Abrahamic Religions and their Holy Books

[Mystic]

Everyone can have their interpretation of the historical actions of Mohammad but as far as Quran goes, I would suggest reading these verses.


وَإِنْ جَنَحُوا لِلسَّلْمِ فَاجْنَحْ لَهَا وَتَوَكَّلْ عَلَى اللَّهِ ۚ إِنَّهُ هُوَ السَّمِيعُ الْعَلِيمُ {61}
[Shakir 8:61] And if they incline to peace, then incline to it and trust in Allah; surely He is the Hearing, the Knowing.

لَا يَنْهَاكُمُ اللَّهُ عَنِ الَّذِينَ لَمْ يُقَاتِلُوكُمْ فِي الدِّينِ وَلَمْ يُخْرِجُوكُمْ مِنْ دِيَارِكُمْ أَنْ تَبَرُّوهُمْ وَتُقْسِطُوا إِلَيْهِمْ ۚ إِنَّ اللَّهَ يُحِبُّ الْمُقْسِطِينَ {8}
[Shakir 60:8] Allah does not forbid you respecting those who have not made war against you on account of (your) religion, and have not driven you forth from your homes, that you show them kindness and deal with them justly; surely Allah loves the doers of justice.
إِنَّمَا يَنْهَاكُمُ اللَّهُ عَنِ الَّذِينَ قَاتَلُوكُمْ فِي الدِّينِ وَأَخْرَجُوكُمْ مِنْ دِيَارِكُمْ وَظَاهَرُوا عَلَىٰ إِخْرَاجِكُمْ أَنْ تَوَلَّوْهُمْ ۚ وَمَنْ يَتَوَلَّهُمْ فَأُولَٰئِكَ هُمُ الظَّالِمُونَ {9}
[Shakir 60:9] Allah only forbids you respecting those who made war upon you on account of (your) religion, and drove you forth from your homes and backed up (others) in your expulsion, that you make friends with them, and whoever makes friends with them, these are the unjust.

مِنْ أَجْلِ ذَٰلِكَ كَتَبْنَا عَلَىٰ بَنِي إِسْرَائِيلَ أَنَّهُ مَنْ قَتَلَ نَفْسًا بِغَيْرِ نَفْسٍ أَوْ فَسَادٍ فِي الْأَرْضِ فَكَأَنَّمَا قَتَلَ النَّاسَ جَمِيعًا وَمَنْ أَحْيَاهَا فَكَأَنَّمَا أَحْيَا النَّاسَ جَمِيعًا ۚ وَلَقَدْ جَاءَتْهُمْ رُسُلُنَا بِالْبَيِّنَاتِ ثُمَّ إِنَّ كَثِيرًا مِنْهُمْ بَعْدَ ذَٰلِكَ فِي الْأَرْضِ لَمُسْرِفُونَ {32}
[Shakir 5:32] For this reason did We prescribe to the children of Israel that whoever slays a soul, unless it be for manslaughter or for mischief in the land, it is as though he slew all men; and whoever keeps it alive, it is as though he kept alive all men; and certainly Our messengers came to them with clear arguments, but even after that many of them certainly act extravagantly in the land.


إِلَّا الَّذِينَ يَصِلُونَ إِلَىٰ قَوْمٍ بَيْنَكُمْ وَبَيْنَهُمْ مِيثَاقٌ أَوْ جَاءُوكُمْ حَصِرَتْ صُدُورُهُمْ أَنْ يُقَاتِلُوكُمْ أَوْ يُقَاتِلُوا قَوْمَهُمْ ۚ وَلَوْ شَاءَ اللَّهُ لَسَلَّطَهُمْ عَلَيْكُمْ فَلَقَاتَلُوكُمْ ۚ فَإِنِ اعْتَزَلُوكُمْ فَلَمْ يُقَاتِلُوكُمْ وَأَلْقَوْا إِلَيْكُمُ السَّلَمَ فَمَا جَعَلَ اللَّهُ لَكُمْ عَلَيْهِمْ سَبِيلًا {90}
[Shakir 4:90] Except those who reach a people between whom and you there is an alliance, or who come to you, their hearts shrinking from fighting you or fighting their own people; and if Allah had pleased, He would have given them power over you, so that they should have certainly fought you; therefore if they withdraw from you and do not fight you and offer you peace, then Allah has not given you a way against them.

يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا إِذَا ضَرَبْتُمْ فِي سَبِيلِ اللَّهِ فَتَبَيَّنُوا وَلَا تَقُولُوا لِمَنْ أَلْقَىٰ إِلَيْكُمُ السَّلَامَ لَسْتَ مُؤْمِنًا تَبْتَغُونَ عَرَضَ الْحَيَاةِ الدُّنْيَا فَعِنْدَ اللَّهِ مَغَانِمُ كَثِيرَةٌ ۚ كَذَٰلِكَ كُنْتُمْ مِنْ قَبْلُ فَمَنَّ اللَّهُ عَلَيْكُمْ فَتَبَيَّنُوا ۚ إِنَّ اللَّهَ كَانَ بِمَا تَعْمَلُونَ خَبِيرًا {94}
[Shakir 4:94] O you who believe! when you go to war in Allah's way, make investigation, and do not say to any one who offers you peace: You are not a believer. Do you seek goods of this world's life! But with Allah there are abundant gains; you too were such before, then Allah conferred a benefit on you; therefore make investigation; surely Allah is aware of what you do.


وَعِبَادُ الرَّحْمَٰنِ الَّذِينَ يَمْشُونَ عَلَى الْأَرْضِ هَوْنًا وَإِذَا خَاطَبَهُمُ الْجَاهِلُونَ قَالُوا سَلَامًا {63}
[Shakir 25:63] And the servants of the Beneficent Allah are they who walk on the earth in humbleness, and when the ignorant address them, they say: Peace.


لَا إِكْرَاهَ فِي الدِّينِ ۖ قَدْ تَبَيَّنَ الرُّشْدُ مِنَ الْغَيِّ ۚ فَمَنْ يَكْفُرْ بِالطَّاغُوتِ وَيُؤْمِنْ بِاللَّهِ فَقَدِ اسْتَمْسَكَ بِالْعُرْوَةِ الْوُثْقَىٰ لَا انْفِصَامَ لَهَا ۗ وَاللَّهُ سَمِيعٌ عَلِيمٌ {256}
[Shakir 2:256] There is no compulsion in religion; truly the right way has become clearly distinct from error; therefore, whoever disbelieves in the Shaitan and believes in Allah he indeed has laid hold on the firmest handle, which shall not break off, and Allah is Hearing, Knowing.

[xpastor]

This is a bit pedantic, but I think you are conflating a couple of passages and adding one dramatic detail. I don't remember any passage in the bible where it is commanded to rip open the bellies of pregnant women.

I just looked it up:

Hosea 13:16
"Samaria shall bear her guilt, because she has rebelled against her God; they shall fall by the sword; their little ones shall be dashed in pieces, and their pregnant women ripped open."


But you're right. I conflated two atrocities. The one with thev virgins is actually in a different story.

Thanks. I stand corrected. I will remember the Hosea passage the next time I want to parade biblical atrocities. The other part of the verse about "little ones dashed in pieces" is reminiscent of Psalm 137:9, which promises a blessing for picking up a Babylonian baby and dashing out its brains on the rocks.

[abaris]

Thanks. I stand corrected. I will remember the Hosea passage the next time I want to parade biblical atrocities. The other part of the verse about "little ones dashed in pieces" is reminiscent of Psalm 137:9, which promises a blessing for picking up a Babylonian baby and dashing out its brains on the rocks.

I had to look it up myself. I remembered hearing it at some point and since no atrocity seems beyond the lord, it somehow stuck in my memory. Especially with all the pro lifers being very vocal.

[Minimalist]

I just looked it up:

Hosea 13:16
"Samaria shall bear her guilt, because she has rebelled against her God; they shall fall by the sword; their little ones shall be dashed in pieces, and their pregnant women ripped open."


But you're right. I conflated two atrocities. The one with thev virgins is actually in a different story.

