Natural Order and Science

[Harris]

Ahahaha.  The old "it's only a metaphor" excuse.  Except that this doesn't make any sense of surah 3:35-37 in which Mary's mother was called the wife of Imran.  It's clearly a literal reference.

I am not here to give enlightenment against all of your copy-paste propaganda material. If you proclaim you want to be a Muslim and ask me to help you in clarifying your ambiguities, I with pleasure would help you how much I may possibly can. However, if you want to have fun by copying and pasting dishonest arguments of crooks in an attacking manner then this is my last response to you.

You Wrote:
“Except that this doesn't make any sense of surah 3:35-37 in which Mary's mother was called the wife of Imran. It's clearly a literal reference.”

Biblical Amram was the father of Aaron, Moses, and Miriam (sister of Moses and Aaron). Imran in Quran was the father of Mary (mother of Jesus). According to Muslim tradition there is a difference of eighteen centuries between Biblical Amram and Quranic Imran.

Mary's (mother of Jesus) father Imran is the equivalent to Joachim in Christian tradition. The name of Imran’s wife is not mentioned in Quran but according to Islamic traditions her name was Hannah. Hannah (mother Mary) is the same name as in Christian tradition (Saint Anne). However, the name Hannah is also mentioned in Bible.

Muslim literature narrates that Imran and his wife were old and childless. Hannah (wife of Imran) prayed to God for a child and when she was pregnant, with the birth of a son in mind, Hannah vowed that she would dedicate the child to the service of the Sacred House in Jerusalem, dedicate the child for worship, freed from all worldly affairs. Instead Almighty Allah blessed Hannah with a daughter. She named the girl "Maryam," which literally means "maidservant of Allah," and she asked Allah to protect Maryam and her offspring from evil.

In Quran it is mentioned:

“Behold! a woman of 'Imran said: "O my Lord! I do dedicate unto Thee what is in my womb for Thy special service: So accept this of me: For Thou hearest and knowest all things."”

“When she was delivered, she said: "O my Lord! Behold! I am delivered of a female child!"- and Allah knew best what she brought forth- "And no wise is the male Like the female. I have named her Mary, and I commend her and her offspring to Thy protection from the Evil One, the Rejected."”

“Right graciously did her Lord accept her: He made her grow in purity and beauty: To the care of Zakariya was she assigned. Every time that he entered (Her) chamber to see her, He found her supplied with sustenance. He said: "O Mary! Whence (comes) this to you?" She said: "From Allah. for Allah Provides sustenance to whom He pleases without measure."”

Ali Imran (3)
-Verses 35, 36, 37-

Similar story is mentioned in Bible but with some difference in details.

(1Sam 1:2 [KJV])
And he had two wives; the name of the one [was] Hannah, and the name of the other Peninnah: and Peninnah had children, but Hannah had no children.

(1Sam 1:3 [KJV])
And this man went up out of his city yearly to worship and to sacrifice unto the LORD of hosts in Shiloh. And the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, the priests of the LORD, [were] there.

(1Sam 1:4 [KJV])
And when the time was that Elkanah offered, he gave to Peninnah his wife, and to all her sons and her daughters, portions:

(1Sam 1:5 [KJV])
But unto Hannah he gave a worthy portion; for he loved Hannah: but the LORD had shut up her womb.

(1Sam 1:6 [KJV])
And her adversary also provoked her sore, for to make her fret, because the LORD had shut up her womb.

(1Sam 1:7 [KJV])
And [as] he did so year by year, when she went up to the house of the LORD, so she provoked her; therefore she wept, and did not eat.

(1Sam 1:8 [KJV])
Then said Elkanah her husband to her, Hannah, why weepest thou? and why eatest thou not? and why is thy heart grieved? [am] not I better to thee than ten sons?

(1Sam 1:9 [KJV])
So Hannah rose up after they had eaten in Shiloh, and after they had drunk. Now Eli the priest sat upon a seat by a post of the temple of the LORD.

(1Sam 1:10 [KJV])
And she [was] in bitterness of soul, and prayed unto the LORD, and wept sore.

(1Sam 1:11 [KJV])
And she vowed a vow, and said, O LORD of hosts, if thou wilt indeed look on the affliction of thine handmaid, and remember me, and not forget thine handmaid, but wilt give unto thine handmaid a man child, then I will give him unto the LORD all the days of his life, and there shall no razor come upon his head.

(1Sam 1:12 [KJV])
And it came to pass, as she continued praying before the LORD, that Eli marked her mouth.

(1Sam 1:13 [KJV])
Now Hannah, she spake in her heart; only her lips moved, but her voice was not heard: therefore Eli thought she had been drunken.

(1Sam 1:14 [KJV])
And Eli said unto her, How long wilt thou be drunken? put away thy wine from thee.

