LOL F_H

Realistically there's nothing I can do to convince you I am being honest. If you don't believe me you don't.

The purpose of my capitalisation was to emphasise points of difference between the bible and the koran. I did this to nail the lie that Islam honours the "prophets" of the bible.

I doubt there ever was an Abraham. That part of the bible is pure myth.

So is the story of a global flood. It may have been lifted from the Gilgamesh epic. Jesuits who went to China in the 18th Century found that Chinese records pre-dating the supposed flood recorded no deluge.

The idea of a global flood is preposterous. Had plant life been submerged for that period it would have died. The ark would have come to rest on a barren land.

The Torah was not written by a single person. It probably underwent redaction.

I do not believe in Adam and Eve. Nor do I believe that Joshua stopped the sun.

There isn't any evidence that the Israelites crossed the desert from Egypt and conquered Canaan. The pillar of fire, cloud of smoke, mannah, ten plagues are obviously legend.
The ten commandments look suspiciously like an adaptation from the code of Hammurabi.

I like some of the prophets. Amos seems to me to be the greatest cry for social justice I've ever read.

The Hebrew calendar was an adaptation of the old Babylonian calendar with its cycle of seven leap months every 19 tropical years. The names of the Hebrew months may be traced back to the old Babylonian months.

I don't believe in virgin birth, God incarnate or resurrection.

I find the bible interesting in a way that the koran is not. The bible is obviously the work of many authors with differing perspectives over many millennia of time. The koran is merely the blathering of a crazed seventh century Arabian warlord though it almost certain underwent redaction after Muhammad's death.

But I do not regard the bible as "holy" or even "inspired by God."

Steven,

You are smart I give you that. But to think you are smarter than others isn’t.
So let’s call a spade a spade.

If you truly believe your secular, atheist version, then the Torah, Bible or the Quran should be equally fairy tales to you. Everyone there is equally seeing flying pink elephants.

Instead, you believe the Muslim version of the prophets is bogus (an atheist would believe the opposite is also correct because time line is irrelevant in mass illusions).
You see in monochrome (Genuine-Bogus, True-False). Pretending to believe in nothing so you can always drive a ‘one way attack’ in a debate is a naïve trick and may imply that deep inside you know your true beliefs are made of glass.

Just to be clear, I am not criticising your belief system. I just think you should focus on finding inner peace with your faith. You will know that when you stop seeing the black&white or true&false and accept that everyone are equally right about their beliefs.

Is it too much to ask you to respect my small and narrow mind?
LOL

All the best,

FH

Following on from:
“If anything, I think that Islam is even more reprehensible and ridiculous than its cousins in Abrahamic mythology, Judaism and Christianity. What I object to is the implicit but obsessive vilification of those millions of people who follow the Islamic variant of that mass delusion.” –CJ Morgan

1) It seems a peculiar characteristic of Abrahamic faiths to be intolerant & monopolistic.
The incidents you find in other creeds: i) The Akhenaton/Aten heresy in Egypt & its suppression by the Amon priesthood ii) The Hindu backlash against the British & more recently Islam. iii) The treatment of Socrates. Tend to isolated .You don’t find the same systemic, sustained authoritarianism with its religious driven conquests, forced conversions, militant mobs that show up in the Abrahamic faiths?
[ and frankly, the world may have been better off without any of them ever appearing]
PS "respect" in Abrahamic terms eventually gets down to, doing things my way.

2) I am tending to believe that the- best bits- of the Abrahamic faiths are impurities that have seeped into them, been plagiarised & re-badged from Greek & other secular thinking, and

3)I am also beginning think that Judaism owes a lot more to the Amon-Ra and Aten cult s that we have been led to believe.
i) Akhenaton could have been a old testament prophet without too much adjustment &
ii) I have recently found references where even the main-stream/polytheistic Amon cult describes Amon as ‘the unseen’, ‘the unseeable’ ‘the universal god’. Conceptions which previously we have been lead to believe were Judaisms- unique- take on the divine.

Any comments?

F_H

Sigh

You stated:

"Muslims also have to believe in all prophets of the Bible and the Torah…"

I pointed out that Muslims do not believe in "all prophets of the Bible..." What you actually believe in are different prophets with the same names.

But let me rephrase.

IF I were a believing Christian or Jew I would point out that Muslims do not believe in the biblical "prophets." Muslims believe in "prophets" whose life histories have been concocted by a crazed 7th century warlord called Muhammad. For reasons best known to himself Muhammad give his "prophets" the same names as the biblical ones.

I wish the koran was merely a "fairy tale." It is as poisonous compendium of bull excrement as Mein Kampf and just as dangerous.

For reasons that I've explained before, I find the bible more interesting. Partly that is because you can trace how the thinking of a group of tribal primitives changes as they come into contact with more advanced cultures. The "God" of Isaiah is different to the tribal deity of the Torah. By the time of Jesus, Jews had had intimate contact with Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek and Roman culture and had borrowed freely from all of them.

Jesus' ethical teachings are a synthesis of various Jewish schools of thought that had already incorporated much from other cultures.

"Allah" is actually the "YWVH" of the Torah on steroids.

Horus,

I don't think intolerance is unique to the "Abrahamic" faiths. It is a weakness of all superstitions. Any belief system that believes it is in possession of the received word of the creator of the universe is likely to be intolerant.

How intolerant depends on the nature of the teachings and the cultures of the believers.

Right now there are growing signs that Hinduism is becoming conflated with Indian nationalism and is becoming ever more intolerant.

CJ Morgan,

I agree with the sentiments in your last post. I'll deal with the question of your giving Muslims a free pass when I have another 350 words.