Thread: Would you delete a copy of the Koran?
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Old 09-15-2010, 08:59 AM   #76
WT Sharpe
Bah, humbug!
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg View Post
The only reason we are having this thread is because of there being people who would become violent in response to their religious book being burnt. And I'm figuring that a lot more than half of that crowd also disagree with evolution.

At its worst, the Bible is as bad as the Quran. But the average page of the Quran seems, to me, to incite hostility towards those outside the religion a lot more often than the average page of the Bible. I just did a web search with randomly chosen translations, and found that the word hell appears 14 times in the Bible (New International Version) but 97 times in the much shorter Quran (M.H. Shakir translation), providing objective support for my subjective impression.

It seems to me that eternal torture is at least as bad as temporary torture here on earth. Don't get me wrong about the issue, through. Even repetitive, poorly organized, books advocating torture should nonetheless go unburnt and (if the motive is spite) undeleted. And of course there are vast numbers of Muslims who find the Quran a much more humanitarian book than I do, and act in accordance with its nicer themes.
You're right about the NIV, and it's interesting that 12 of those 14 instances of the word are attributed to Jesus. It brings to mind what Lord Russell wrote about the moral character of Jesus in one of his essays:

.....There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person that is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.
..........— Bertrand Russell, (1872 – 1970), British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, author. "Why I Am Not a Christian" (1927).

However, in the King James Version (the Version preferred by many fundamentalists) there are 53 instances of the word "hell" (many are probably mistranslations). Still far fewer than in the much shorter Qur'an, however. It is striking just how often and in what detail eternal punishments are depicted in the Qur'an.
Last edited by WT Sharpe; 09-15-2010 at 09:12 AM.
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