It's view on spirit and man. Gosh, you seem to be forgetting the topic.
You need to communicate better. By no means was it clear that you made an inquiry about Genesis and its view on spirit and man.
Nope. Pure Monotheism. Once you say "who", you declare Monopolytheism. The very concept of Monotheism isn't a matter of "you're praying to the wrong name", that's bullshit. The purpose of Monotheism as a concept, is not to make a selective version of Polytheism minus other deities, it's a completely different view of God to Polytheism. It's there in the name 'monotheism'.
I suppose you mean henotheism. Like I said, if I interpret your misunderstanding correctly, inquiring about God's attributes, asking "who" He is, doesn't mean you're setting Him apart from anything / anyone else, or singling Him out from a plethora of other candidates. That is not what is meant with "who". If I ask you who you are, you could answer by giving me your name so I can call you as opposed to someone else. But if I wonder who you are, already knowing your name, I'm wondering more profound things about who you really are and what your relationship is to me, etc.
Again, these are not eyewitness accounts, nor even accounts passed down from events - they are overhearing of what the pre-Christian communities believed and practiced.
Christians. Tacitus explicitly said "Christians, as called by the populace" and "Christus, from whom the name had its origin."
What does it matter if they're eye witness accounts? You reject eye witness accounts. And most historical sources about anyone are not eye witness accounts.
They're not assumptions, your texts (four fully propped-up biographical texts with theologically-driven emphasis) are completely different to mine (billions and billions of scattered accounts of varying levels of authenticity with all kinds of chains of transmission collected from large groups of people, compiled successively into larger multi-volume collections arranged categorically, taken critically throughout history from the 8th century onwards etc).
It's not an assumption to say that what you are presenting is of a completely different nature to mine.
Except, that's not what you said. I wouldn't have disagreed if these were your assertions and I've never denied that the natures of these texts were different. You said I was unwilling to admit anything and that, unlike you, I didn't use critical methodology. Starting to make sense of this dialogue, in that you're debating partly me and partly that Christian stereotype.
Also the earliest known surviving Qur'an manuscript predates the Uthman, it wasn't 'put together at the last minute' decades later.
Which one are you talking about? The Birmingham palimpsest?
If you want to believe that, go ahead. It's a belief, not an academic fact.
Because fully-written, theologically-driven, polemical storybooks do not make for historically credible sources.
They're not to be looked at from a purely historical perspective either.
The Bible claims all kinds of strange 'miracles', use your discernment.
Qur'an is revelation, not Hadith, do you even read?
This is part of the whole distinction I'm trying to show you here but you're too dense to listen.
If you're able to read and listen as well as you'd like your opponents to decipher your often vague comments, you'd know I've been arguing in favour of discernment rather than whether scripture can be rightfully identified as God's Word. I wrote this in my last post:
"One judges the end result on its coherence and its overall relation to the common prerequisites for something to be true, just like everything else."
That we shouldn't qualify the validity of divine revelation based on whether the scripture is "from God" (since we've agreed that none of this is verifiable), was the point I tried to make all along.
As for "therefore everything that character did or claimed is true?", apply the same to yourself. We have two unverifiable supernatural claims battling eachother out in the arena.
I do apply the same to my own beliefs, beliefs that are far from static.
One is prepacked and simplistic with a smiling face (four 'gospels'), the other is really vast, catalogued, archived and controversial (Hadith).
Simplistic? Ah, so you've figured out the mysteries of the Bible, which turned out to not be so mysterious after all?
Serious scholars believe the Quran emerged during Muhammad's lifetime? Give me the names of those serious scholars, please.
Yet you tie yourself to the bible with chains around you? this is just so bloody weird.
Another assumption. Why do you assume so much? Moreover, based on what I've said in this thread, you should already have acknowledged the opposite.
Ok, so no Prophet received revelation. Now what?
Like you said. Discern whether or not a prophet has received revelation. You think I was spoonfed Christianity? I spent the first 25 years of my life as an agnostic, fathered by a Marxist, mothered by a convinced atheist and I still do not identify with a single denomination. Be patient and discern with reason. Or believe. Or meditate. Do whatever it is that creates order and peace within.
You finally get what I'm saying.
