h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

i read your post about islam and stuff. its cool you've noticed these things whilst like 3 billion muslims worldwide have read it and not understood a thing they read. i'm impressed by your curiosity.

i bet there is some muslim scholar out there who can make those lines peaceful. i don't know.

anyhows, all the Religious Books, that were brought down by God (if you believe in God)(by the way, it is actually possible to prove that little imps sit on your shoulder, and there is more proof that little imps sit on your shoulder, than there is of god :p) anyways where was i? God. he created the universe. because he was bored (the only reason evident). It then decided to create organic life forms, that would make him happy. think of a big game of the sims, but you know how everything will turn out in the end, yet you let the sims do what they want. so we have free will, but it will all lead to one thing anyway.

People believe God wrote those books. Okay, maybe they were genuine once upon a time, maybe, 1000s of years ago, there were no lines of anti religion destruction. however, i, and some of my friends who are in my religious and philosophical group, that there is a race of "demons" or pan dimensional beings, that god created, who envy us, because we can have material pleasure, while they are bound in the immaterial plane, where they can only interact via telepathy. unfortunately, this telepathy can travel across the dimension, where they can deal damage to us mentally (depression, anger, stress, pressure blah etc) and make us think we are like the only person alive, nobody else matters. the point is, i believe that through envy, they changed these books, among other things, to try and split us up, seen as they can't hurt us themselves, why not make us hurt each other?

anywhos, thats my explanation to why you'll find loads of horrible and weird stuff in the books. as for the muhammad (pbuh) thing. he wasn't perfect. *shrug*

Hi Sheepdog,
Thanks for your reply. It's interesting to see your viewpoint on the passages I quoted. Never heard of the pan-dimensional beings before, apart from Vroomfondel and Majikthise who created the Deep Thought computer!

I'm not attacking Islam just for the sake of it. It's just that I'm pissed off with the way the world is going, whilst acknowledging the fact that the West is at fault with this needless war in Iraq. I also have issues with Christianity and Judaism, but I haven't got around to writing about them yet.

Pardon me for asking, but your initial sentence here, about me noticing what 3 billion Muslims haven't noticed, appears a little sarcastic? It's true though, in my opinion, that truly peaceful Muslims appear to overlook these passages, as well as the fact that Muhammad, as God's final Messenger, didn't lead a perfect life.

Karl

And another thing.
I'm not certain that your and your friends' theory about the Quran (and other religious books) being corrupted by evil pan-dimensional beings would be accepted by any bona-fide religious authorities, be they Islamic, Christian, Jewish, or whatever.

It also does not make sense that (an all-powerful) God would allow his divine word to be corrupted by such evil beings without any intervention by Him! Similarly, I cannot see any sense in the suggestion, which is often made, that God's word has sometimes been misinterpreted and unintentionally corrupted by humans during the process of their writing in His religious books. If He were to allow this to happen to his teachings, this would make His works a fallacy. What use is there in us trying to distinguish the true messages of God from those that have been corrupted by humans and/or evil spirits? This leaves them wide-open to misinterpretation and will inevitably arise in conflicts over those differences in interpretation. I cannot believe, that if an all-powerful, loving God does exist, that He would allow this to happen to His messages to humanity.

It also seems to me that there are double standards at work in your interpretation. You can accept all of the loving, peaceful messages in the Quran as being the work of God, but you dismiss the other, seemingly violent, aggressive, discriminatory passages as being the work of evil spirits. That's very convenient for you. Unfortunately, Muslims in other parts of the world interpret these distasteful messages as also being the word of God.

In my opinion, you cannot divide any (supposedly divine) religious texts into parts that are truly the word of God and those that have been corrupted, be those the Quran, Christian Bible, Torah, or whatever. They must be accepted or rejected as whole, complete works. You cannot have it both ways.

Karl

yeah but you have to remember God isn't perfect, and he doesn't feel emotion. basically, he created us, because it was a brilliant idea at the time.

Hold on a minute, you're saying that God isn't perfect? Are you saying he's capable of error, just as we humans are? Why then is he better than us and why is he worthy of worship?
I think you'll find that your interpretation of God as imperfect will not be accepted by anybody of any authority in any religion, including Islam. As a matter of fact, read the excerpts of the Quran that I quoted in my posting and you'll find that your statement above could be interpreted by Muslims as blasphemous, and indeed, worthy of your execution!
I wouldn't say things like that to Islamic fundamentalists if I were you!

Karl

don't worry i'm quite capable of looking after myself.

If god was perfect, we wouldn't be here.

i think god creatd us because he wants something from us, maybe worshipping him makes him stronger (like those Terry Pratchett "Gods")

Maybe he is a demi God and in fact, there is something else out there.

i can't exactly write posts about these things my mind isn't good for me. it changes what it is thinking about every 5 minutes.

I don't understand - if God was perfect, we wouldn't be here???

Also, this demi-god business. Sounds similar to the "demi-urge" of gnostic Christian tradition to me - a spiteful, self-obsessed, and cruel spirit who is said to have created the material world, and in so doing separated humanity from the higher, true God. The trouble is, this smacks of polytheism, which is one of the reasons why the orthodox Christian church stamped out Gnosticism as heresey.

Karl