The issue of Blasphemy in Islam

[The Grand Nudger]

I'm asking you why god has never nixxed the tradition, not whether a god needs animal sacrifice. Could go either way I guess..maybe they don't -hence my question..but maybe they actually do need the blood of some animal for some reason of magic - in which case my question is moot.

The pig thing just leads into more of the same kind of questions. Now..I..ofc..think there's a pretty good cultural explanation for it...but magic book says it's a god rule. Maybe god should explain that one too?

[Leonardo17]

1) I think I answered that question. Since there was already a strong culture of animal sacrifice, the message might have been to maintain the tradition in a way that benefits the poorest layers of society.
2) I don’t know about paganism that well. But I know that the issue of “energy” is very important in these traditions. Not only as animal blood. In India and ancient Egypt they had rituals that would in some cases take weeks to perform. There was always this thought of “bribing the Gods” that was entirely abolished in monotheistic religions. In fact, it wasn’t so in early Paganism either. But this is the subject of another discussion.
3) I’m not sure I understood your point on this. The “magic book” is to be seen as a “user’s manual”. Sometimes strict obedience is needed, but in most cases you have the duty “to ask yourself and God” about the reason of the guideline (whichever guideline might that be). So all of these issues are (and should be) the subject of a constant debate.
As an explainer: I know that there are some benefits in the consumption of pork meat. But in middle age Europe sheep and cattle were the preferred meat of aristocrats while pig was the preferred protein source for the peasants. Anyhow, I am reducing my consumption of meat altogether because most doctors agree on the fact that a plant-based diet with a limited amount of animal protein is the ideal way of nutrition.

[The Grand Nudger]

1) I think I answered that question. Since there was already a strong culture of animal sacrifice, the message might have been to maintain the tradition in a way that benefits the poorest layers of society.

An answer that further indicts such a god as a fuck up.  A shitty practice that it decides not to say a word about, because it hopes it might help do some -other- thing that it -also- doesn't do.  IDK..but if were a believer, I wouldn't be in the business of multiplying gods failures when asked about just one of them....but I do respect what a terrible position your beliefs have put you in..in this regard.   Forced to offer things like..well..like all of this...or fail a loyalty test. Oddly enough, theres a super simple answer for why god wants sacrifices in old magic book. It likes the smell of burnt flesh.

Kinda puts later abrahamists hell in perspective, eh?

2) I don’t know about paganism that well. But I know that the issue of “energy” is very important in these traditions. Not only as animal blood. In India and ancient Egypt they had rituals that would in some cases take weeks to perform. There was always this thought of “bribing the Gods” that was entirely abolished in monotheistic religions. In fact, it wasn’t so in early Paganism either. But this is the subject of another discussion.

You're in luck, I do!...but, to be completely honest, there's not actually any difference between paganism and islam in this regard.  As you flirted with above, it's just one expression of a long standing human tradition that turned out to be false by every stated metric, measure, or reason.  You think that bribing gods was done away with, but in mere reality, gods simply asked for different coins, and still do. The defining factor of any theistic god belief, pagan or abrahamic, is personal interventionism.

3) I’m not sure I understood your point on this. The “magic book” is to be seen as a “user’s manual”. Sometimes strict obedience is needed, but in most cases you have the duty “to ask yourself and God” about the reason of the guideline (whichever guideline might that be). So all of these issues are (and should be) the subject of a constant debate.
As an explainer: I know that there are some benefits in the consumption of pork meat. But in middle age Europe sheep and cattle were the preferred meat of aristocrats while pig was the preferred protein source for the peasants. Anyhow, I am reducing my consumption of meat altogether because most doctors agree on the fact that a plant-based diet with a limited amount of animal protein is the ideal way of nutrition.

A users manual that bends the truth for effect, and still gets it wrong? This is your gods work? More academically, the pig thing had nothing to do with the middle ages or europe. It came down to you from judaism somewhere in the late bronze or early iron. Just someone repeating something which was, itself, on les than solid ground. Pigs don't chew their cud and have cloven hooves. More accurately, though, their Others were pig farming city dwellers, and the people who wrote the myths big mo and co stole were rural shepherds. Culture war. There's alot of stuff like this, broadly referred to as the pastoralist influence.

Speaking of what doctors know..did god not know that when making this meat world? When making us meat eaters? When affirming sacrificial practices? Or will you be forced, here, to offer an even more ludicrous view of an imagined past to cover a ludicrous view of an imagined god?

