God really should come up with better ways of getting his message across, for an omnipotent being he seems to be really rubbish at making a clear point...
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God really should come up with better ways of getting his message across, for an omnipotent being he seems to be really rubbish at making a clear point...
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I was obviously talking about what the Qur'an says, not making a judgement on whether it's the truth or not as regards the existence or non existence of God.
Or mankind is really rubbish at understanding it, or simply isn't ready. It is a revelation after all, there's no requirement that it should or could be all understood at the same time or development of mankind.
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I'm not allowed to use that excuse in the classroom so I don't see why God should be able to do it with his (multiple) divine revelations.
I'm not allowed to use that excuse in the classroom so I don't see why God should be able to do it with his (multiple) divine revelations.
You are not God and your responsibility is for a group of individuals for a couple of years, not for all mankind for eternity.
How do you objectively know that? Do you now what the ultimate destiny of Mankind might be (assuming there is one)? Can you discern whether the scripture is relevant to that final destination? sometimes a lesson taught is not always understood until maturity, and mankind is still in its infancy.
Anyway, both yours and RDM's mind is set so it is pointless even discussing this with you as I am simply wasting time I could spend doing something productive.
Ultimately our world works be it for good or bad we survive and live on. Some say our existence alone is a miracle considering our surroundings (mostly inert rock and gas ). We are essentially star dust. To look at us it's hard to believe that's what we boil down to but it's true.
Life is an amazing thing we have something special here on earth and we shouldn't ignore it. Yes we have our bad moments in history but without experiencing sorrow we don't know what happiness is.
So how can such a long one-to-one verbal communication from god be spread 1500 years ago other than writing?
I mentioned the other method which is Chinese whispers and that simply doesn't work. One node and the story is distorted immediately. Two nodes and the story is completely different. 1500 years plus 5000000+ nodes and there wouldn't be any revelation left.
Now tell me what format do you think an all knowing god thought his revelation would be spread using? Surely he knew it would be a book because its the damned reality. It's a book lol no ifs no buts.
It is impossible to spread something without storing it first. Trying to spread something without having a stored and distortion-free point of reference (ie. a book/transcription) is illogical, insane and ultimately futile.
It's a bit like me giving out my phone number. I know you're going to write it down - it would be retarded if you didn't.. Surely god knew what he was giving out would also take the form of text.
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While I don't want to get into a conflated discussion along the lines of whether it was verbally dictated with the intention of being written down or not, I will say that Judaism spent the majority of its existence largely as an oral religion passed down from generation to generation, with very little change. So Chinese whispers aside, it can and has been done.
The point was however that the Qur'an was revealed orally to Mohammed and then orally to Mohammed's followers over a period of 23 years. There was no intent to write it down until after Mohammed died. I already stated that the relationship between the written scripture and the revealed scripture is open to debate and given the variances there is reason to believe that there is some disparity.
How do we know that? Surely we can only really judge it from when it was first written down, we would have no idea how much that has changed since the first oral telling up until that point?
Exactly, you've only to look at some of the ancient Japanese /Chinese texts and some of their critiques to gain some perspective on how much sentiment is lost iin translation and transcription over the years. The transcriber, knowingly or not, will bias the original sentiment. Times that by ten, then you've got something that bares no resemblance to the original at all.
Because the oral Torah has extensive corroborative evidence in other third party written histories as well as the application of the Oral Law being consistent through the evolution of Rabbinic Judaism. We see it also in the oral histories of Southern American, aborigine and African tribesmen, where explorers accounts Mirror that of later accounts, even centuries later.
That isn't to say that there isn't variance in the Qur'an however, most non-Muslim scholars think there is, it simply demonstrates that oral histories can be passed from generation to generation virtually intact.
This happens within a secondary system where the texts (written) are transcribed in isolation from the original unbroken text and without recourse to the direct learned repetition from an oral tradition, particularly when you translate it from its original language or even dialect. What I am saying is that often these oral histories are fastidiously and carefully taught from one individual tasked with retaining the tradition to another (an apprentice so to speak), in this it is common to see very little variance in the tradition, even over long periods of time and generations of people.
In many cases a specific unbroken mechanism of orally retained tradition is more accurate than any number of copied scripture.
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I can see some sense in that, but accuracy is a fairly finite term, if a story is verbally passed on, it will be changed, whether that's a conscious change or not.
edit: The speaker will knowingly or not, emphasise certain aspects, and the listener may interpret that in different ways, tone of voice, body language etc.
edit: The speaker will knowingly or not, emphasise certain aspects, and the listener may interpret that in different ways, tone of voice, body language etc.
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Perhaps, but in the case of many, the intonation, delivery and emphasis is highly and strictly proscribed, precisely to combat the issues you raise.
But we cannot be certain that the account of Noah and the flood in Genesis is exactly the same as when the tale was first told surely?
No, because no one was party to the conversation, (and there are two Torah, one oral, one written, both given to Moses at Sinai) but we can be pretty confident that there was very little change in the oral tradition of Judaism during the evolution up to Rabbinic Judaism. Which when discussing the objective effectiveness of oral tradition illustrates just how little it can change when the tradition is strictly regimented and controlled and contradicts the opinion of Asim.
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