The Differences Between Jesus and Mohammed

While it's not exactly the theme of this post it is in the background:

The Appeal of Islam in a Poorly Catechized World:

Are We Losing the Apologetics War with Islam?


Islamic cultures are honor cultures, and the religion of Islam might justly be described as an honor religion. Allah is in charge and he...

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(Via .)

Did Muhammed Exist?

(subtitle: "An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins") a book by Robert Spencer. A quick review with just a couple of observations.

The author's avowed aim of subjecting Muhammed and the Quran to the same sort of rigorous analysis that Jesus and the Christian and Jewish Scriptures have been experiencing for more than a century intrigued me. Given that, as a believing Catholic Christian, a lot of this so-called analysis seems tendentious and poorly grounded in reason, I was curious to see what the author would make of Islam's founder and principle scriptures based on his survey of scholarship.

To recap the classical Muslim understanding of the events: Muhammed is called by Allah from the middle of Arabia to preach a re-purified message to everyone. His locutions are given to him by the Angel Gabriel in perfect Arabic which sayings, stories and pronouncements are gathered together a few decades after his death into the Quran as we now know it. It is perfect and complete and there are no variant versions, such as Christians deal with. And it is perfectly comprehensible.

This is roughly parallel to some Protestant systems of thought that treat the Scriptures as if they were dictated by God, word for word. While Catholicism has the highest regard for the Scriptures (Inspired and, therefore, Inerrant) it doesn't regard the authors of Scripture to be mere transcriptionists. Nor does it deny the thousands of variant versions from the ancient world.

The author aims, in part, to contrast the facile view that Mohammed, the Quran and early Islam happened in the "clear light of history" with his view that, in fact, we know very little about any of them and have little reliable information to base any firm conclusions on.

I was particularly struck by the author's dismissive attitude towards oral tradition, comparing it to the children's game of telephone. First of all, scholars have been and are continuing to study oral tradition in relation to history. In cultures where oral tradition predominates, such as First Century Judea, it can be a highly developed system for reliably transmitting information from one generation to the next. If scholars were to turn their attention to the first three centuries of Islam and study the oral transmission they might come to more meaningful conclusions than the author. The Quran, the biography of Mohammed and the Hadith might all be analyzed in a sober manner. From these studies we could then talk about what we can and can't know about early Islam, its Scripture and it's founder.

Alas, the threats of violence will probably keep most scholars away from any such project. At least for raising these issues, albeit in a flawed manner, the author deserves credit.

Logical Inconsistency

is a common human condition. We are apt to entertain two quite inconsistent ideas without ever realizing it. Do read the entire article below for an illuminating exploration of one such situation, involving a brilliant man. Intelligence is guarantor of consistency it seems:

The Delusions of Liberal Humanism:

The link between intelligence and correct interpretation of reality is unfortunately weak. That is one of the reason why someone like cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker can be very smart and yet be consistently wrong. Pinker champions his latest wrong idea in his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: the Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes, which posits that humans are evolving to become less violent.

The fact that you can publish a book making a claim so easily debunked by both empirical evidence and common sense says a lot about the publishing industry. But the idea that Pinker believes it to to be true—and so many people are willing to entertain the notion—says even more about the delusions of liberal humanism. As philosopher John Grey says in his devastating review,

The idea that a new world can be constructed through the rational application of force is peculiarly modern, animating ideas of revolutionary war and pedagogic terror that feature in an influential tradition of radical Enlightenment thinking. Downplaying this tradition is extremely important for Pinker. Along with liberal humanists everywhere, he regards the core of the Enlightenment as a commitment to rationality. The fact that prominent Enlightenment figures have favoured violence as an instrument of social transformation is—to put it mildly—inconvenient.

There is a deeper difficulty. Like so many contemporary evangelists for humanism, Pinker takes for granted that science endorses an Enlightenment account of human reason. Since science is a human creation, how could humans not be rational? Surely science and humanism are one and the same. Actually it’s extremely curious—though entirely typical of current thinking—that science should be linked with humanism in this way. A method of inquiry rather than a settled view of the world, there can be no guarantee that science will vindicate Enlightenment ideals of human rationality. Science could just as well end up showing them to be unrealisable.

Read more . . .

Read the whole thing.

(Via First Thoughts.)

More Evidence

that the MSM is heavily filtering the news to promote their world-view:

:

I did not know this stuff....

...which, apparently, is the point of the news media's practice of suppressing news reports about leftist violence:

While the media is all over the recent bombing attempt in Times Square, they quickly swept the 2008 bombing of the Times Square military recruiting station under the rug. The hometown New York Times relegated the terror attack to regional news, even

Read the whole thing.

(Via Lex Communis.)