I have too many of these to ever expect you to have a well considered answer for. The genre, though, isn't so much about gods or magic books as it is reformers. People who are dissatisfied with explanations like "cuz god likes the smell of burnt animals" and want to put forward a different conception of god, or why god does or says what god is said to do and say. I find it odd, and cross purpose, for reformers to shackle themselves to exactly those x's they wish to minimize. A quicker way to the end of all of this, is to ask whether or not there are -any- examples in the entirety of magic book (and I would choose the most assanine and manifestly false as a rule) that you think..might not have been uttered by any gods? Ultimately..because..ure, I see no reason that a god couldn;t be a know nothing fuck up, but I wonder how far down that road you'd go to maintain any, some, or all of those items....and to what end?

[Leonardo17]

1) I don’t really know
2) I don’t agree. In fact I am kind of interested in the ancient Egyptian culture too. Before the Bronze Age collapse (around 1200 BC), there rituals were shorter and in many ways more effective. It is during the Iron Age and in Greco-Roman civilizations that animal sacrifice became widespread. In fact, for romans, gladiator fights were (at least at the beginning) a human sacrifice to a dead person or to a deity. Egyptians had very elaborate systems of occultism and magic. “Magic” in that sense is not to be understood as something negative, but as some sort of technique to create change in the physical world. Like to make crops grow faster, or to ward off alligators while their cattle had to pass through the Nile. Then gradually their spiritual system degenerated. Magic turned in to bigotry and black magic. Religious rituals became longer and longer, because they were seeing that they were unable to obtain the desired results. So Animal sacrifice became common currency in the classical and Hellenistic period. Than the Romans even turned to human sacrifice, than they quit that also and started to organize gladiator fights just for fun.
I don’t have a clear date in mind for the prophet Moses, nor for the prophet Abraham. I Think that Moses must have lived at some time in the early 1st millennium BC. But still it was the 1st century A.D. when Christianity started to spread, the 4th century when Constantine made Christianity the official religion of his empire and 6th century A.D. when Islam first appeared and the 10th century A.D. when it had become a truly worldwide religion. So from that period on, there has been a shift in the way people were seeing things. It was already clear that the old ways were not working since the collapse of Bronze Age Civilizations and there was a clear disconnection between the divine and the human at the time of Jesus so these Abrahamic prophet has the task of re-establishing a new connection with the divine based on a new currency.
So you might indeed be right. The new currency was not magic (I’m talking about the Egyptian Book of the Dead for Instance) like the Hittites or the Egyptians, It wasn’t animal sacrifice like the Greco-romans, but in this case it was devotion. People has to show, in many ways, how surrendered and how obedient they could be by showing their veneration and their total surrender to the sayings of the prophet or to the orders of the Catholic Church.
So yes, I agree with you. When you are asking “Why does God need any of this?”. The answer is “He / She doesn’t”. In fact there are people in my surrounding that occasionally tell me “You are the one who needs God, not the opposite” (So I am the one who is supposed to benefit from anything that I am doing for God). So yes, this is an important issue too