(1Sam 1:15 [KJV])
And Hannah answered and said, No, my lord, I [am] a woman of a sorrowful spirit: I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but have poured out my soul before the LORD.

(1Sam 1:16 [KJV])
Count not thine handmaid for a daughter of Belial: for out of the abundance of my complaint and grief have I spoken hitherto.

(1Sam 1:17 [KJV])
Then Eli answered and said, Go in peace: and the God of Israel grant [thee] thy petition that thou hast asked of him.

(1Sam 1:18 [KJV])
And she said, Let thine handmaid find grace in thy sight. So the woman went her way, and did eat, and her countenance was no more [sad].

(1Sam 1:19 [KJV])
And they rose up in the morning early, and worshipped before the LORD, and returned, and came to their house to Ramah: and Elkanah knew Hannah his wife; and the LORD remembered her.

(1Sam 1:20 [KJV])
Wherefore it came to pass, when the time was come about after Hannah had conceived, that she bare a son, and called his name Samuel, [saying], Because I have asked him of the LORD.

(1Sam 1:21 [KJV])
And the man Elkanah, and all his house, went up to offer unto the LORD the yearly sacrifice, and his vow.

(1Sam 1:22 [KJV])
But Hannah went not up; for she said unto her husband, [I will not go up] until the child be weaned, and [then] I will bring him, that he may appear before the LORD, and there abide for ever.

(1Sam 1:23 [KJV])
And Elkanah her husband said unto her, Do what seemeth thee good; tarry until thou have weaned him; only the LORD establish his word. So the woman abode, and gave her son suck until she weaned him.

(1Sam 1:24 [KJV])
And when she had weaned him, she took him up with her, with three bullocks, and one ephah of flour, and a bottle of wine, and brought him unto the house of the LORD in Shiloh: and the child [was] young.

(1Sam 1:25 [KJV])
And they slew a bullock, and brought the child to Eli.

(1Sam 1:26 [KJV])
And she said, Oh my lord, [as] thy soul liveth, my lord, I [am] the woman that stood by thee here, praying unto the LORD.

(1Sam 1:27 [KJV])
For this child I prayed; and the LORD hath given me my petition which I asked of him:

(1Sam 1:28 [KJV])
Therefore also I have lent him to the LORD; as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the LORD. And he worshipped the LORD there.

References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_in_Islam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Anne#In_Islam
http://newtheologicalmovement.blogspot.c...jesus.html
http://www.central-mosque.com/biographies/maryam.htm

[little_monkey]

There are countries in which women are joining the men to fight along in any combat situation.

The reason that in sports, we have separate leagues for men and women is to recognize that men have stronger muscles. That in no way makes men superior to women. 




That is totally illogical.  It is this kind of illogical reasoning that leads to such situations that a woman cannot leave her house without being accompanied by a male of the family. It leads to honor killing, where even if a woman was raped - meaning was forced into sex - she will be killed by a member of her own family, it leads to woman's obligation covered their faces in public, otherwise she can be physically beaten. Where women have been allowed to do more than what Islam permits is in countries that were once a colony of the Western world, and have governments that have embraced some Western values, such as Pakistan, Indonesia, and Turkey. The danger is that these countries are moving more and more towards Islamisation, and whatever Western values are still present, they are being eroded. Just look at Turkey. I visited that country before the Islamic party took control. Women were as free as men then because the government was secular, but since the election of Erdogan, things have changed for the worse for women. 




I don't know where you get these figures, but even if they're true, this is happening in countries in which secular governments are in place, with freedom rights protected by the constitution, and so Sharia law doesn't have a chance to be the law of the land - though in some communities, Sharia law is practiced covertly, predominantly in the UK. But in Islamic countries, where the rights of individual is non-existing, the fate of those women are deplorable. 

Look Mr. Professor, you are now provoking me for a cheap dirty fight and that is not the way how professors behave. I can give you hundreds of links that are sufficient to prove horrendous facts about how nasty are the men in modern cultures who beat so ruthlessly their wives, mistresses, and girlfriends that in many cases that brutality ends up in the death of victims.

There is one major difference you have omitted: in the West, those behaviors are outlawed, and those who perpetrate them are brought to justice; in the Islamic states, those behaviors are approved by the law, as those laws follow very closely to Sharia law. So you are comparing apples with oranges.

That ruthlessness is so shocking that no Hollywood made Taliban is capable to compete that.

Hollywood is in the business of making money. The use of violence in those movies is understood that the audience is mature enough to know the difference between reality and fiction. There are exceptions as there are individuals who can't make that distinction, but we are not going to impose laws on movie makers just because a few don't have all of their brain screws properly fixed.

Up so far you have attacked me by using unjust and dishonest arguments of the crooks and in my defence I only showed you the actuality by showing you your mistakes.

