Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Are you kidding? I am saying what Islam contends, not what I as an Atheist believe. Islam contends that is not from man, but from "god", and specifically that it is the final message from "god" and is for all eternity unchangeable. Yes, there are differences in interpretation, but all interpretations are profoundly reactionary drawing as they do from the same profoundly reactionary source material that can never, ever be changed, or disregarded and that lays out a great many things in alarming specificity. I regard it all as so much malevolent gibberish, a slightly more malevolent set of gibberish than the other sets of malevolent gibberish that are out there.

Again, you demonstrate the same contradiction. I think that it is so embedded in your thinking that you may not be able to escape from it. As an atheist, you would be expected to know that words on a paper can never be "for all eternity unchangeable" regardless of what some may think. You believe that Islam is "gibberish" and acknowledge that there are different interpretations, but then state your belief that all Muslims believe that Islam is "for all eternity unchangeable". The simple fact that Islam is practiced differently between sects, between geographic regions, and over time shows that such change is there whether you or they choose to acknowledge it. Your statement that "all interpretations are profoundly reactionary" is ignorant beyond belief.

The source material, the Koran and the Hadiths, are in fact fixed and unchangeable as much as you and I would wish it otherwise. To pretend otherwise is to be completely and utterly ignorant of Islam. You are welcome to delude yourself into believing that there are progressive "interpretations" of Islam. I am saying they don't exist in the real Muslim world. Where exactly are they? How exactly and in what ways are they being progressive by any sort of western standard? As for "change", it has been in the wrong direction for decades, as technology make the actual words of Islam more accessible to the masses, Islam has become more radical and more reactionary, not less.

Do you really believe that a book such as the Quran, written in often inscrutable Arabic of a form that is not even in common use today will be read exactly the same way by two individuals centuries apart? Do you believe that those two readers will not read in context of their own experiences, knowledge, and environment and, hence, read the text differently? This is to say nothing of your contention that "the Hadiths" are "fixed and unchangeable". There is not even basic agreement on the validity of the hadith.

It is not technology that has increased reactionary forces within Islam, but oil money in the hands of the most reactionary of Muslims. Oil money has been used to convince the world that Wahhabism is the only true Islam. Among those who have been convinced are those like you who fail to see Islam through any other lens.

The Koran is unchangeable, much as the Bible is unchangeable. Thpugh the latter is subject to new interpretations of what certain phrases meant in the context of the times in light of scholarship. The Koran also once was in its earlier years, but most Muslims believe all the scholarship necessary for that took place in the early centuries of Islam.

Orthodox Islamic belief today is that the Koran is co-eternal with God. However, that was not orthodox Islam in the early centuries. There were many theologians who posited the Koran did not exist until it was revealed to Muhammed. This strand of thinking is more consistent with a view that many passages in the Koran had a context particular to various events in the early Islamic community and had a message limited to that context. However, around the tenth century the weight of opinion shifted to the co-eternal view, which became the orthodox view.

Orthodox Islam is far less dogmatic even today about the hadith. There was a great deal of cataloguing of these sayings of the prophet in the early centuries as to which had a strong provenance and which a weak one, with many in between. Even the strong ones have far less authority than the Koran because, unlike the Koran, they are the word of a man, not of God.

Many hadith contradict other hadith, but people are relatively comfortable with that ambiguity and feel free to pick and choose the hadith from which they draw inspiration. As I recall, at one point in his career as dictator, Qaddafi published his Green Book, which set forth a view that rejected all authority in Islam other than the Koran. This was seen as idiosyncratic, but not as heresy.

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Are you kidding? I am saying what Islam contends, not what I as an Atheist believe. Islam contends that is not from man, but from "god", and specifically that it is the final message from "god" and is for all eternity unchangeable. Yes, there are differences in interpretation, but all interpretations are profoundly reactionary drawing as they do from the same profoundly reactionary source material that can never, ever be changed, or disregarded and that lays out a great many things in alarming specificity. I regard it all as so much malevolent gibberish, a slightly more malevolent set of gibberish than the other sets of malevolent gibberish that are out there.

Again, you demonstrate the same contradiction. I think that it is so embedded in your thinking that you may not be able to escape from it. As an atheist, you would be expected to know that words on a paper can never be "for all eternity unchangeable" regardless of what some may think. You believe that Islam is "gibberish" and acknowledge that there are different interpretations, but then state your belief that all Muslims believe that Islam is "for all eternity unchangeable". The simple fact that Islam is practiced differently between sects, between geographic regions, and over time shows that such change is there whether you or they choose to acknowledge it. Your statement that "all interpretations are profoundly reactionary" is ignorant beyond belief.

The source material, the Koran and the Hadiths, are in fact fixed and unchangeable as much as you and I would wish it otherwise. To pretend otherwise is to be completely and utterly ignorant of Islam. You are welcome to delude yourself into believing that there are progressive "interpretations" of Islam. I am saying they don't exist in the real Muslim world. Where exactly are they? How exactly and in what ways are they being progressive by any sort of western standard? As for "change", it has been in the wrong direction for decades, as technology make the actual words of Islam more accessible to the masses, Islam has become more radical and more reactionary, not less.