intervened in this state of affairs whatsoever.

Are you sure that the Qur'an is not the word of God ? Feel free to assert anything you like, you didn't give any good explanation of why Muhammad curiously gets things right? Your only answer was that we argue from incredulity.. not really, we're just trying to find the best explanation of the Qur'an. Is it really difficult to understand that, assuming a God who's willing to communicate with us exists, the Qur'an, and also the original OT/NT, are his words verbatim, that all the noise surrounding these books is the product of people's free will and their ability to corrupt God's message or to communicate it unclearly, and nothing more?