The Life of Muhammad

You were indoctrinated with your own beliefs regarding religion.

By who?

No Odai, I certainly wasn't indoctrinated. My opinions have been formed by myself, based on consideration of ALL of the religious premises.

You are set in your own ways.

I am not at all set in my ways. You forget, I am not a youngster like you. Throughout my adult life my views have changed. I have had no difficulty changing my opinion over the years after contemplation. Unlike you of course, who was fed the Islamic faith since you were knee high to a grasshopper with minimal if any of the other concepts.

For example, your clear rejection of logical evidence repeatedly, with no sound arguments. That is so typical of someone totally set in their ways.

A fascinating opinion. But actually you haven't presented any plausible evidence. Only claims form biased interpretations.  

Logical evidence you say... well what do you think an agnostic, unbiased professor would say to your so called evidence. I know, do you?

The sources I've linked to however, don't have ulterior motives. Their only motives being to inform people about what they perceive (correctly) to be miracles in the Qur'an.

Of course they do Odai, of course they do. They are totally biased, they are members of the Islamic faith. You are relying on translations that are known to be problematic.

An Arabic word may have a range of different meanings depending on the context, making an accurate translation extremely difficult. What you end up with is a biased interpretation that says exactly what the interpreter wants it to say.

Thats enough for me, for now, my back feels like its been hit with a baseball bat.  

I have nothing against your religion and have no wish to belittle your beliefs, but by the same token I don’t favor your religion either. I merely look at the evidence that the Quran came from god, as an impartial observer, and find I have no alternative but to reject those claims.

I think you will find that everybody else on the forum rejects your evidence as well, as would everyone else in society who hasn’t been indoctrinated in favor of Islam.

Christians have made similar claims, that there are hidden codes within the bible, messages from god. However, when these claims are studied by experts, they are shown to be fallacious.

There’s a fascinating frailty of the human mind that psychologists know all about, they call it “argument for makers”.  We live at the boundary of what is known and unknown in the universe; we are uncomfortable with not knowing so we assume divinity. We instantly jump from an abject state of ignorance to an abject state of certainty. That’s all I see in your claims for “evidence”, a biased translation of a text that’s notoriously difficult to translate. Individually, the follower is quick to adopt such notions due to childhood pressure and psychological factors.

In essence, the human perception system is rife with all kinds of ways of “getting it wrong”, hence the need for “real” unbiased evidence. Not a person of the Islamic faith, interpreting a difficult to interpret Islamic text, in a way that would be favorable to others of the Islamic faith.

We are poor data taking devices, that’s why we need science.

To be clear, I’m not saying definitively that the Quran wasn’t the work of god; to do that would be impossible. I’m saying that thus far, the evidence you provide does not satisfy the standard of evidence that any scientist would require.

In regard to your comments on indoctrination, I respectfully disagree, as do psychologists, philosophers and those struggling to shake off indoctrination of all kinds. History clearly demonstrates your view to be wrong.

The underlying theme seems to be your view that religious indoctrination is not an issue and easily overcome by the adult mind, easily shaken off as if it’s a trivial matter.

Well firstly, it can hardly be deemed acceptable for a religion to indoctrinate a child in the first place and restrict access to alternative religions. Couple that with evidence for the difficulty in breaking such indoctrination, and it’s clearly a rather despicable thing to do.

Religious indoctrination can be overcome, but to claim it’s a trivial matter shaken off with ease is simply not true; in fact it’s counter to the experiences of millions of individuals and researchers worldwide.

Essentially, once indoctrinated, we are less able to think logically about concepts we have been indoctrinated to believe in. It’s not necessarily related to IQ, rather the power of belief, and the unwillingness to have ones dearly held beliefs changed.

There have been many examples of the power of indoctrination throughout history. Hitler youth, religious cults, the list is endless. And once indoctrinated, it’s quite clear that such a thing is very hard to overcome.

The youth committee of the Soviet Union’s communist party, known as the Komsomol, said:

“We must make the young into a generation of Communists. Children, like soft wax, are very malleable and they should be moulded into good Communists… We must rescue children from the harmful influence of the family… We must nationalize them. From the earliest days of their little lives, they must find themselves under the beneficient influence of Communist schools… To oblige the mother to give her child to the Soviet state – that is our task.”

Not even a modest skeptic could swallow the imagineerings of the Mormon bible. Yet there are millions of true believers and that is undeniable fact.   Mark Twain