I was given some literature while I was at the book fair about “Signs and Mericals (sic) of Prophet Messenger.” It’s a substantial book, 300 something pages long and it has as its mission to educate me about Muhammad (PBUH) and the Q’uran. Needless to say, it’s awful. I think it must be aimed at someone with about a 10th grade reading comprehension but with a 2nd grade mentality about religion. I can’t imagine this being effective with anyone that already has a faith and certainly would not resonate at all with a real atheist.
The first part of it is all about how Muhammad was foretold by various texts from other religions. They pull stuff from the Old and New Testaments, an apocryphal gospel, some Hindu texts, and even some Zoroastrian texts. Of course this is after explaining that the other traditions texts’ were corrupt and couldn’t be trusted. Not a great idea to dismiss the credibility of your sources before you start to use them… Anyway, I did a little digging about the stuff in the Bible and of course they’re way off. They claim that both the Old and New Testaments refer to Mohammed by name but that sloppy translation has kept the knowledge from the Christians and that outright deception has kept it from the jews. Um, yeah… whatever.
The best thing is the so called “scientific” proofs of things in the Q’uran. They point to a sura that talks about God sending down water to agitate the earth and make things grow and then exclaim that scientists didn’t know how that worked until recently! They spend pages talking about how that sura was way ahead of its time in “explaining” how water makes things grow. There are other equally vague references to “green matter” in plants and iron falling to earth that the authors then say that there is no way that they could have known about them back when it was written, it must have come from God! It actually crosses from being preachy to insulting one’s intelligence.
This has been the latest in a long line of ridiculous religious literature that I have read. Why is it that a religious organization (the Catholic church, The Church of LDS, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.) can have a well defined theology with many nuances and still sound idiotic when it prints literature designed to recruit people? How difficult is it to put down in writing what they believe and maybe some of the benefits of belonging to that particular denomination? Is it so hard to talk about the merits of your religion without disparaging the others? Can’t it stand on its own? Why do they feel the need to “prove” things in 500, 1000, or even 50,000 words? Most of the Christian literature and all of the Muslim stuff I’ve read have tried to be logically rigorous, arguing from some sort of authority (A book, a prophet, a disciple, etc) and “proving” that they are indeed the correct religion. Of course it’s much easier to use logic to refute the entire basis of religion, so I’m surprised so many people try that approach. The way I figure it, if Descartes couldn’t do it, what chance do any of us have in logically proving this sort of stuff?
I think I’m going to have to do what I’ve had to do with all the other religions I’ve studied, namely not listening to the rank and file in that religion and consulting some actual texts. I’ve found both scholarly and religious books to help in this regard. Unfortunately, my Arabic is not nearly good enough to start reading the stuff I want, not yet. With a little more time, I’ll do it. It’s easy to get motivated to study something that you’re actually interested in…