I'm not going to begrudge anyone the schadenfreude of watching the other tribe beclowning themselves, and this is absolutely fucking hilarious for anyone with a functioning sense of humour even if they are basically pro-Ukraine and pro-Trudeau, but I don't think this means very much.
Like with the blackface it matters only because we all know the Liberals would be calling for nuking the CPC from space if they even approached anything like this.
And it wouldn't be seen as an honest mistake but a reflection of real issues within the party (it clearly is a reflection of credulity on the part of Liberals since, as you say, this shouldn't have even passed the sniff test but good luck getting that standard applied equally)
But it's the Liberals so they'll get a pass , like the time they did both a misinformation and a stoking stochastic terrorism while pushing for ever greater censorship and control to fight such things.
Wait, does that mean that they would accept the untranslated versions?
No. This is a polemic tracing its way directly to Mohammed. He claimed he was prophesied in the Torah and Gospel (a common sort of claim for an upstart) and he just...wasn't. The Qur'an cannot be wrong, so the solution for him was to claim it was corrupted. The Qur'anic phrasing usually implies mistranslation or lying - it says people cover up the truth or lie with their mouths, not that the books were lost. It's a more extreme version of the polemics of some early Christians about Jews hiding prophecies of Jesus. God has a sense of humor.
But Muslims eventually* realized that what Christians especially believed about the Gospel was utterly incompatible with their own (the Qur'an seems to believe it was a Qur'an-like book given to Jesus that commanded his followers to fight and die) and so they insisted that it was utterly, totally lost. Meanwhile the Torah was conveniently corrupted enough to eliminate the references to Mohammed.
This also led to a polemic that Islam was so much better because it was perfectly preserved. Not actually true but Islam does have earlier witnesses of the Qur'an compared to say...the Bible and they're remarkably similar to what we have, even though there's still variants due to the consonantal text. Muslims reacted really badly to even one Islamic scholar pointing out "holes in the narrative". It's a deeply emotional issue, a pillar they take for granted.
Muslims instrumentally use critical scholarship to point to things like the Documentary Hypothesis that they think backs their view of corruption. But they will never take the conclusions to their natural end. Conclusions like:
-
Yes, things like the Exodus and Patriarchs are inherently historically dubious and part of works that show clear artifice. Given the Qur'an copies them...
-
Yes, even though that is the case we actually have a very reasonable view of what the Bible says over centuries, even if it isn't historically credible and there's no "Muslim Gospel of Jesus" or missing links in the Torah - it's an apologetic construction. We have a general idea of when books were compiled and we certainly have a lot of witnesses and variants that help us try to figure out what was meant (unlike the Qur'an where the "bad" manuscripts were all burned by Caliphal fiat).
-
There's no "'goldilocks zone" where we accept all we've learned about corruption but also the Bible is corrupted in these exact ways that're helpful for Islam but also substantially true in the telling of its legends that we know from critical scholarship are dubious.
tl;dr: Textual criticism for Muslims is a train: they reach their station (Bible is corrupted and they took out the references to Mohammed) and get off. No amount of showing them ancient copies of Deuteronomy that match what we have now will change their minds. They're right for the wrong reasons.
* The Bible probably wasn't translated into Arabic in Mohammed's time. In fact: a lot of the stories people think the Qur'an got from the Bible actually came from Syriac Christian apocryphal versions that likely would have been spread orally in the region. Most obviously Jesus' miracle of breathing life into the clay birds - not Biblical, but from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.
I think that the distrust of experts on this site goes way too far. 99% of the topics experts agree on or are on places like Wikipedia are true. If you look up something like the Central Limit Theorem on Wikipedia the answer will be more or less correct. But most things are boring. The ideas we focus on that are controversial and we don't trust them on are ones that cause the experts to lose their minds over and lose the ability to be impartial. Some examples are HBD and Covid. But if you open up a biology textbook, you can take most of that knowledge to the bank.
Using your own examples: in 2020 it would have just been HBD. Now it's "HBD...and a global pandemic". Am I supposed to be relieved that they can still be rational about stellar mechanics and calculus but not an actual global health emergency? If I had told you ahead of time that we can't trust the experts on an upcoming pandemic, would you see me as going too far?
And I bet, a decade ago, there would be no controversy over the sex binary. Now I'm seeing publications like SciAm flirt with nonsense on this topic.
Who said this is a fixed situation? Polarization is driving this behavior and polarization begets polarization. If you see that as the underlying issue there's little to be sanguine about.