3) You know that I am a liberal to the point of having frequent conflicts with many people who call themselves more traditional Muslims. But I know that there is a prohibition on the issue in the Holy Book so I assume that there has to be a logical explanation. But I am not a fanatic. I know people who eat it of used to eat it.
On vegetarianism: No. We are not a carnivorous specie. We are not even omnivorous like canines or bears. The shape of our teeth and the structure resembles those of apes. And apes are mostly fructivorous. But we became carnivorous out of necessity. When they developed the first tools our ancestors became able to scavenge to bodies of dead animals for protein and later to hunt them. So we adapted to a meat based diet, but we are still mostly fructivorous.
So a Mediterranean type plant and carbon Hydrate diet is best for the most of us. And the issue of Pig is unimportant. We are here to live long and to have the healthiest diet possible right?
The issue of God being real or not is the subject of another debate. In fact, I no longer debate these issues. I think that one who is comfortable believing in science and philosophy should simply keep it that way. This is not an issue. Religion is for those who seek spiritual answers. But religion is not, and can never be, the only aspect of life. So get over it.
There is is no Koranic or Biblical Verse or a phrase from the Bhagavad Gita that says something like “You cannot go beyond the speed of light” or “Matter is made of verse small particles that themselves break into smaller particles” which is why the Kuran clearly suggests that we must try to understand issues via reason and science and listen to the facts that have been established by science.
Your description about reformers is not totally untrue. But if it were as simple as that why has there been so much bloodshed in Europe over those very Ideas of reform? You must read the story of Phillip II who launched an entire Armada against Elisabeth II to return England to the sphere of influence of the Catholic Church. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Armada ).
Who gathers a fleet of 130 ships to fight a fellow Christian nation who are just as you put it “reformists”. No. It’s never about reforms it’s about politics. Like the issue of the headscarf. It’s all about the alpha male as Freud would have put it (Or the Ego as eastern religions like to define it). When you do a reform, (Which are not reforms by the way: Luther only said “I don’t need an intermediary between me and God”. This is not a religious issue. This is about logics. Why would I need an intermediary to read what you call “the magic book”. I can do it myself. I don’t need anyone). And the sad truth is that people are sheep. It is much easier for them to follow the old ways than to listen to persons who are not talking a deity who sits upon the clouds and is waiting for them with I don’t know how many wife’s if you agree to pay a monetary price for it (Which has also started to become common practice among some muslim sectarian formations by the way ). Besides those reformist were in many cases like Galileo. They were told to shut up or else. Just like the street protests in today’s Iran.
Yet, I never oppose the atheist / Agnostic approach for one reason: The approach is simple so you have fewer chances of making enormous mistakes. As an Indian Guru that I really like puts it: “It is people with great convictions who do the most terrible things” (Lenin and Franco were both people with great ideas and very bright goals for their country and mankind). So having no conviction and being able to say “I don’t know” or “There is no tangible evidence for that” is a great advantage. So why would I want to spoil it?
I am more into making separations between the true and the untrue. Because regardless of whether you are a person of faith or not, these issues are closely related to political power. And basically, I don’t want to see generations of people anywhere to be subjected to religious dictatorships anymore. One way or another people have a tendency to believe in things. So if are able clarify some basic issues the ugly aspects of religion will disappear and will give way to a more humanistic way of seeing things. See today even the pope is able to express more moderate views on the issue of Gay Catholics (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/27/world...ights.html ).
So it may be falsehood as you put it. But thank to reforms or what I would rather call “a return to the original messages” it can at least become a harmless falsehood.
And as I said. To me it’s not falsehood. I think that the message is very deep. And because the message is very deep people have continuously and willingly misunderstood it and distorted it. And I see clear benefits in understanding these messages, to a point where I have to agree that few people (like saints) are able to truly understand these messages. But I cannot prove these things. You may call it self-deception but a certain amount of willingness is necessary in order to be able to get into these things. And that’s why I am saying, If you don’t want to do it, than don’t do it.

[The Grand Nudger]

How much in magic book, that you've read, do you think might have been about politics and sheeple, rather than something a god said to a man in a cave?

Logically speaking, ofc.

There are other items, if you'd prefer not to explore that one...such as the notion implicit in your comments above that atheists or agnostics are not, themelves, people with great convictions. That seems to be a human trait, not an ingroup-outgroup thing. The sets of convictions are different, but the commitment, not so much. Or..perhaps, whether or not you'd truly wish to see the end of religious dictatorship - or that the problem is the the Right Dictatorship has not presented itself. Gods dictatorship, as expressed in the torture porn rag you call a user manual that requires strict obediance. Your notion that contemporary reformed religions are in any true or even credible sense a "return" to the "original" messages? Is that true of neo-paganism, for example..or do you allow that historic neopagans were a kindof rowdy lot keen on blood..despite the current manifestation being a bunch of hippys?

I think you're probably doing being human better than the first muslims, but you're not doing islam better. Likewise, odin would be pissed at the folks using his name today - and not for good or wholesome reasons as you or I might see them.

[Leonardo17]

1) A lot. You must have heard that the prophet Mohammad was at war with Arabs who wanted to maintain the old ways. And there are many verses that are focusing on these issues.
2) These are very large issues that are beyond my amount of knowledge. But
a) Of course they have convictions but they won’t for instance a non-believers republic with a morality police beating and killing women who decide to wear the Hijab for instance
b) I think there are no reformed religion. The protestant churches in America who have worked to abolish the Woe-Rade law were also “reformed” Christian as you would put it. So the return to the original message has to be an individual action. Not a collective action undertaken by a group or society in general. I only said that the ideas of Luther were correct. I didn’t say I’m a Lutheran
- There is a phenomenon called invented religions. Hinduism is in many ways a polytheistic religion but is has roots that go back to 3000 BC (or perhaps even more) and a whole set of sages, Yogis, schools of Hinduism with serious amounts of religious material that have to be taken seriously by any theologians.
You cannot create a new religion with a mail-group, a website and a few Hippy-like dressed people who say they decided to become Pagans. But sorry for this. I know that there are real neo-Pagans in Europe, Australis and North-America. But this is my vision of things. Vercingetorix (The Gaulish King) was a true Pagan. Today we don’t really know a lot about their deities and how people perceived these deities and what were their day to day religious beliefs and how they saw the world in general. But this is my opinion. (Anyone willing to go to Stonehenge to celebrate the shamhain festival – or whatever – has my blessing to do so, but I simply don’t thing of it as the same thing that – for instance – the ancient Athenians believed in. I think there is difference between the two )
c) All I am saying is that we live in a different age. So if we have a certain belief system (which I do) I think it can only make sense if it is in line with the reality of our time. This principle was valid for the first Muslims as well. In fact their beliefs were truly revolutionary and more adapted to the reality of their times than the already existing idolatry religions of the Arabian Peninsula at that time. (Or at least this is how I see things)

