So I have been reading the Quran in search for answers and found none. I found it an extremely dull book, half of it is Allah praising himself making it seem like he has some serious self-esteem issues. The other half is filled with ancient myths, banal repetition, and contradictions cleverly refuted by "abrogation". "But read it in Arabic and you will instantly see the beauty and the message of the Quran!" proclaim the apologists. Well, I don't speak Arabic so tough luck for me I guess? Why is God monolingual?
Then there are those who claim the Quran itself is a "linguistic miracle". This is of course completely made up and no professional linguist holds this belief. Others bring up the "scientific miracles of the Quran". This absurd claim turns the scientific method completely ass backwards. All of these so called miracles can also easily be explained simply as being the result of common knowledge, copy-pasted from the Greeks or the Bible, and most importantly simply being so vague as to requiring massive amounts of confirmation bias to see them as any sort of miracle or foreknowledge.
Then comes perhaps the most entertaining of all: that Quran contains some sort of mathematical patterns as proof of it's divnity. This of course is in no way an argument for the divnity of anything. You could find dozens of similar numerical patterns from any long enough text, and it has been done for such works as the Bible or Moby Dick. Not only that, but many of these claims have proven to be fabrications. For example when claiming the number of daysmentioned 365 times (Islam doesn't even use the Georgian calendar so this was an absurd claim to begin with), the word day in plural form has been emitted from the word count.
The Quran has also a nice little moving goalpost argument repeated several times: "produce a sura like it". This is of course true, no matter how much you try you will never produce a sura like those in the Quran. Just as you will never produce a poem like those of Pablo Neruda, or a play like those of Henrik Ibsen. No matter how hard you try, it will never be exactly like the Quran, Neruda, or Ibsen. Why would God use such faulty logic? There is also no consensus amongst secular scholars whether Mohammad really was illiterate or not. And even if he was, he was not the one who complied the Quran. Thus how educated he was does not matter.
Did Mohammad peace and blessings of Allah be upon him recite a linguistically refined Quran or set up a working political system? Maybe (although even this has been questioned) but this is not sufficent evidence for being the messenger of God for humanity. There have been several humans with extraordinary abilities (e.g. Solomon Shereshevsky) and several civilizations that rose in unexplainable conditions (e.g. Tiwanaku) but this is hardly proof of divinity. And when it comes to the Quran's preservation, even this has been questioned by several sources and historians. Even if we concede this point, the Quran is by no means the longest preserved text in history.
I don't mean to be condesceding, these are my sincere experiences with this and would like to hear what makes you feel certain that the Quran is God's divine revelation.
Then there are those who claim the Quran itself is a "linguistic miracle". This is of course completely made up and no professional linguist holds this belief. Others bring up the "scientific miracles of the Quran". This absurd claim turns the scientific method completely ass backwards. All of these so called miracles can also easily be explained simply as being the result of common knowledge, copy-pasted from the Greeks or the Bible, and most importantly simply being so vague as to requiring massive amounts of confirmation bias to see them as any sort of miracle or foreknowledge.
Then comes perhaps the most entertaining of all: that Quran contains some sort of mathematical patterns as proof of it's divnity. This of course is in no way an argument for the divnity of anything. You could find dozens of similar numerical patterns from any long enough text, and it has been done for such works as the Bible or Moby Dick. Not only that, but many of these claims have proven to be fabrications. For example when claiming the number of daysmentioned 365 times (Islam doesn't even use the Georgian calendar so this was an absurd claim to begin with), the word day in plural form has been emitted from the word count.
The Quran has also a nice little moving goalpost argument repeated several times: "produce a sura like it". This is of course true, no matter how much you try you will never produce a sura like those in the Quran. Just as you will never produce a poem like those of Pablo Neruda, or a play like those of Henrik Ibsen. No matter how hard you try, it will never be exactly like the Quran, Neruda, or Ibsen. Why would God use such faulty logic? There is also no consensus amongst secular scholars whether Mohammad really was illiterate or not. And even if he was, he was not the one who complied the Quran. Thus how educated he was does not matter.
Did Mohammad peace and blessings of Allah be upon him recite a linguistically refined Quran or set up a working political system? Maybe (although even this has been questioned) but this is not sufficent evidence for being the messenger of God for humanity. There have been several humans with extraordinary abilities (e.g. Solomon Shereshevsky) and several civilizations that rose in unexplainable conditions (e.g. Tiwanaku) but this is hardly proof of divinity. And when it comes to the Quran's preservation, even this has been questioned by several sources and historians. Even if we concede this point, the Quran is by no means the longest preserved text in history.
I don't mean to be condesceding, these are my sincere experiences with this and would like to hear what makes you feel certain that the Quran is God's divine revelation.