Also, what about the second-order consequences of irrationality? Let's grant HBD is true for the sake of argument. If you cannot be rational about this it'll cascade into everything: your views on schooling, diversity, the causes of poverty, how to handle the Third World, how to handle crime, interpreting history, immigration...All of these are then suspect.
I don't think this is hypothetical, I think a lot of the derangement and ludicrous (like, actually dangerous to lives and entire localities) policy and absurd expert advice we're seeing across a huge number of fronts is due to exactly this sort of cascade of irrationality.
I'm not smart enough to tell when something is just a harmless little carveout from rationality. I'm not smart enough to know some of the consequences of these beliefs in the moment (many of the current irrationalities du jour like gender ideology were uncritically supported by my past self). I imagine many people aren't. Which is probably what alarms them when they can tell someone with authority is being irrational (especially in a partisan way). What about when they can't tell?
People have really summed up the issue with the guy; he really does sound like he's playing Paradox grand strategy games with actual grand strategy.
With Nixon and Monroe firmly in hand, we can now move into application. Let us start with our great power rival, China, and the jewel of their near-abroad, Taiwan. We have operated in strategic ambiguity with regard to Taiwan for far too long. I will move to strategic clarity, by which I mean that China must understand that I will defend American interests in Taiwan. If Taiwan wants any partnership in their defense, then they will need to raise their defense spending and military readiness to acceptable levels. Meanwhile, I will commit to making sure Taiwan has the weapons they need for that defense, both from a sea-borne invasion, and in future, for a long-term insurgency against any occupying foreign force, if needed.
Vivek has publicly said that he's going to tell China "we'll defend Taiwan until we get semiconductor independence". Which...I guess everyone is supposed to take well?
Can we consider one potential consequence of telling Taiwan that the US will defend them right now (against an enemy that continually states it'll declare war if Taiwan ever tries for independence) while also promising to throw them under the bus as soon as the US is sufficiently diversified?
In Paradox-land, only the player has agency so it isn't that big a deal. People are less cooperative.
Pulling from an old post:
The BBC did do that ridiculous piece on a "typical" family in Roman Britain with a black Roman centurion. Which also permanently dinged my respect for Mary Beard when she lent it her name in defense
Then we have Stephen Moffat basically admitting to lying as a social engineering tactic. He's probably the most prominent person on the fiction side and apparently has first dibs on major British IP (Sherlock, Doctor Who, Jekyll, Dracula...) on that channel:
Moffat even talks about the idea he mentions above — the excuse of “historical accuracy” that some people often give to justify an all-white cast — “[W]e’ve kind of got to tell a lie: we’ll go back into history and there will be black people where, historically, there wouldn’t have been, and we won’t dwell on that. We’ll say, ‘To hell with it, this is the imaginary, better version of the world. By believing in it, we’ll summon it forth.’”
It's past suspicious for me at this point.
I usually blame the US for everything wrong in the world but it may just be London's impact: half of Black Britons cluster in that area. People working there may just be exposed to disproportionate amounts of black people and react by doing stuff like this.
Celebs, boundaries and emotional abuse
So two stories have popped up around the same topic recently: how much men have the right to complain about or police their women's public behavior.
First off: recent mother Keke Palmer finally got to go out and enjoy herself, and her outing involved being serenaded by R&B star and notorious hound Usher Raymond. Her "baby daddy" decided to come out and complain that: "A man of the family doesn’t want the wife & mother to his kids to showcase booty cheeks to please others".
Well, that didn't go well. The feminist-aligned internet tore into him and he appeared to have been promptly dumped and, insult to injury, merch clowning him is now being sold
At the same time, "toxic masculinity" has a white representative to balance it out: Jonah Hill is now being attacked for being a misogynistic narcissist. Soon after the birth of his child, his ex decided to post texts showing his demand that she stops sexy photo shoots or overly close relationships with men or hanging out with women from her "wild past"
Hill is also facing a backlash from the DM women for "emotionally abusing" his ex via his boundaries and non-negotiables and his exploiting of "therapyspeak" to sanctify controlling behavior.
In both stories both men are excoriated for hypocrisy because these women behaved this way when they met, and expecting them to change (including after childbirth) is inconsistency.
So, what culture war implications to take from this?
-
Keke Palmer's boyfriend had a very standard male reaction, regardless of charges of hypocrisy. Making it public that way was unwise, especially since he was the comparative minnow in the status competition. Times have changed. Maybe men like that should reconcile themselves to playing the role of the honorable wife who conveniently never sees any of these shenanigans, for everyone's sake. Of course, that would suggest some more restraint on Palmer's part...
