https://hesedyahu.wordpress.com/2019/08/08/what-turns-me-off-islam/So I’ve been watching debates occurring on Speakers’ Corner in London between Muslims and Christians, and Muslims and atheists. I’ve seen a good amount of them. It makes a change to see people in this country discussing doctrinal differences rather than the plethora of American videos on subjects. A different approach can be refreshing.
Now I see the Muslims repeatedly destroy the christians and the atheists; the atheists and christians normally portraying themselves as arrogant, often and repeatedly interrupting the polite Muslims, and making the most ignorant of claims. And the Muslims, even when shouted down remain, for the most, logical.
But they make an awful mistake. Before I get there, let me just explain.
Strangely enough, the terrorists who are said to be Muslim don’t turn me off Islam. Someone gave a statistic I found to be convincing. There are millions of Muslims compared to the much smaller proportion of terrorists. So one doesn’t necessarily mean the other. Plus, if I judged a philosophy or worldview only on the existence of bad people in it, all worldviews would be dead in the water.
The idea of some Muslims trying to force a change in the current system doesn’t do much to me either. All this secular culture is about politically is forcing one’s beliefs on others anyway, so it would be nothing new. In fact, at least those Muslims are more honest than the typical western statist.
You are free to shoot me for my next point if you want, but I don’t hold modern western views. The notion of their marrying a girl under the British age of consent doesn’t bother me much either. Actually, it doesn’t bother me at all. I don’t believe the current culture or legal system is morally superior to the ancient ones in many cases. Laws of the government are not laws of morality, and the laws of different governments at different times had different laws on the minimum age for sex and marriage, sometimes having no such law. So why would I judge a 7th century Arab using 21st century British culture and law that is just manmade? Remember, a Brit would now call a person who has sex with a person under 16 a paedophile, a sexual molester, regardless of the verbal consent of the young person. Yet historically, the age of marriage and consent was based on puberty and maturity, around the age of 12 in some cultures. A good amount of historical English royals would be condemned by such accusers but they don’t tend to apply their anachronistic, manmade values closer to home.
Anyway, back to the subject.
I’ve seen these lists that people have of the immoral things that the Quran is supposed to teach. I’ve never found them to be convincing. The amount of times I’ve seen silly anti-Torah arguments that comes from an ignorance of the context, done by both atheists and Muslims (ha!), I don’t trust when outsiders to the Quran say, “hey, look at this out-of-context verse,” and then the Muslim can easily say, and normally does, that the context and traditional explanations have been ignored. It just becomes a matter of interpretation.
I have a primary issue with Islam and a secondary issue with Muslims, or at least some of them.
The fundamental difference between Judaism is that Judaism doesn’t just rely on the revelation of Moses but the witness and continued tradition of the whole Jewish people from that times onwards. They all saw the Sinai event. No other theory about the event makes sense, the idea of myths and misunderstandings becoming glorified stories (that still tend to humiliate the nation and the “hero” so that’s more evidence that this glorification of myth make no sense).
Islam is only based on the claim of revelation from only Mohammed. The whole credibility of that religion is on his shoulders. And for all the perfection the Muslims heap on his book or the oral transmission of it that they’re supposed to memorise, his weakness, for me, comes with his acceptance of the false messiah, Jesus, or Isa.
Muhamed and his Muslim acolytes accept Isa as the messiah. He’s not. Moe swallowed a lie, inserted it in his “revelation” and falsified the whole thing.
What further discredits him to me is the way he and his followers try to cover his tracks by, on one hand, claiming that the Torah and Jewish Bible are corrupt, and, on the other hand, using it to prove that Moe was some expected prophet and Isa was the promised messiah and also a prophet. Wonderfully convenient. The fact that, contextually, both claims are false again causes more alarm bells to be rung concerning Islam.
The fact is that, fundamentally, it cannot usurp the evidences and witnesses for the Jewish Bible, the Torah in particular.
There may be other things in the Quran that are wrong, incorrect or stupid. But those things aren’t relevant to me. When I already know something or someone to be a lie, i.e., Jesus, and Moe puts this guy in his “revelation” as the truth and the true messiah or prophet, as his acolytes teach, then that brings down the whole Islam castle for me.
And their claim that “Isa was messiah prophecied by the prophets but the Jews chose to desecrate and alter their own scriptures to hide him and other things” is a baseless and worthles claim based only on faith inthe one man, Mohamad.
The secondary issue is the uneven manner in which they handle the Torah. When it comes to their own Quran, the knowledgeable amongst them would say that although the text can be understood to a certain extent, it still needs traditional and authoritative interpretations and studies and teachers to help understand what a fair amount of it is saying to avoid making false and immoral claims about the Quran. But with that understanding, why do they then treat the Torah like a sola-scriptura christian, arrogantly asserting that they simply have to read the book, interpret it their own way, and then understand parts of it to be incorporating pagan ideas to further the agenda of a corrupt Torah, and understand other parts as prophesying Jesus and Moe?
I watched this Muslim in Hyde Park giving his sermon on how Genesis 11, the story of Babel and its tower, is actually a pagan myth interwoven into the Jewish Bible. I watched this man eloquently speculate over something he had utterly no knowledge of whatsoever, not knowing the original writer, only going off what modern ignorant scholars have speculated who also have no traditional history of the creation of the books of Moses, only relatively modern speculation.
I’m sure that if anyone were to treat this Moslem’s Koran the same way he treated to Torah, he’d complain and talk about the need for Muslim teachers to interpret it properly. He’s asked for context to be taken into account. He’s cite the passage in the original language and show how textually he was correct. Yet he ignores all this for another man’s written tradition. Is the right word for this practice “hypocrisy,” this unequal form of “interpretation?” Either way, it is a practice I see with ubiquitous regularity when Muslims handle Torah, and to me it makes them look all the more like liars and conmen.
So these are the things, in my experience, that shows Islam is a lie.
But then again, a national tradition based on a miraculous event witnessed by millions compared to one man in a cave, it doesn’t really compare!
Topic: What turns me off Islam (Read 2150 times)