Thanks. I stand corrected. I will remember the Hosea passage the next time I want to parade biblical atrocities. The other part of the verse about "little ones dashed in pieces" is reminiscent of Psalm 137:9, which promises a blessing for picking up a Babylonian baby and dashing out its brains on the rocks.

No, no....you don't understand. They wanted god to bash their heads in... in his mercy!

[xpastor]

@ MysticKnight

You have provided a number of quotations from the Koran which speak of peace. That is neither here nor there. All of the Holy Books are full of contradictions.

I would describe all the Holy Books as collections of literature written by barbarians, for barbarians, about barbarians.

Now barbarians sometimes have some fine noble thoughts and they also express bloodthirsty xenophobia often enough. An example from the Jewish OT: In the Torah there is a noble exhortation to treat foreigners kindly because "you were once foreigners in the land of Egypt." And yet the OT is the most xenophobic literature I can think of.

As for the contradictions in the Koran, I do not know much about it, but I have read that Muslim scholars employ something called the law of abrogation to sort out these contradictions. Basically, a saying which is chronologically later abrogates (cancels out) an earlier saying. My source maintained that the violent passages urging war against unbelievers come later than the more peaceable sayings. NB. The Koran is not arranged chronologically in the order in which Gabriel supposedly dictated the passages to Mohammed; instead it is the dumbest literary arrangement ever seen, starting with the longest chapter (sura) and moving to the shortest one.

The important question is not what Mohammed did as a historical figure, although I do believe he led military expeditions. The important question is what Muslims think he did and see as an example for themselves.

In my OP I quoted the Bukhari Hadith, the passage in which the Jewish men were to be killed in spite of having surrendered. Among the Sira (biographies of Mohammed) is the Sirat Rasul Allah of Ibn Ishaq, which describes the same event in gruesome detail:

The captives were taken into Medina. They dug trenches in the marketplace of Medina.It was a long day, but 800 Jews met their death that day. Mohammed and his twelve year old wife [!] sat and watched the entire day and into the night. The Apostle of Allah had every male Jew killed.

I truly believe that most Muslims living in the western world are peaceable folk. However, that kind of teaching can produce a cultural contamination even on some of the people influenced by western culture, and even higher numbers among those living in their traditional homelands outside the ambit of western liberal ideals.

This morning I was listening to an interview with an academic who has studied "lone wolf terrorism" like the two recent attacks in Canada. He mentioned that polls indicate that 50,000 Muslims in the USA and UK approve of suicide bombings. Fifty thousand is a small but significant percentage of the total number of Muslims living in these nations. The academic noted that only about 500 of those would actually engage in a suicide bombing. However, I am left wondering if the others, perhaps do not want to commit suicide but would willingly engage in lethal attacks on their neighbors if they thought they could get away with it.

As for Muslims living outside the western world here is a page with a whole host of poll results. To cite only one, in Saudi Arabia, the benighted home of Wahhabi Islam, 92 percent believe the fucking barbarians of ISIS conform to Islamic values.

[abaris]

@xpastor

I think you also have to look at the problem from a political perspective.

All the holy books preach violence when you know what you're looking for. The reason why we don't see large scale violence from radical christians or radical jews is that they're quite comfortable in their political and social environment. Incidents happen nevertheless, such as bombing abortion clinics or killing doctors or the slaughter Barruch Goldstein commited in a mosque. Relatively isolated incidents, but the potential for violence is existing, it only lies dormant.

Now look at the Middle East. It is in flames. Whole generations grow up without having any perspective in life and so radical preachers have a field day. If you got nothing to lose in life, you can at least have a glorious death and a prominent place in paradise. By the way, that's the same argument the christian priests used to motivate people for their crusades. Radical Islam is a relatively new phenomenon. It grew on the fertile soil of ongoing conflict.

[xpastor]

@xpastor

I think you also have to look at the problem from a political perspective.

All the holy books preach violence when you know what you're looking for. The reason why we don't see large scale violence from radical christians or radical jews is that they're quite comfortable in their political and social environment. Incidents happen nevertheless, such as bombing abortion clinics or killing doctors or the slaughter Barruch Goldstein commited in a mosque. Relatively isolated incidents, but the potential for violence is existing, it only lies dormant.