-
The situation is reversed with Hill. He has the status. Which I suspect is a significant part of the motive to release it now and draw in Deuxmoi-reading women to help win a battle that she couldn't have won in the relationship. As many people asked: why did she put up with his absurd demands (asking her to not post risque surfing photos when he met her through them) for any time whatsoever? Well, because he was Jonah Hill, presumably.
-
No pretense to even wrestle with why men don't want the mother of their kids publicly on display. Just near-total lack of care.
-
Obviously the concept creep on abuse continues.
-
Is the celebrity (and wannabe celebrity) class just going to litigate every relationship online now for fans and political affinity group points...forever? The Hill thing happened a while ago and now it's supposed to be a thing? I suspect part of the push to call some of this "abuse" is precisely that there's a realization that no one should care about messy personal business. I assume the word game is retarding us coming to the conclusion one should in a panopticon: to stop caring. I wonder how long it'll hold.
Right above it the report gives examples of staged or PR photos as a separate, but also bad, categories. If that's what they meant it was already covered.
Also,in my experience with Canadian ads, mixed race couples (especially with black people, who should be of much less relevance here) are very over-represented. I don't really see how it can be a coincidence at this point and not a result of the exact sentiment I'm seeing here, even if it isn't as badly or explicitly put. I think they just said the quiet part out loud this time.
Plenty of Americans describe themselves as "Irish" or "German" or whatever without trying to imply they are less American.
It should go without saying but: She didn't call herself Somali. She gave a speech advocating for Somali interests and called herself Somali.
Fair to say that's a different thing from half-Indian Jay highlighting his heritage at the icebreaker.
despite obviously having a female lead.
Nobody has a problem with "a female lead". Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley were anchoring movies before I was born. Nobody had a problem with Black Widow. Nobody was annoyed by the original Charlie's Angels movies, even if they hated the recent woke abomination
I would say the problem of "wokeness" is beyond that now. Things like Rachel Zegler's comments on Snow White or the replacing of the dwarves had nothing to do with the mere presence of women in a fairy tale about a woman. It often just feels hostile to the existing IPs, general beloved tropes and stories and even the legacy audience (which matters since they drive hype)
That sort of wokeness applies in two ways here: Brie Larson is seen in a similar light as Zegler by the sorts of males who love this shit and (more importantly) the original movie was "woke" in the sense that Larson's character was so bland (most of her struggle being essentially against social forces telling her she's not good, fitting wokeness) that there's nothing to be loyal to. Middle class people will go watch that movie when they're told it's The First , and it's right before Endgame. But they don't love the character the way people love Stark or even Black Widow and so they have no reason to stick with her when the MCU's brand is collapsing.
Besides that, the problems are:
- This "phase" is dead so there's nothing to be excited for. Between Ant-Man fumbling Kang and Johnathan Majors allegedly beating women right around the time two movies of him being an intimidating boxer were in theaters it's clearly going to have to be rejiggered. So what's there to be excited about?
- Too much Disney+ material fatigues people.
- Audiences know they can get mediocre Marvel movies on Disney+ eventually, especially since they're no longer event movies due to the first two points.
- Feige clearly seems stretched thin by all that extra material he needs to produce, and Marvel's ad hoc style (decide after we film) apparently doesn't work if someone doesn't have their hands around everything.
Tying themselves to THAT brand is actually likely to hurt their 'cred' (such as it exists) with any liberals who might have been swayed by their moves towards increased inclusion
They never cared. The whole idea that Bud Light was the victim of fence sitting was simply cope to avoid admitting that conservatives got a rare (ultimately meaningless) cultural victory.
If they actually wanted to save Bud Light there would have been some sort of effort (before it allegedly betrayed them). They just wanted to laugh at conservatives futilely burning Keurigs again and then they wanted to not be laughed for being wrong at so they tried to spin the narrative.
Bud Light never got that audience and it's debatable if it was ever close (or a potential replacement for the one they lost) and not just the sorts of things people like the hapless marketing executive are just trained to say and think is good because of their milieu.
Most of the time I think what happens is conservatives just grit their teeth and keep watching/buying, the media praises the company and bequeaths it free advertising and the company gets to take a victory lap at how successful "inclusion" is. But Bud Light isn't Disney, it's relatively easy to swap. So here we are.
First we have Rome
I almost mentally checked out, like I do when Rome is mentioned when discussing this. It's really more just reiterating old mythmaking rather than anything else: Westerners say they're like Romans so feel compelled to draw policy conclusions from Rome.
