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Notes -
There Are No Amendments In Islam
Sarah Haider writes a compelling analysis of the odd political re/alignment you see playing out today between Christians and Muslims on social issues:
There's really nothing surprising about this alliance at the object-level. What religious Christians and Muslims believe about how society should be structured in regards to promiscuity, sexual modesty, and traditional family structures have long been near-impossible to tell apart. The overlap also bleeds into superficial similarities about isolated rural ranchers defending their traditional way of life from outside influences, while openly carrying their firearms to their places of worship (am I talking about the Taliban or...?).
Sarah is correct that the modern alliance between liberal progressives and Muslims was a marriage of convenience that took advantage of some unusual culture war circumstances, but it's a tryst that was bound to fray apart given the fundamental policy disagreements. One of the efforts to keep the bandwagon held together comes from what Sarah terms Muslims in Name Only (MINOs):
I was raised Muslim but abandoned it as an atheist a long time ago, and this passage is particularly painful for how real it is. The discordant discourse above has largely been operating in parallel and disconnected tracks. On one side you get a bevy of purportedly "Muslim" activists announcing that Islam can mean whatever you want it to mean, and actual Muslim religious scholars responding with The Fuck?:
As an atheist I have all sorts of complaints about all religions, but the attempts to rehabilitate Islam's image to better fit liberal sensibilities are pernicious for their particular dishonesty. Because one of the few good things I'll say about Islam is to praise its unusual commitment towards scriptural fidelity.
In case you didn't know, Islam was founded around 600 AD explicitly as the final entry in the Abrahamic religion trilogy. Islam was not presented as an alternative to Judaism and Christianity, rather it was heralded as the true and uncorrupted version of those creeds. According to Islamic lore, Allah (literally just the Arabic word for God) created the world and everything in it and then spent the next however many millennia trying — and implicitly failing — to convey his divine message to humans through a long succession of prophets. First man Adam was also the first prophet, and he was followed by well-known Biblical heavy-hitters like Ayyub (Job), Musa (Moses), and of course 'Isa (Jesus). The full list is unknown and unknowable but Islam assures us that every community throughout history received at least one of Allah's Verified™ messengers.
The reason Muhammad of Mecca is special in Islam is because he's Allah's final message delivery attempt. Adam was the first, and Muhammad is heralded as the "Seal of the Prophets" to underscore the finality. I won't get into exactly why god needed so many attempts to convey his message, but a common point of criticism from Muslims about past attempts (such as Christianity) is that god's message was corrupted and lost through misguided translation attempts. I say this as a Muslim apostate with no stake in the debate but the concern over the Bible's reliability seems uncontroversially true to me given the inherent limitations of translation, and the resulting myriad of competing versions. After centuries of debating whether the in John 1:1 was intended to be a definite or indefinite article from the original Greek, I can see why someone would be too traumatized by the prospect of any translation attempt.
To their credit, early Muslim scholars appear to have taken this mistranslation concern very seriously. All of Muhammad's revelations were collected over time by his followers and, after his death in 632 AD, were compiled into a single book known as the Quran. Islamic theology insists that the Quran is the literal word of Allah which means it has never been modified. Given the religious motivations at play, it's natural to be skeptical of such a claim but it does appear to be solidly supported by the archeological evidence available, with the oldest Quranic manuscripts radiocarbon dated to between 568 and 645 AD and matching what we have available. The commitment to the divine inviolability of the Quran is also reflected in the expectation that, everywhere from America to Indonesia, all practicing Muslims are required to learn and recite passages in the original Arabic. Translations of the Quran exist of course, but reluctantly so and intended solely as a study aid.
The Quran is the central commanding text, but below it are hadiths — a sporadic collection of stories, speeches, and anecdotes attributed to Muhammad and a significant source for how to live the Good Muslim Life (covering topics such as when to assalamualaikum your bros, whether cats are cool, or how to wash oneself before praying). Unlike the Quran, hadiths are not seen as direct guidance from Allah. Instead, their reliability as a guiding lodestar is obsessively assessed in proportion to their authenticity. So some hadiths will be accepted as controlling authorities because they're heavily corroborated by reliable narrators, while others get dismissed because they're fourth-hand accounts on a weird topic and with a dodgy chain of transmission.
The point is, given the obsession over the lineage of the Quran and *hadiths, *it's no surprise that Muslims today come across as especially zealous about following their deen. There's no leeway to fall back on mealy-mouthed "Living Quran" rationalizations for why only some aspects of Islam should be obeyed but not others.
Islam's etymology is about unquestioning submission to authority, purportedly only to god's authority but that's a hard demarcation to keep in mind when political and religious power is near-impossible to disentangle within Muslim countries. Its focus on the eternal afterlife for doling out rewards for devotion endowed me with a fatalistic perspective about my temporary earthly existence at a formative time where I was still grappling with immigrating to the US. My depressed ass then couldn't wait to hurry up and die — an overwhelming desire to to get it over with already so that can experience the promised happiness at last. I left Islam because it's a regressive and stifling bundle of superstitions, ill-suited to living out a fulfilling existence. In consideration of the billions today living under its penumbra, I wish it wasn't so, but that sentiment is not enough to change reality.
I'm comfortable saying that the MINOs who self-appoint themselves as the religion's modern rehabilitators are blatantly lying. If I had to guess at their motives, it probably has something to do with the fact that being a member of a religious minority is too valuable an emblem within the Progressive Stack of oppressed identities to give up completely. For Islam to be the religion least amenable to revisionism does not matter when it's put up against such an irresistible force.