I am prone to errors like any human being, but in your case, you cannot admit that you believe in a crackpot theory, and therefore your mind is closed to any criticism.

Think only logically, if Islam is really the religion how you have depicted it then why people are accepting it in Europe and in America.

There are billions of people who believe in one religion or another. But as I have defined those religions, they are all crackpot theories as they do not have an inbuilt mechanism for self correction. So whether one is converting to Islam, or any other religion, they are just moving from one crackpot theory to another.  I just feel sorry for them to live a life of delusion.

[Angrboda]

I am not here to give enlightenment against all of your copy-paste propaganda material. If you proclaim you want to be a Muslim and ask me to help you in clarifying your ambiguities, I with pleasure would help you how much I may possibly can.

Clarifying ambiguities? Is that what you call it. I call it engaging in wild speculation that's contrary to the text.

Similar story is mentioned in Bible but with some difference in details.

Some difference in the details?! Like having a son instead of a daughter. Waha.

[Harris]

There is one major difference you have omitted: in the West, those behaviors are outlawed, and those who perpetrate them are brought to justice; in the Islamic states, those behaviors are approved by the law, as those laws follow very closely to Sharia law. So you are comparing apples with oranges.

Hollywood is in the business of making money. The use of violence in those movies is understood that the audience is mature enough to know the difference between reality and fiction. There are exceptions as there are individuals who can't make that distinction, but we are not going to impose laws on movie makers just because a few don't have all of their brain screws properly fixed.

I am prone to errors like any human being, but in your case, you cannot admit that you believe in a crackpot theory, and therefore your mind is closed to any criticism.

There are billions of people who believe in one religion or another. But as I have defined those religions, they are all crackpot theories as they do not have an inbuilt mechanism for self correction. So whether one is converting to Islam, or any other religion, they are just moving from one crackpot theory to another.  I just feel sorry for them to live a life of delusion.

You are talking about Sharia Law as if you are a scholar of it. I bet you do not even know the meaning of Sharia.

You are throwing lies of the crooks on purpose and that behaviour by no mean falls under the category of mistake because if literate person behaves like ignorant then that is a clear sign that he has no conscience.

You are talking about “inbuilt mechanism of self-correction” that mechanism is called conscience which is part of every person by nature.

Conscience is an original and natural power of the mind, common to all human beings which provide means of self-governance. It provides us the power to judge our own intentions and deeds critically and in condemnation without, or against, our will or deliberate intention. Through conscience one can judges motives virtuous or vicious. It is conscience that makes man a moral agent. Morals are not a matter of reason or a matter of sentiment.

Our moral capacities create the capacity for self-governance. Reason or conscience gives all individuals the ability to discover objective truths either about duty, or about the good, without external guidance through political authority.

Conscience depends not only on the ability to imagine consequences but on the capacity to mentally "talk to oneself."

However, “A conscience without God is like a court without a judge.”
Alphonse de Lamartine

The only purpose why people reject the existence of God is to consent rationalization of desirable acts by wilfully and systematically ignoring the conscience. Using suspicions and partial knowledge of one’s own faults, followers of their own desires avoid further inquiry by closing the eyes of their mind. This is how one can corrupt his/her own consciences wilfully. Lack of conscience makes people inner hypocrites who culpably pretend themselves to be the better persons than they are in actuality. Dead conscience leads to an inability to distinguish that which is morally good from that which is bad. Repeatedly violating one's conscience will slowly kills it, leaving people unable to tell good from bad.

“There was no law of nature that man should love mankind, and that, if there had been any love on earth hitherto, it was not owing to a natural law, but simply because men have believed in immortality. Ivan Fyodorovitch added in parenthesis that the whole natural law lies in that faith, and that if you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism. That’s not all. He ended by saying that for every individual, like ourselves, who does not believe in God or immortality, the moral law of nature must immediately be changed into the exact contrary of the former religious law, and that egoism, even to crime, must become not only lawful but even recognised as the inevitable, the most rational, even honourable outcome of his position.’”

Page 45 The Brothers Karamazov
Part 1, Book 2, Chapter 6 ("Why Is Such a Man Alive? ")
Fyodor Dostoevsky

This is how abortion can be defined as "choice," homosexuality must be proclaimed as "normal and healthy," requiring "acceptance," and evolution and global warming described as "established science." The bigger the lie, the greater the self-recrimination if exposed as such.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscience

However, the craziest intellectual act of all times is the rationalization of the idea that intelligible and predictable universe is the outcome of nothingness and all of its fine-tuned events are happening all by themselves, without any reason, and for nothing.

“In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

As that unhappy poet A. E. Housman put it:

For Nature, heartless, witless Nature
Will neither care nor know.

DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”

Page 133
River out of Eden
Richard Dawkins

Cultures without conscience are without morals. Such cultures have seen great miseries and they are vulnerable to more miseries. In such cultures rape and beating of women are everyday norms.

“If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

[little_monkey]

There is one major difference you have omitted: in the West, those behaviors are outlawed, and those who perpetrate them are brought to justice; in the Islamic states, those behaviors are approved by the law, as those laws follow very closely to Sharia law. So you are comparing apples with oranges.

Hollywood is in the business of making money. The use of violence in those movies is understood that the audience is mature enough to know the difference between reality and fiction. There are exceptions as there are individuals who can't make that distinction, but we are not going to impose laws on movie makers just because a few don't have all of their brain screws properly fixed.

I am prone to errors like any human being, but in your case, you cannot admit that you believe in a crackpot theory, and therefore your mind is closed to any criticism.

There are billions of people who believe in one religion or another. But as I have defined those religions, they are all crackpot theories as they do not have an inbuilt mechanism for self correction. So whether one is converting to Islam, or any other religion, they are just moving from one crackpot theory to another.  I just feel sorry for them to live a life of delusion.

You are talking about Sharia Law as if you are a scholar of it. I bet you do not even know the meaning of Sharia.

You are throwing lies of the crooks on purpose and that behaviour by no mean falls under the category of mistake because if literate person behaves like ignorant then that is a clear sign that he has no conscience.

You are talking about “inbuilt mechanism of self-correction” that mechanism is called conscience which is part of every person by nature.

YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY WRONG ON THIS ISSUE.

If that was the case then every crackpot theory would be valid because everyone can honestly say that it comes from their conscience. I know that you are speaking from your conscience. I don't doubt that. But since there are 7 billion people on this planet, each person with a conscience, then you would get 7 billion different theories. There is only ONE way out of this mess, and that is, a theory is only good if there is empirical evidence supporting it.

[robvalue]

Yeah, wrong. Not everyone has a conscience.

God "forgot" to give it to some people.

Why does Allah need all this help to explain things, and so many excuses made on his behalf?

[Esquilax]

Are people... still talking to Harris as though he's a serious, legitimate debater? The man is literally immune to facts: the last time I conversed with him, he posted a source and claimed it supported his position, but that source established the opposite of that. He'd just kinda stopped at the title and assumed the rest favored him. Even when supplied with quotes saying the exact opposite of what he'd claimed, he still insisted that the source favors him because the title implied it.

There is no possible way a conversation with this dullard could be productive.

[Rhondazvous]

Can you apply probability to god?

To calculate any probability, you need to know how many different outcomes there are and the probability of each outcome. That's ok if you toss a coin or roll a pair of dice. But for god? I don't think you can say 50% he exists, 50 % he doesn't. 

If a bacteria is too complex to put itself together, then either god is less complex than a bacteria or he is impossible.

Bacteria is a complex system, but I think we can solve this puzzle. A lot of the pieces have been discovered, and I believe it is just a matter of time before a team of scientists can put the right configuration of molecules to turn a pile of dirt into a living organism. OTOH, who knows what is the nature of God? If you know someone, please kindly advise.

God is (fill in the blank as it pleases you).

If you fill in the blank with something to which the principle of probability can be applied, then you're in business.

[little_monkey]

To calculate any probability, you need to know how many different outcomes there are and the probability of each outcome. That's ok if you toss a coin or roll a pair of dice. But for god? I don't think you can say 50% he exists, 50 % he doesn't. 


Bacteria is a complex system, but I think we can solve this puzzle. A lot of the pieces have been discovered, and I believe it is just a matter of time before a team of scientists can put the right configuration of molecules to turn a pile of dirt into a living organism. OTOH, who knows what is the nature of God? If you know someone, please kindly advise.

God is (fill in the blank as it pleases you).

If you fill in the blank with something to which the principle of probability can be applied, then you're in business.

And that's a huge problem to fill in the blanks - what is a god? what is his nature? Philosophers as way back as the Greeks were pondering on that and found many perplexing contradictions. So one can speculate eternally about the nature of god, but the bottom line is that the whole debate around that issue leaves us in a quandary. And as far as applying probability, you have no place to start from.

[Alex K]

Are people... still talking to Harris as though he's a serious, legitimate debater? The man is literally immune to facts: the last time I conversed with him, he posted a source and claimed it supported his position, but that source established the opposite of that. He'd just kinda stopped at the title and assumed the rest favored him. Even when supplied with quotes saying the exact opposite of what he'd claimed, he still insisted that the source favors him because the title implied it.

There is no possible way a conversation with this dullard could be productive.

And don't forget the time he tried to debate advanced theoretical physics by copypasting walls of text verbatim from scientific publications without attribution, and when caught was indignant about how narrowminded we are .