God has never intended to create religions, especially not numerous religions. Religions are human inventions. Spirituality is to try to learn God, religion is to perform a variety of rituals in the hope of a heavenly reward. God gave us rules: There is only one God, eternal, incomprehensible, infinitely superior, transcendental. We are not allowed to kill, steal, cheat, slander, bear false witness, have a sex life that harms others. All other laws are created by man.
After this, people created their religions. Jews, Christians, Muslims .. all they have fought wars and slaughtered in the name of religion. Everyone is killing people, which God has forbidden. Forbidden!
I’m not a Muslim and have no intentions to be one. Personally I think that it’s impossible to debate with a Muslim, they do not even answer the issue in question – they redefine it.
A Muslim man is allowed to marry a Christian woman, but a Christian man is not permitted to marry a Muslim woman. (Or a Muslim woman is not allowed to marry a Christian, a Jew, a Bahá’í, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Sikh, an agnostic…) This makes me mad, but I don’t know why. When the Quran was written, it was the Arab man who was the recipient. Therefore, the ban on Muslim women to marry non-Muslims, was a racist rule. (Today it’s different, because many different ethnic groups and nations have embraced Islam). But the marriage ban is still an expression of oppression of women.
The Quran is clearly addressed to men. God speaks to the Muslim man, but only indirectly to Muslim women. I don’t t have to prove it by pointing to any particular surah or verse – the entire Quran is the same, addressed to the Arab man. The man is the subject in the Quran. The woman is a secondary creature. The man is the owner, the husband, the negotiator, the worker, the recipient, the warrior, the conqueror, the slave master, the one who divorces, the rebuker, the one who has sex with the woman.
The woman is just there, like an empty object.
”Your women are your fields, so go into your fields whichever way you like” (Quran 2:223).
”Wives have the same rights as the husbands have on them in accordance with the generally known principles. Of course, men are a degree above them in status” (Quran 2:228)
”If you fear highhandedness from your wives, remind them [of the teaching of God], then ignore them when you go to bed, then hit them. If they obey you, you have no right to act against them. God is most high and great.” (Quran 4:34)
As you can see, the Quran is talking to the man about how women are and what they must do. You can’t find a sura which begins with ”Husbands have” or ”Women, your men are”. This is NOT how God speaks! To be honest, neither the Bible has a divine form of speaking to the readers. Why? I guess some men, with access, have added some text here and there in the Bible and the Quran. The purpose was probably that they wanted a divine law that made it easier for them in the daily life by then, thousands of years ago.
To bear false witness about God must be one of the worst crimes one can imagine!
”The share of the male shall be twice that of a female” (Quran 4:11).
”And let two men from among you bear witness to all such documents [contracts of loans without interest]. But if two men be not available, there should be one man and two women to bear witness so that if one of the women forgets (anything), the other may remind her.” (Quran 2:282).
”And forbidden to you are wedded wives of other people except those who have fallen in your hands (as prisoners of war) ” (Quran 4:24)
Do you really think that God allows rape?
Sayyid Maududi (d. 1979), a highly respected traditional commentator and scholar, says in his comment on the verse that is it lawful for Muslim holy warriors to marry women prisoners of war even when their husbands are still alive. But what happens if the husbands are captured with their wives? Maududi cites a school of law that says Muslims may not marry them, but two other schools say that the marriage between the captive husbands and wives is broken (note 44). But why would a debate over this cruelty emerge in the first place? No sex or marriage should take place between married female prisoners of war and their captors. In fact, no sex should take place between women captives and their Muslim overlords.
Islam allows deep immorality with women who are in their most helpless condition. This crime is reprehensible, but God wills it nonetheless — the Quran says so.
The Quran is not better than the Bible. There is divine verses that clearly comes from a supernatural being. And in the next verse are sentences that people have created and added to the sacred scriptures, in order to make people believe that they come from God.
Again: To bear false witness about God must be one of the worst crimes one can imagine!
Some Christian debaters claim that the Quran says that the Bible says that Mary, mother of Jesus, is a part of the Trinity. I have studied the relevant surahs, but I can’t find that the Quran says this. What Quran says is that some of the followers of former revelations (some Christians) think that Mary is part of the Trinity. And that was true; during the Prophet’s lifetime there were quasi-Christian sects in Arabia that worshiped Mary, the mother of Jesus, as part of the Trinity, and even sects which appointed high priestess for Mary. This is what Quran criticizes, it doesn’t question the Bible.
What Muslim interpreters say is quite another matter.
I have only access to a few translations of the Quran, and I must say that the verses are not easy to understand. And with books like the Bible and the Quran, it’s always a chance that someone has remembered a corpus wrong before it has been written down, and each time the books were copied (by hand before the invention of printing), there was the risk of accidental or purposeful errors.
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Glory to Thee, O my God! I beseech Thee, by the wrong Thou hast suffered and the ills inflicted upon Thee by the hosts of wrongful doers, to send down upon me from the clouds of Thy mercy that which will purify me of all that is not of Thee, that I may be worthy to praise Thee and fit to love Thee. No God is there beside Thee, the Mighty, the Ever-Abiding, the All-Bounteous, the Most Generous.