Category: Religion

Is Muhammad A Title?

A German attempt at improving faith relations backfired, with their Muslim scholar ‘s research. He had no doubts at first, but slowly they emerged. He was struck, he says, by the fact that the first coins bearing Muhammad’s name did not appear until the late 7th century — six decades after the religion did. The earliest biography, of which no copies survive, dated from roughly a century after the generally accepted year of his death, 632, and is known only by references to it in much later texts.

He traded ideas with some scholars in Saarbrücken who in recent years have been pushing the idea of Muhammad’s nonexistence. They claim that “Muhammad” wasn’t the name of a person but a title, and that Islam began as a Christian heresy.

Prof. Kalisch didn’t buy all of this. Contributing last year to a book on Islam, he weighed the odds and called Muhammad’s existence “more probable than not.” By early this year, though, his thinking had shifted. “The more I read, the historical person at the root of the whole thing became more and more improbable,” he says.

He has doubts, too, about the Quran. “God doesn’t write books,” Prof.  Muhammad Sven Kalisch, a Muslim convert at 15 and Germany’s first professor of Islamic theology says. T

via Islamic Theologian Says Prophet Muhammad Likely Never Existed – WSJ.com

Scholarly Paper roughly translated by Google into German
London 2001 London 2001

Has Global Warming Become Religion?

Global View – WSJ.com
But mother nature has opinions of her own. NASA now begrudgingly confirms that the hottest year on record in the continental 48 was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954. Data from 3,000 scientific robots in the world’s oceans show there has been slight cooling in the past five years, never mind that “80% to 90% of global warming involves heating up ocean waters,” according to a report by NPR’s Richard Harris. A discussion of the various measurement models.

The Arctic ice cap may be thinning, but the extent of Antarctic sea ice has been expanding for years. At least as of February, last winter was the Northern Hemisphere’s coldest in decades. In May, German climate modelers reported in the journal Nature that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation. But be not not-afraid, added the modelers: The inexorable march to apocalypse resumes in 2020.

This last item is, of course, a forecast, not an empirical observation. But it raises a useful question: If even slight global cooling remains evidence of global warming, what isn’t evidence of global warming? What we have here is a nonfalsifiable hypothesis, logically indistinguishable from claims for the existence of God. This doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist, or that global warming isn’t happening. It does mean it isn’t science.

Young Tibetans Lured By Modernity

For Rural Tibetans, the Future Is in Town – washingtonpost.com
Tibetans, traditionally nomadic herders and farmers, are increasingly being lured into a commercial world, a place where Chinese and English language skills are prerequisites for success and ethnic identity is something to be marketed to tourists. Many young Tibetans like Jian jump at the chance to escape harsh farm work on mountain plateaus, but the opportunity means leaving behind a way of life that has defined one of the most romanticized cultures in the world.

Turkey Tries To Modernise Islam’s Teachings

The New Face of Islam | Print Article | Newsweek.com
Mehmet Aydin, who first conceived the Hadith project four years ago, when he was Turkey’s minister of state for religious affairs, says it is obvious that in the seventh century, the time of the Prophet, life was very different. One Hadith, for instance, forbids women from traveling alone. In Saudi Arabia, this and other sayings are given as a reason women should not be allowed to drive. “This is clearly not a religious injunction but related to security in a specific time and place,” says Gormez. In fact, the Prophet says elsewhere that he misses those days, evidently in his recent memory, when women could travel alone from Yemen to Mecca. In its first three centuries “Islam was interacting with Greek, Iranian and Indian cultures and at every encounter [scholars] reinterpreted Islam according to new conditions,” says Gormez. “They were not afraid to rethink Islam then.” Continue reading “Turkey Tries To Modernise Islam’s Teachings”

The Future Of Faith

The Neural Buddhists – New York Times
The atheism debate is a textbook example of how a scientific revolution can change public culture. Just as “The Origin of Species reshaped social thinking, just as Einstein’s theory of relativity affected art, so the revolution in neuroscience is having an effect on how people see the world.