We have almost nothing to learn from a predominantly agrarian society whose main expense was the military in a time with much weaker state capacity and connection between various residents in a pre-nationalist age on assimilation.
There are so many differences I don't even want to start (not least that there is a difference between conquering a people that live in a cultural region you share and giving them broad latitude and importing a disembedded class that keeps a connection with the conservative and reactionary elements of its culture)
We absolutely don't and don't want to live in the world of Rome. We're going to live in it even less as automation continues.
From this perspective, Muslim Empires were tolerant, while modern-day Muslim states lack toleration.
Meh, I also dislike this "Muslims did tolerance, it's just the modern ones that're bad".
They were tolerant by medieval standards, before the concept of the modern state, the nation-state and the idea of universal citizenship. What of it?
Dhimmi were still second class citizens. Or rather: Muslims were the real citizens and others paid to be residents. And faced significant limitations on them that arguably explained their eventual "assimilation" (something very difficult against Abrahamic faiths): some places would need approval to rebuild churches (guess how this can be abused). Muslims could marry up to 4 Christian women and hold an infinite amount of them as sex slaves. Christians could not marry Muslim women or take them as slaves. All kids were Muslim by default btw.
In that light, the "impressive" task of assimilating Christians seems less impressive. It has Great Replacement vibes more than anything.
You yourself note that this is a word game: nobody would consider this tolerant by modern standards. Imagine if Europeans tried to implement a system where Muslims could never be citizens until they converted and had to pay a poll tax? It might be better than what happened to the Moriscos but that's no standard.
As for modern Muslims being more intolerant: well, arguably modern Christians were also more intolerant (they certainly nearly wrecked their entire continent) before they burned it out of their system and decided on secularism.
Why? Increased state capacity + the washing away of old arrangements - in this case the modern nation + democracy means you have to treat all those People of the Book better which...well.... States now have way more ability to fuck around in local conditions so they do. When people actually get power in a democracy, they don't want to share it with minorities they distrust so they don't (more likely they just don't have a democracy at all, in these places)
If the fruits of modernity - greater connection, greater responsiveness, greater government capacity, greater importance of thoughts as opposed to muscle power - all cause problems for assimilation (or make the lack of assimilation* more important) old Islamic empires are an actual anti-model: we know it wouldn't work so why bother?
* It may simply have always been low except from the 10,000ft view.
See, this is why center-left people don't feel like allying with the right, despite our increasing frustration with the regressive far-left
If the center left had proven even vaguely able to resist this sort of thing, the Right would also find them to be a more attractive option than tit for tat. Or would not have needed to get involved at all.
People like Rufo & DeSantis exist because attempting to appeal to universal principles or allowing the academy to police itself has utterly failed. A lot of this stuff (especially in America, in the UK the Tories take a lot of blame since they were in power) happened under their eye. They not only refused to do anything about it, they often attacked both right and left critiques of it.
And then, when someone goes "too far" in response, they lament that there's no partner for common sense and sanity and they definitely would have done something if not for those crazies who made it too tense to get involved.
Yeah, uh-huh.
Tanista
4mo ago
Concurring with Nate Silver that the whole thing was an embarrassment and the time it took means Harvard still looks awful despite doing the thing
Tanista
6mo ago
You'd think being a very immigration friendly nation would prevent blood and soil rhetoric like:
"It is the legitimacy of the non-Indigenous occupation in this country that requires recognition, not the other way around."
But apparently not for all groups. I guess the brown "occupiers" just stay out of this stuff?
House was meant to be an asshole (with some reasons for being a dick, but still basically even in his days of full health, being an asshole). Maybe as a deliberate contrast to all the TV medical shows where the doctors are caring, devoted, wonderworkers?
It wasn't specific to medical dramas, a lot of media had that "quirky genius gets to be a dick" trope. If anything it was more popular in police procedurals (with the whole "consultant who gets to break all of the rules" gimmick). Though House itself was influenced by Sherlock and maybe the genre it spawned.
I remember reading Why We Love Sociopaths as a teen precisely because I liked shows like House. I think it captured something real, even if the specific diagnosis was wrong: House was the product of the triumph of narcissism + the Golden Age of TV and its focus on anti-social types.
House clearly fits the mold of the asshole-genius from that genre.