They do this with Christianity, too, and they just love them some "former/ex-Evangelical/Fundamentalist" who is now out there saying "it ain't necessarily so" (sorry, Bart Ehrman, but you're the poster child for this as far as I'm concerned).
I don't know. From what I glean of liberal Christians, there's some remnant of religious belief remaining which they can't give up, but the pull of being a good liberal is too strong. Also, since Christianity is/was the dominant religion in the West, there's a lot of remaining cultural inertia about its power and influence. So if you can present yourself as "I'm a good X and the Holy Book says/doesn't say about progressive cause" that gives you some sort of authority by association.
I think it works both ways; for the liberals who have discarded religious tradition but aren't out-and-out declared atheists (they'd probably mumble something about being agnostic if pushed on it), the liberal Christians/Muslims/Jews give them that aura of authority by association, too, by coming out with "Yes, guys, you're in good with God because Godself never said nothing about contraception/polyamory/queer trans IVF babies" and propping them up that way. It's a two-way transaction: the religious liberals get the acceptance and support of the mainstream liberals, and the mainstream liberals accept them as weapons to use against the redneck knuckledraggers: "Oh, A is educated and knows the history and theology, unlike Bubba-Joe the Southern Babtist".
laughs in Catholic Er, maybe you heard about a little thing called the Reformation? Very big on this, that the True Pure Gospel Message had been corrupted and infiltrated by human interpolations and interpretations and that you had to go back to the Source. All through the history of Protestantism, there have been new denominations created over "No, we have the One True Pure version" - not to be picking on the Baptists, they just have the most accessible example for this in the Trail of Blood. 'Our church is the One True Church which survived in secret down the centuries despite the corruption and falling-away of others' (usually it's we Catholics who get it for this). The insistence about the KJV translation is just one attempt at the preservation of inerrancy, a complex topic of its own, but comparable for the necessity of adding in "in the original manuscripts" to cover this problem.
I think most of them, heart of heart don’t actually believe but don’t want to admit it to themselves. They like the trappings, the music, the friends they see at church, and the idea of helping their fellow man. It just boggles the imagination that someone could legitimately believe that the God who created the heavens and the earth says that something is wrong and you given the equivalent of a “yeah, but i want it to be okay so it is okay.” Ideals, especially ideals that you hold dear always have consequences. And to me, the absolute hallmark of a person believing a given set of propositions is whether they change their behavior in light of that.
Most people really use religion as a security blanket or insurance policy.
Many Christians, including some of the more conservative ones, do not believe that every single word of the Bible is the literal word of God. On the contrary, the letters of Paul (for example) are the word of Paul — some of which Paul himself believes to have come from God, and some of which is explicitly given as “I didn’t get this from God but it seems like common sense.”
55% of American adults believe that the bible is inerrant, so that is the most common belief, and is usually taken as pretty important—Protestants tend to have a high view of scripture, and Catholics also affirm that the scriptures are infallible, I belief. (Officially speaking, of course. That doesn't mean every layman knows every thing.)
Ah, you're referring to 1 Corinthians 7:12.
Here's the passage:
I've seen some take this as talking about Jesus' own teachings on divorce, and still affirm that Paul is infallible. Some others think that Paul is fallible in that passages, since he recognizes it as from himself, even if he's infallible in general. In any case, Paul goes on to say at the end of the same chapter:
This reads to me as that it might be defending or affirming his authority, in some sense, at least. He does so more strongly in other places. Paul says in the same book (1 Cor 14:37),
In 2 Peter, it says
So there, at least, Paul's writings were considered to be scripture.
Thank you for your explanation of 1 Corinthians 7. I’d probably respect it more if it did make a distinction between inspiration and personal best judgment, but I can see how the text supports your interpretation. Agnostically speaking, I probably shouldn’t hold it against Paul in the event that he either truly always speaks with inspiration or honestly believes that he does.
I’m having trouble squaring some of the statistics in your link with broader statistics in the USA. In particular, their survey would have it that 71% of Americans, in 2021, believed that the Bible was the inspired word of God in some sense (even if it might contain errors). But in 2021, only 63% of Americans said they were Christian.
So is the discrepancy all made up of Jews and Muslims? Are there “unaffiliated” people who nevertheless believe the Bible to be inspired by God? It would be helpful to know how the responses in the American Bible Society survey split up by stated religious affiliation, honestly.
In any case, this certainly supports the idea that a large percentage of Christians think the Bible “has no errors” (even if many say some of it is “symbolic and not literal.”) Still, as an outsider, I think I’m still most inclined to define “Christian” to mean people who believe in the divinity of Christ. I don’t think that someone who believes that Paul believed in an imminent apocalypse and writes with reference to that view is somehow “not Christian” if they still think that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead and will someday return to judge us all, for example.
To be clear, I gave two differing interpretations of 1 Corinthians 7 that could be consistent with asserting the infallibility of Paul in his letters.
As to the surveys, that's a good point. Here's another poll with a number higher than 63%, which is odd as well: https://news.gallup.com/poll/394262/fewer-bible-literal-word-god.aspx
It's less clear in the options than the American Bible Society survey, but it does have a number higher.
I wonder if these have different sampling mechanisms, and ones unrepresentative of the general public?
Pew research appears to be depending on data from here: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/religious-projections-appendix-a/ Gallup appears to be using telephone calls: https://news.gallup.com/file/poll/394616/220706ViewsofBible.pdf
American bible society also had theirs from online surveys, but its number was higher than Pew's, so it's not just surveys vs. telephone.
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