questions to pose in a discussion with a Muslim
OP - March 13, 2012, 10:58 AM
Hi folks,
I'll try to keep it short. I live and work in a secular, majority Muslim country. I am plain white American from a Protestant background though I am an apostate virtually from the time I could read.
Anyhow, got into a friendly debate with one of my colleagues about religion recently. I've known him a long time and he is very liberal in his Islam as well as being a super nice guy. Anyhow somehow we got to discussing religion, and I gave my agnostic point of view and he his Muslim point of view. I challenged him on his circular logic (Mohammed is a prophet because it says so in the Quran, and the Quran is the word of God because Mohammed is the prophet who received it) but didn't get very far in that angle.
We ended our discussion with him making me promise that I will look more into Islam, saying that an American friend of his converted to Islam after reading the Quran. Being a skeptic in all things, I chose to come to this site instead (I also visited a Muslim forum as well).
What I would like to know is, whether or not the argument I am going to make to him is a sound one. It is roughly as follows:
1) If God exists and has a message for us, why would he deliver it in secret to someone who never offered concrete proof of his revelation?
2) How do we know that it was not Satan disguised as an angel who gave messages to Mohammed (or Jesus or Moses)? After all, if Satan is the great deceiver, then what better way to deceive the masses of essentially good people than by giving a message, 90% of which is decent and reasonable enough to convince people of its goodness, and then making about 10% of the message likely to result in great violence and oppression and abuse, which more than outweighs the goodness of the other 90%? (Note: I personally do not believe in Satan or Hell)
3) Any reasonable person should want to see proof that something works before they purchase it. And so since the goal of Islam (and the others) is to enable souls to enter paradise, anyone who wants me to convert to their religion should be able to SHOW me the souls of their faithful dead in paradise and the souls of dead disbelievers in hell. Yes, it is an absurdity to demand such but then it seems absurd to me to risk my eternal soul on a religion which has never yet given empirical proof that it has 'saved' even a single soul.
Does this sound like a reasonable argument which is not likely to cause offense (esp. #2)? There is no risk of any trouble with the government in saying these things.
Cheers
Topic: questions to pose in a discussion with a Muslim