It's understandable: it feeds people's fantasies of being special (which we're all supposed to be) but, of course, House also has to be tortured to provide some sense of cosmic balance. Multiple times in the early series there's a legitimate discussion of "could House be as good if he wasn't miserable/a drug addict?" (this is a common talking point of extreme narcissist Kanye West, for example: "name one genius that ain't crazy")
That's the deal: we live vicariously through them, they get punished in the end and we are doubly sated.
I think David Chase was quite right in his diagnosis for why The Sopranos ending was badly received. It was blue balls for cosmic justice, he broke forming genre conventions:
There was so much more to say than could have been conveyed by an image of Tony facedown in a bowl of onion rings with a bullet in his head. Or, on the other side, taking over the New York mob. The way I see it is that Tony Soprano had been people’s alter ego. They had gleefully watched him rob, kill, pillage, lie, and cheat. They had cheered him on. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted ”justice.” They wanted to see his brains splattered on the wall. I thought that was disgusting, frankly. But these people have always wanted blood. Maybe they would have been happy if Tony had killed twelve other people. Or twenty-five people. Or, who knows, if he had blown up Penn Station. The pathetic thing — to me — was how much they wanted his blood, after cheering him on for eight years.
Honestly, I don't think the moment for narcissists has ended. It's just that you can't have white males like House pushing unPC takes and "punching down" - his treatment of Cuddy, his boss, was funny, but, post #MeToo, it does look very different . But I think the underlying desire isn't gone.
Nowadays you'd probably be more likely to see a less overtly grandiose minority narcissist claiming the mantle of victim while behaving like an asshole (e.g. characters like She-Hulk). Or maybe a more gelded white male that has similar characteristics but stays on the right side of the "line" (which is of course less fun).
I don’t know anything about Islam but a fairly similar phenomenon exists in Christianity. I don’t think progressive Christians are lying.
As an exmoose like @ymeskhout I am willing to give the absolutely ignorant "cultural Muslims" who literally know nothing a pass but many of the more educated types I'd say are lying or at least misleading via omission.
There's one every common example that drives me crazy: anyone who knows anything about Islam and says, in a debate with the broadly Protestant audience in the Anglosphere, "that's not in the Qur'an" is lying. Whether they set out to be malicious or not, they're exploiting the sola scriptura assumptions of their audience (it's very easy to assume Islam is the same because of its elevated view of the Qur'an, but the Five Pillars are literally impossible without the Hadith) to mislead and soothe their audience. This is especially liable to go unpunished on panel shows that don't have the time to drill into Islamic jurisprudence and the Legends EU-like hierarchy of sources.
There's no way to understand basics of Islam without understanding why this is misleading.
I've seen this on both sides. I've seen crypto-conservatives do it to defend against New Atheists, and I've especially seen progressives do it. And, imo, anyone that does this without explaining that the "Sunni" in "Sunni Muslim" that makes up 90% of the Islamic world literally means "one who follows the Sunnah, the ways of the Prophet" mainly found outside the Qur'an is a liar.
Tanista
4mo ago
Maybe America could do with a general taboo against the display of all flags except the US flag?
I recall the debate over Tlalib's Palestinian flag (and comparisons to a Congressman showing up in his IDF uniform) and it all seems like a - somewhat distasteful - hassle.
Tanista
8mo ago
In the UK, a 19 y/o was found guilty of a hate crime for quoting a rap lyric containing the n-word on her instagram page.
I thought the absurd US incoherency around "the N Word" (where a teenager's life can be ruined because we have to pretend she learned the word from her racist grandpappy rather than the radio) was the worst it could get.
US ridiculousness + European free speech norms though...
Personally, my preferred solution would be to limit or remove the circumstances where individual identity matters at all. For instance, my preferred solution to the pronoun issue would just be to remove gendered pronouns completely; in languages like Hungarian or Turkish for example, they don’t exist and people communicate just fine, while romance languages go further than English and have almost every single noun and adjective be gendered. Obviously this is not always practical but the general goal should be towards less identity politics, not more.
Reshaping the entire English language in order to deal with a novel form of identity politics doesn't seem as practical as simply refusing to recognize that novel form of idpol at all. It seems to create a pretty bad set of incentives.
It seems to me that "less idpol" means not chasing after the compromise point between the status quo and whatever new idpol (including the ludicrous notion that a man imprisoned in a prison with men - I assume you want to keep it this way - is somehow so not-a-man that we need to play this pretend game of eliminating gender distinctions...while maintaining the central distinction that keeps them in that jail in the first place) has now been spun up.