[The Grand Nudger]

1) A lot. You must have heard that the prophet Mohammad was at war with Arabs who wanted to maintain the old ways. And there are many verses that are focusing on these issues.

How problematic do you think that is for islam, that alot of the things attributed to some god may actually be the opinions of a human warlord?

2) These are very large issues that are beyond my amount of knowledge. But
a) Of course they have convictions but they won’t for instance a non-believers republic with a morality police beating and killing women who decide to wear the Hijab for instance
b) I think there are no reformed religion. The protestant churches in America who have worked to abolish the Woe-Rade law were also “reformed” Christian as you would put it. So the return to the original message has to be an individual action. Not a collective action undertaken by a group or society in general. I only said that the ideas of Luther were correct. I didn’t say I’m a Lutheran
- There is a phenomenon called invented religions. Hinduism is in many ways a polytheistic religion but is has roots that go back to 3000 BC (or perhaps even more) and a whole set of sages, Yogis, schools of Hinduism with serious amounts of religious material that have to be taken seriously by any theologians.
  You cannot create a new religion with a mail-group, a website and a few Hippy-like dressed people who say they decided to become Pagans. But sorry for this. I know that there are real neo-Pagans in Europe, Australis and North-America. But this is my vision of things. Vercingetorix (The Gaulish King) was a true Pagan. Today we don’t really know a lot about their deities and how people perceived these deities and what were their day to day religious beliefs and how they saw the world in general. But this is my opinion. (Anyone willing to go to Stonehenge to celebrate the shamhain festival – or whatever – has my blessing to do so, but I simply don’t thing of it as the same thing that – for instance – the ancient Athenians believed in. I think there is difference between the two )
c) All I am saying is that we live in a different age. So if we have a certain belief system (which I do) I think it can only make sense if it is in line with the reality of our time. This principle was valid for the first Muslims as well. In fact their beliefs were truly revolutionary and more adapted to the reality of their times than the already existing idolatry religions of the Arabian Peninsula at that time. (Or at least this is how I see things)

Is magic book not an idol?

[Leonardo17]

1) That’s not how I see it no.
2) Abrahamic religions don’t like idols. There is the story of Abraham breaking down the idols in a temple with an axe and then putting the axe in the hand of the last remaining idol and telling the guardians of the temple “He must have done it. There is life in him isn’t there?”.
Even Christian depictions of Jesus, the apostles and the virgin were at one time broken down by iconoclasts (during the Reign of the emperor Justinian I If I remember correctly). So no, monotheism refuses idolatry.

[arewethereyet]

Jesus isn't an idol in Abrahamic religions?

And for the Catholics - all the saints and the Virgin Mary?

[The Grand Nudger]

1) That’s not how I see it no.

 We must be miscomminicating - that's okay, I honestly doubt we can go very far with this one.

2) Abrahamic religions don’t like idols.

What religions say about themselves, vs what religions actually do and are. 

I think that beliefs about a sacred and magical book that ends up a prized and well cared for possession are direct stand ins for the idols you may be more familiar with.  They perform the function of idols, and are believed to have similar supernatural powers as those idols, and are treated like those idols.  Many neopagans use their own magic books in precisely the same way.

There is the story of Abraham breaking down the idols in a temple with an axe and then putting the axe in the hand of the last remaining idol and telling the guardians of the temple “He must have done it. There is life in him isn’t there?”.
Even Christian depictions of Jesus, the apostles and the virgin were at one time broken down by iconoclasts (during the Reign of the emperor Justinian I If I remember correctly). So no, monotheism refuses idolatry.

Monotheism doesn't do that, you may do that...though I think it's questionable whether or not you actually do refuse idolatry.... but it's not a requirement of or rule for monotheism.

If I had to guess, you think you refuse it because of a narrow and dogmatically important bit about offending god. Which, conveniently, is why I think you might want to reassess islams relationship to a magic book. If that sort of thing is unwarranted, and forbidden, and offends god....... well.