You are viewing a single comment's thread from:

RE: Omega Point: The Meaning of Life

in #spirituality8 years ago (edited)

The line of argument you're employing, is a common one among evolutionists, and indeed, googling it reveals your own argument to be one of the more prevalent forms.

Unguided evolution has been around long enough for its apologists to have plausible stock answers for every argument.

Still not buying it.

The authors of the Qur'an describe an event wherein Muhammad pointed to the Moon and it split in half, the halves then rejoining by his command. You are not convinced by this, not because of a comparative shallowness of Islamic apologetics but because of the "gut feeling of truth" you get from whatever you were raised from a young age to believe in. That feeling is the same one which convinces a Hindu, a Mormon or a Buddhist that those respective religions are true.

No, I don't evaluate their claims first, I evaluate their credibility. If they are credible, then their claims are interesting to me.

More than half the Quran is abrogated - that's where Muhammad changed his earlier message from Allah to something that contradicted it. Not good for a perfect book that exists in perfect form in heaven. Muhammad claims that the Scriptures are corrupted and changes every story to make decedents of Ishmael the protagonist instead of decedents of Isaac. It is clear from the Dead Sea Scrolls that those scriptures were not corrupted dating back 900 years before Muhammad. End of story.

Joseph Smith lost credibility many ways but the two slam dunks are these:

(1) As he explains in the first preface to the Book of Mormon, someone stole his original translation of a big chunk of the "golden plates" and he couldn't/wouldn't simply retranslate them ... presumably because there was no other copy except in his memory which if not able to match the stolen text perfectly, should they emerge, would prove that he had no golden plates.

(2) He grabbed an opportunity to translate a book of Egyptian hieroglyphics into the "Book of Abraham" full of racist teachings. Later, Archeologists used the Rosetta stone to translate it and found it to be the "Book of Breathings" a burial manual.
End of story.

On the other hand, the Bible collects tons of evidence from many sources that Jesus performed thousands of miracles every day in front of large crowds. These crowds became his followers and were present in Christian communities all around the mediterranean in the first generation.

Joseph and Muhammad and their followers used their "revelations" to claim earthy power, wealth and glory. Jesus and His followers did not.

There is no comparison.