My answer: Human already pretty much have the technology to kill all humans, between nuclear and biological weapons. Even if we can perfectly align superhuman AIs, they will end up working for governments and militaries and enhancing those killing capacities even further. Killing all humans is pretty close to being a solved problem, and all that's missing is a malignant AI (or a malignant human controlling an aligned AI) to pull the trigger.
Yeah, I'm not sure why the Skynet-like totally autonomous murder AI eats up so much of the discussion.
IIRC the original "Butlerian Jihad" concept was fear of how humans would use AI against other humans (the Star War against Omnius and an independent machine polity seems to be a Brian Herbert thing).
The idea of a Chinese-controlled AI incrementally improving murder capacities while working with the government seems like a much better tactical position from which to plant the seeds of AI fear from than using another speculative technology and what's widely considered a scifi trope to make the case.
China is already pretty far down the road of "can kill humanity" and people are already primed to be concerned about their tech. Much more grounded issue than nanomachines.
You're not owning anyone, you're just marginalizing yourselves, and ceding the entire institution to your rivals. It's not a gain.
The rivals were already calling shots in the institution. The two-mothers, non-binary woman ad came from inside the house.
By your own account police departments are red-triber enclaves. But I think blue states made their displeasure felt after George Floyd and other such incidents. Budgets were cut, people were made uncomfortable enough that older cohorts took retirement...
The reason "DEI" has taken over as a general online-conservative curse-word is cause it allows them to express the insight that not all institutions need to be taken over from the bottom-up.
It's the same in Africa that it is in America, where I have friends that tell me racism has increased in the past twenty years despite anti Black racism being in quite obvious decline.
I (African immigrant to Canada) just had a totally surreal conversation with my sister (also immigrated to US but was born there and moved back as a child) about how the US sucks to live and racism is everywhere. Miami is apparently horrible cause DeSantis, the cops constantly bother you for being black and you might die. Keep in mind: this is the child of an African migrant who came to the US as part of a diplomatic mission making upper-middle class money.
I didn't even know where to begin. She has an alternate cultural heritage (African parents are...skeptical of black American narratives*), if she got this big a dose of it I can only imagine what others are getting.
* It's very amusing to watch them talk around it - "she started following...those people. And you know how they can be".
Tanista
9mo ago
After the 2016 election it was clear to me that everyone on that staff other than Silver was determined to atone for why they didn’t do more to stop Trump.
We really should keep a tally of how many organizations Trump ruined.
He might end up owning the libs purely via an immune system overreaction.
As an exmoose myself, I think this is an ironic thing in Islam because, despite how much Islamic apologists hammer on this, Islam is paradoxically destroyed by this more than Christianity is.
For one: the Qur'an almost never indisputably says that the Torah and Gospel are lost. It often means that the book was covered up or misinterpreted (Gabriel Reynolds has some work on this). It does however say that Jews and Christians should judge by those books (e.g. Q5:47, Q5:68). Which implies they're extant. The doctrine of total corruption was a later necessary apologetic tactic once it was absolutely clear to everyone (there probably wasn't a written Arabic Bible to compare in Mohammed's time) that the Bible and Qur'an couldn't be reconciled (see Q7:157).
So either way, Islam is false. The Quran is the direct speech - not word - of God. And it tells Christians and Jews to either judge by a book that doesn't or never existed (the Qur'an doesn't seem to know what the Gospel is, or much about Jesus) or Christians and Jews should judge by a book that disprove Islam and/or is false.
Beyond that, the Bible is unquestionably unreliable in a dozen ways. The problem is that biblical scholarship ends up harming Islam more. We know the sources for the Qur'an and we know the ages at least of the Biblical stories. One is vastly older and more apocryphal (the story of the snake in the Garden in Islam descends from a later apocryphal story - a lot of Muslims who're ignorant of the specifics of the Bible blissfully cite similarities as proof of their faith, not knowing things like this).
As I said Muslims don't have access to the hermaneutical tactics liberal Christians have used. There's no blaming it on imperfect human messengers distorting God's message or the mores of the day that must naturally show up in any text or in the inherent, deliberate multiplicity in the viewpoints like with the Gospels. The Qur'an is said by doctrine to literally be pre-existent, an atemporal divine attribute, and to sit in heaven. It can't be gainsaid or reformed. This makes its pronouncements strong but it also makes them brittle.
Once you apply critical methods to the Qur'an (an easy trap to fall into once you see Muslims applying it to defeat the Bible) and come to the conclusion that Dhul-Qarnayn is merely the Arabized version of the Alexander Legend common at the time...there's no saving anything.
Pull on any one string...
More options
Context Copy link