I understood this the first time. You had a problem with Christians calling the Bible the Word of God. I never called the Bible the Word of God. You were not arguing my opinions.
If there are no scriptures that are directly the word of God, then I reject all religions that make truth claims of that nature. Clearly the Bible is not this, so if I rejected the Qur'an, I would not accept the Bible, categorically. Without the Qur'an walking along the little Bible along with it's toddler hands, there would be no chance of me accepting the Abrahamic Prophets. That is just honest, and I've already said this.
There is nothing that makes the Bible itself (outside of the context of the Islamic revelation) credible. If I found evidence otherwise, then I clearly would be a Christian or Jew.
I've understood as much. Still, you make a choice between a whole set of scripture and another set of scripture. There is also the possibility that both sets of scripture contain truths and untruths. You also systematically juxtapose the Quran to the Bible. If you have paid attention, I've always distinguished between the Quran, the Torah and the Gospel. There are multiple reasons for this, which I will address later, or which you can read about
here.
There is no limits to your requirements. Of course ironically the continuity of references to similar things would likely count wouldn't it?
The limits are implicit in the definition of scripture. One can't simply choose what is or what is not divine revelation.
It just makes no sense. Several of the four "gospels" reference Isaiah and the Psalms word-for-word, stuff like that must really make you wonder about the possibility that the writers where writing intentional fiction.
There are very logical explanations for this. One, if we're talking about what Jesus said, Jesus was a student of the Torah. His mission was to convert the Jews. He could quote the Torah without problem to that effect. The gospels' authors might have known the Torah as well, so they could equally have quoted verses to reinforce fulfillment of prophecy to include the Jews (who for the most part didn't go with it) in Christian revelation. The gospels were born from a Judeo-Christian environment within a Roman setting. Gospel authors could have quoted Torah scripture in order to convert the Jews. They could also have quoted Torah scripture to show the Romans that their newfound faith (Christianity) had ancient roots. Antiquity in classical Graeco-Roman times was regarded as more authentic (Bart Ehrman's argument). I'm also of the opinion that things have been added to the gospels (I'm a Marcionite, in case you didn't yet know), and a good example of this is the comparison between Marcion's Gospel of Luke and the canonical Gospel of Luke.
Else, keeping the Qur'an as a possibility in your mind should be a must, with the risk of you completely contradicting your own reasoning.
The essence of logics is the law of non-contradiction. I accept no belief system that contains contradictions.
Nor do I, but in principle, there is nothing remarkably different to either of our posts, or a cereal box, or the harry potter books, or a spiderman comic - in comparison to Matthew mark luke or john. It's that their religious context gives the bias of thinking otherwise.
The gospels claim divine revelation. Your other examples don't. It's up to us to discern whether the claim or not is true. No one else will do it for you, even though many will try.
The Qur'an isn't his voice. I keep going over this again and again. Your texts are biographies, the Qur'an is completely different.
You don't need to repeat anything I had already understood. But you try to have the Quran compete with the Bible, while the Bible doesn't have the same position in Christianity than the Quran has in Islam. Jesus does.
I wonder the same. What is productive about claiming that a letter that a guy literally wrote to scold some churches, is the 'inspired word of god'. I find it hard to think of anything more absurd than that. Likewise for a bunch of biographical books.
Firstly, the gospels might be biographical, but they do, according to their authors,
contain the word of God.
Secondly, according to the word of God in Christianity (John 14:17), the apostles were helped by the Spirit of Truth (Paraclete). It's sort of God's protection against distortion of His Word as conveyed by His disciples. This idea exists within Islam as well (Quranic preservation), so I don't see why it's so absurd to you.
This also can't be proven externally. It requires personal experience or belief.
No, God being a personality and an individual. With whatever justification you use, turning the Creator of everything, the source of everything, into a mere guy. Nothing screams Nihilism more than that.
I have no problem with this. God, as a man, can still be the creator of everything, or the source of everything, and transcendent at the same time.
If I am a game developer and I enter my own game by creating a character, I don't stop being the game developer outside of the virtual world of the game and I don't stop being the creator of everything in that virtual world.
Don't throw my question back at me. You will have to answer it and maybe we will get somewhere.
You didn't ask a question. You made a statement.
