My reason for not believing in a theistic god is quite simply that there is nothing to make me believe in it.
You're not interested in an eternity of paradise? I genuinely find that odd and can't relate.
The holy books are filled with so many errors, and as well as the quran...
Examples, please.
It's also apparent in these books that the god of choice is always taking an interest in the world. Miracles and divine intervention are common place. If that happened today atheism would not exist because proof of the divine would be a regular occurrence.
Atheism has always existed. The performing of miracles never changed that. The children of Israel had so many prophets because they were quick to fall into disbelief despite all the miracles Moses was allowed to regularly perform. In the Qur'an God told Muhammad He wasn't jumping through hoops as a condition for people to belief anymore, people disbelievers throughout history would just find a way to justify why it wasn't really a miracle, etc. So your claim is a gross untruth in light of human nature having not changed a bit for aeons.
The quran, like all the other holy texts, claims to be the word of god. The way to verify this is testing it, see if it stacks up. Quite frankly it doesn't.
What are you using as the criterion of measurement?
Islam teaches that humans were created from clay.
We are CLEARLY made from clay; everything within the earth... all the minerals, vitamins and substances that make up the land and seas around us... are what we are composed of. Grab a food product at random and read the
Nutrition Facts list of what we routinely put within our bodies, and then read the list of the minerals found in a gob of black, sticky clay scooped up from the ground.
I may be thinking of another religion but I'm fairly certain it's the quran that teaches Adam was 90 feet tall.
There is nothing like that in the Qur'an. It does mention an extinct tribe of people who God said were tall, meaning presumably taller than the average Arab.
It also doesn't account for evolution, the proof of which is overwhelming.
1. Why doesn't the fossil record show the in between stages of the super slow transformation of one species into another?
2. What possible reason would such information be in the Qur'an?
Nor does it account for the number of people today who have Neanderthal DNA in them from before the Neanderthals went extinct. Everything I know to be proven fact contradicts the claims of the quran.
1. What are the claims of the Qur'an that
anything about Neanderthals would be an instant debunking of the Book? lol
2. Wouldn't the mystery of who were the people that Cain, son of Adam encountered after his banishment be explained by this Neanderthalic complaint?
The only logical conclusion I can come to is that it was a story told by ancient societies because they didn't have any answers. Adam never existed. It's not real.
From a purely scientific mindset, why wouldn't Adam be real? As you go back through history, doesn't the human population get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller? What does that imply?
The story of the arc and the great flood. This would have happened around 4000 years ago.
Where did you pull that number from?
It's quite simply impossible for the number of races, ethnicities and the huge amount of genetic traits to come from one incestuous family in just 4000 years. It cannot happen. Something else that puts a hole in the story is the amount of people who were thriving at this point. God flooded the entire world. Except for the Chinese who were developing at an incredible rate and remained unaffected from a global flood that wiped out every human on the planet. The Japanese were also unaffected. And the Africans. And the Europeans. And the Native Americans. And the Aztecs. And the South Americans. And most of the middle east. The flood never happened. It's not real.
Your argument about the Deluge is unreasonable and devoid of facts. The truth of the matter is that every people in the world have the Flood in their history of "myths" tat correspond to the exact same time period of around 10,000-12,000 years ago. A time period in which there was enough regular rainfall to erode the Great Sphinx, and in which the last of the Ice Age glaciers were still melting in century long intervals.
Mohammad splitting the moon. Now this I can't prove to be false, but I can weight it against other things. People throughout the world at this point gazed at the stars. The Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, they all had wonderful astronomers who mapped out the night sky. Certain claims by one society are matched by claims in another. Ancient Greeks for example would leave records of things they observed, shooting stars, eclipses, things that would last seconds or minutes, the same claims found with other peoples they had no contact with. Both recorded things matched by the other. So it's reasonable to assume that if Mohammad split the moon and then joined it together again, someone somewhere would have also noticed apart from a few Arabs in the desert. Maybe the rest of the world was on holiday, but I doubt it. I have to say this isn't true.
Throughout the Qur'an Allah frequently told the prophet that He was not allowing His servant to perform miracles as signs for the disbelievers, and when they asked for them, he was instructed to point to the Qur'an itself as the great miracle. The "splitting the moon" story is not worthy of serious discussion. I don't believe in it any more than you.
The sun orbits the Earth...yeah, we've known that's bullshit for a few centuries now.
What is this?
It says in the quran that in the embryo/foetus the bones are the first thing to form. "So we made the clot a morsel, so we made the morsel bones, so we clothed the bones (with) meat". This is wrong. The skeleton is actually among the last to be formed. You'd think the all knowing creator of everything would realise this. It's wrong.
The "morsel" is a clump of meat. In food terminology, reference to a "morsel" means a clump of meat. So this particular translator seems to be using 'meat' when he meant 'skin.' What's the Qur'anic address for this verse?
The stars are missiles to be hurled at jinns. Or they hunt demons. I haven't read the quran in a while so I can't remember the exact quote, but you can look it up to see exactly what it says. This is also wrong. The stars are just stars, they do the exact same thing as the star we orbit, the sun.
This is a reference to the 'shooting stars' phenomena that look like moving stars from an earthbound point of view.
Women are defective in intelligence. Coming from a culture where gender mixing is the norm and close relationships aren't looked down upon, I can tell you this isn't true from my own experience. And then there's current trends in school grades, sciences, IQ and employment performance, the fact there are women in MENSA (if you don't know MENSA is like a super genius club, only 2% of the human population globally have a high enough IQ to qualify for membership). Now we live in an age men and women have equal rights, women are on the same level and even starting to out preform men. So I'm going to say this is wrong.
"Defective in intelligence" is one way of interpreting that, I guess. I prefer to recognize that it doesn't say she is 'defective' but different in how she thinks... men and women being two different genders in the species. There's going to be situations in which she is better equipped for and vice versa.
You touched on something about islam being a religion of peace. This isn't the case. That's not to say it's a religion of violence, but that it's both. You can find justifications in the quran for living a life of peace and for living a life of violence because it isn't wholly one or the other. Your Hitler analogy was interesting. Throughout the quran there's talk about the believers, and the kaffir. It's important to note the quran makes a huge distinction. Those who aren't muslims are inferior. The quran compares non muslims as beasts of burden, on the same level as animals, and according to some preachers worse than animals. Islam must be spread by the sword, peace through slaughter and conquest.
I'm sorry, but this is always foolishness. Islam is not spread by the sword/slaughter/conquest. Arab nations/empires were spread by conquest, but religion
can't be. There is no compulsion in religion.
But then by that same token, god made us different tribes so we might know each other. So you can cherry pick. But the quran is supposed to be taken in it's entirety as the ultimate true word of god. If you don't believe this part here, why should you believe this other part over here?
Because of misunderstandings and confusion.
This and many more examples are why I'm not a muslim. or a follower of any other religion, all making the same claims, all claiming to be true, to be the word of whatever god they describe. But if something is supposed to be the wisdom of an all powerful all knowing deity who created everything, why is there so many errors? Why are they filled with what seems to be the best knowledge of the time they were written? The only conclusion I can come to is that they were not written by the god described in these holy books but by people.
The fundamental problem is that the body of sacred scripture have a very specific purpose for being on earth, none of it being a history book, or a detailed catalog of scientific inquiry. Sacred scripture's sole purpose is to instruct the believer on how to profit from the existence of the afterlife, and to warn the disbeliever of the folly of his ways. Attempting to shoehorn the Book into categories it was never meant to fit is the only real error involved within these discussions.
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