Now look at the Middle East. It is in flames. Whole generations grow up without having any perspective in life and so radical preachers have a field day. If you got nothing to lose in life, you can at least have a glorious death and a prominent place in paradise. By the way, that's the same argument the christian priests used to motivate people for their crusades. Radical Islam is a relatively new phenomenon. It grew on the fertile soil of ongoing conflict.

No quarrel with what you say here about the political dimension.

I would only add that based on their respective Holy Books, Islam is inevitably more politicized than Christianity. In his later years Mohammed was the state, and this outlook was woven into the very texture of Koran, Hadith, Sira. In the NT times Christianity was far from having power. Although Christianity was to become the state religion for many centuries in European nations, there is absolutely nothing in the NT preventing the separation of church and state. Not so with Islam. It has always had trouble being in a minority position.

[JuliaL]

The Abrahamic religions are (meta)stable, replicating informational constructs initially assembled by (meta)stable replicating chemically stored informational constructs (people) a few thousand years ago. Like a pyramid of stones, they have persisted because they are (meta)stable. Unlike a pyramid of stones, they spread because they replicate.

We recognize the Hebrews as those who recorded this (meta)stable pattern. They may not have been first, just the ones who wrote it down. They dedicated members of their community to waving foam fingers with "we're number one!" written on them. This is a defining characteristic. Self confidence is highly conserved by natural selection, like self awareness. Self awareness makes self preservation much easier and self confidence provides the motivation to self preserve.

The Christians are an iron age mutation of the Jews who inherited from the Hebrew tribes. They changed the meme to include the weak and the poor. By cementing together enough of the underclasses, they built a large, accretive structure, resilient, powerful and growth oriented.

The Muslims are a separate mutation which retains more of the violent strategems of their parent stock. They have some characteristics which are not shared by the cemented scum of Christianity such as blurring the separation of the religious and the political and the dogmatic retention of their text in the original Arabic. The growth of Islam shows the wisdom of these strategic moves as evolutionary success, commonly defined, is persistence and expansion into niches, in this case memory space, often in the face of competition for those storage slots.

All of these are successful, as they persist and expand. It is not at all necessary that their tenets be true. I define true as: being in agreement with observed reality. Being in agreement with observed reality requires observing reality and comparing the alleged truth thereto. This is an active process which must take place at some time in the future showing the alleged truth to have been true in fact in the past. Philip K. Dick pointed out, entertainingly, that we can't trust our memories of the past. Hence, nothing can be shown to be true. So it's a good thing for the Abrahamics that they don't have to be true to thrive and survive.

[Minimalist]

92 percent believe the fucking barbarians of ISIS conform to Islamic values.

One wonders how barbaric the other 8% want islam to be?

[abaris]

I would only add that based on their respective Holy Books, Islam is inevitably more politicized than Christianity. In his later years Mohammed was the state, and this outlook was woven into the very texture of Koran, Hadith, Sira. In the NT times Christianity was far from having power. Although Christianity was to become the state religion for many centuries in European nations, there is absolutely nothing in the NT preventing the separation of church and state. Not so with Islam. It has always had trouble being in a minority position.

Yeah, but still - at least in the USA the evangelicals try to legislate their religious believes on the state level. And they are successful in some cases. If they had their way, they would happily set up a christian Iran.

And look at Israel. The ultra orthodox are still a minority, but they already try to force their believes on the majority in the most vile way. They spit at school girls and try to enforce some kind of gender apartheid in their quarters and they harass shopkeepers opening their business at Shabat.

Radical religion is a growing problem everywhere. It's only our relatively stable western political systems that keep them at bay so far.

The Christians are an iron age mutation of the Jews who inherited from the Hebrew tribes. They changed the meme to include the weak and the poor. By cementing together enough of the underclasses, they built a large, accretive structure, resilient, powerful and growth oriented.

That may be true for early christianity, but let's not forget the Constantinian buttkissing contest of 325 at Nicaea. They sucked up to power and happily threw their every believes obverboards. That's their secret of success. That's why every given army had their field curates although prominent early christian thinkers banned christians from doing military service.