And yet my guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible. Continue reading “The Future Of Faith”

Banned Movie

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.492169&w=425&h=350&fv=width%3D425%26height%3D355%26file%3Dfitna-en.flv] from wikileaks.org

Here is the controversial banned film on Islam, Wikipedia has a very good coverage ongoing of this film and its consequences. So after all the official condemnations, see it for yourself and make your own judgment. Wikileaks, the uncensored freedom of information site that we have featured on this blog before, has the original videos and some from the recent Tibet riots

Moses was high on drugs: Israeli researcher

Moses was high on drugs: Israeli researcher

Such mind-altering substances formed an integral part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times, Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem wrote in the Time and Mind journal of philosophy.

He said the psychedelic effects of ayahuasca were comparable to those produced by concoctions based on bark of the acacia tree, that is frequently mentioned in the Bible.

‘I don’t hate Muslims. I hate Islam,’ says Holland’s rising political star

‘I don’t hate Muslims. I hate Islam,’ says Holland’s rising political star | World news | The Observer
Get ready for a new furor from the Netherlands, where census figures show that Muslims will be the majority by 2015. How will the tolerant to-a-fault Dutch react? Geert Wilders has got nothing against Muslims. He just hates Islam. Or so he says. ‘Islam is not a religion, it’s an ideology,’ says Wilders, a lanky Roman Catholic right-winger, ‘the ideology of a retarded culture.’

Wilders has been immersing himself in the suras and verse of seventh-century Arabia. The outcome of his scholarship, a short film, has Holland in a panic. He is just putting the finishing touches to the 10-minute film, he says, and talking to four TV channels about screening it. The Dutch government is planning emergency evacuation of its nationals and diplomats from the Middle East should the Wilders film be shown. It is alarmed about the impact on Dutch business.

‘We already have more than 6,000 mosques in Europe, which are not only a place to worship but also a symbol of radicalisation, some financed by extreme groups in Saudi Arabia or Iran,’ argued Filip Dewinter, leader of Belgium’s Flemish separatist party, the Vlaams Belang, who organised the Antwerp get-together. ‘Its minarets are six floors high, higher than the floodlights of the Feyenoord soccer stadium,’ he said of a new mosque being built in Rotterdam. ‘These kinds of symbols have to stop.’ Horror! The secular temple, our Colosseum, where our gladiators entertain us, is being overshadowed by a rising barbaric religious invasion.

Continue reading “‘I don’t hate Muslims. I hate Islam,’ says Holland’s rising political star”

Saudi Arabia to lift ban on women drivers

Saudi Arabia to lift ban on women drivers – Telegraph
Saudi Arabia is to lift its ban on women drivers in an attempt to stem a rising suffragette-style movement in the deeply conservative state.

Government officials have confirmed the landmark decision and plan to issue a decree by the end of the year.

The move is designed to forestall campaigns for greater freedom by women, which have recently included protesters driving cars through the Islamic state in defiance of a threat of detention and loss of livelihoods. Continue reading “Saudi Arabia to lift ban on women drivers”

Lost Qurans Found

The Lost Archive – WSJ.com

Many Christians, too, dislike secular scholars boring into sacred texts, and dismiss challenges to certain Biblical passages. But most accept that the Bible was written by different people at different times, and that it took centuries of winnowing before the Christian canon was fixed in its current form. Muslims, by contrast, view the Quran as the literal word of God. Questioning the Quran “is like telling a Christian that Jesus was gay,” says Abdou Filali-Ansary, a Moroccan scholar.

And so the Wall Street Journal reveals how photos of ancient copies of the Quran have been quietly re-discovered in Germany and their threat to Islamofacist “Fundamentalism” doctrine. quran.jpg

On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran. Continue reading “Lost Qurans Found”