The General Religion, Mythology, and Theology Thread

Says God himself, by way of Prophet. Nothing is optional in the Qur'an, period.

The Quran sees the Bible and the Tanakh as incomplete versions of its message, correct?

edited 29th Sep '15 12:10:18 PM by SpaceWolf

And I'm saying that some people might not believe that.

Well, not quite.

Heretics.

edited 29th Sep '15 12:28:43 PM by TheHandle

Seriously?

Yes. No-one would admit them as Muslim. Ever.

Even that passage about... Bees?

Unless they're right of course, in which case God presumably would. It feels odd to me that something as subjective as religion should have such... strict categories, for lack of a better term.

Well unless god himself drops by and tells us what he meant, I guess religious books are pretty polarizing in a boolean function way

That is to say, you have the option of taking either the "A" side or the "1" side, but the other will have the exact same validity from a mathematical perspective.

My suggestion is to take the best of both and make the best out of the result. And also, send hot chicks my way.

For Science!.

edited 29th Sep '15 12:56:01 PM by Aszur

If you reject aspects of the religion you claim to be a part of, you undermine your own argument. If I were a Muslim and yet rejected parts of the Quran as incorrect, I'd be doubting the infallibility of my own religion. And if one proposes that holy scripture like the Quran is wrong, you're implicitly claiming that either a) God can be wrong, which undermines any attempt to justify your actions based on your faith or b) the Quran is not representative of God's will; an opinion that would place your beliefs in something distinctly unlike traditional Islam.

While Christian Biblical literalists would find common cause with these Islamic believers, one has to appreciate that the majority of Christians who see the Bible as allegory rather than absolute truth find them rather alarming.

If you are unable to allow for the possibility of error in your beliefs, then you are extremely dangerous.

edited 29th Sep '15 1:04:05 PM by Fighteer

I suppose someone who follows some religious tenets that are slightly different from the ones the religion formally has actually follows a different religion that is similar to, but not quite the other one.

Think of the Qur'an as a country's Constitution, except without the possibility of amendments. There's some bits that are clear, some bits that are vague; it's meant to last forever and to be used by everyone, so it gives you a lot of wiggle room, but within a very strick margin. What you can't do is ignore this or that article, phrase, or even comma. The text is the text; absolute and inalterable. [The Ummayads may have messed with it during the first compilation, but no-one is supposed to have done it since.]

Where it gets a bit more vague is, again, in the commentary of the text given by the Prophet himself. That is where you get room for picking and choosing, because there's different degrees of reliability of this or that specific report of the Prophet's words or deeds. It's a bit of the inverse of the Qur'an, because where the Qur'an is "certain but vague", sayings of he Prophet are "uncertain but clear"; he tended to be a pretty straightforward talker, but it can be hard to be sure whether he actually said this or that thing at all.

I'm not saying that it necessarily makes sense (not that the 'official' version of the faith makes much sense either...), just that's it's entirely possible for people to think like that while still identifying as Muslims.

I tend to stick to a "close enough" kind of mentality when it comes to such things. No one believes in exactly the same thing as anyone else anyway.

edited 29th Sep '15 1:12:49 PM by Corvidae

Again, no one else would accept them as such; that's the very definition of a heresy.

Once enough of them exist, people will accept them as a separate type of Muslim.

Tell you what, Ḯ'll bet you money they won't and we'll wait until it happens, how about that?

It's not like religious reformations don't happen.

But the thing is, if you break away from the established religious structure because of your disagreements with it, you're denouncing that structure as non-representative of God's will, thus keeping your own beliefs consistent. If you do nominally stay part of the established order and acknowledge it as representative of God's will, while simultaneously holding beliefs that contradict it, it just makes you a hypocrite.

but in that case the first comunity dosent like how you run things and get....violent, it happen....a lot

Fair point.

Problem is, "religious structure" is difficult to determine without a determined leader to be the chief of doctrine. And that is ripe for political and local influence as opposed to focusing on scriptures.

I mean, is that not what is at the heart of the shiite and sunni thing, that they claim Bob is the leader and the other claims Alice is the leader, and overtime, Alice and Bob hve said different things about stuff?

Even the Catholic Church which comparatively is relatively stable, is not free from political influenceby nearby political segments throughout its history, much more so if you see how segmented every religion is, really.

The thing is not to get violent over the diferences. And everyone has gotten pretty violent over them at one point in history or another.

The Liberal Muslim Movement:

"...The methodologies of liberal or progressive Islam rest on the interpretation and re-interpretation of traditional Islamic scripture (the Quran) and other texts (such as the Hadith), a process called ijtihad (see below). This can vary from the slight to the most liberal, where only the meaning of the Quran is considered to be a revelation, with its expression in words seen as the work of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in his particular time and context. As a consequence, liberal/progressive Muslims may then interpret verses from the Quran allegorically or even set them aside...

Why do you think nobody listens to them? Theirs is a doomed effort.

They exist. That's always a good start.