Abu Adam

The following is an American freethinker's comment on my debate with Abu Aadam. This debate took place in a Yahoo club. Abu Adam copied and pasted it in his site  http://thetruereligion.org/af.htm Nevertheless he decided not to publish my last responses to him. 

Ali Sina. 

First of all, it is apparent that Ali Sina and I use the same nom de guerr. I am not he and he is not me. I have never posted anything about Islam in a Yahoo chat club (or any other forum save this one). I am very familiar with the writings of Dr Sina. I think he is a man of courage and vision. I also think he has an unfortunate propensity for overstatement and could learn much from Ibn Warraq in terms of fine-tuning his communication skills.

As for the arguments of his interloculator, they are the same, tired excuses we witness time and again from Muslim apologists: the barbarities inscribed in the Quran are somehow mitigated, we are told, by "context" and "problems with translation". This is part and parcel of a broader pathology that afflicts much of the Muslim world: a profound state of denial. The most recent manifestation of this phenomenon can be seen in the Muslim reactions to the release of the Bin Ladin video in which he implicates himself in the worst terrorist atrocity of modern history. The poor audio of the tape notwithstanding, it is quite obvious what words are coming out of Bin Ladin's mouth...and that the voice on the tape is identical to the voice heard in his many previous recordings. Nonetheless, Muslims around the world are insisting the video is a forgery, a trick. This state of denial is characteristic of devotees to totalitarian creeds. Bin Ladin could get up in a court of law and proclaim both his culpability and his satisfaction over the murder of more than 3000 infidel non-combatants, and many in the Muslim world would still maintain his innocence, insisting he had been coerced into confession. This is the extent of the irrationality we are dealing with.

Dr Sina's use of the Hadith to demonstrate the moral defects of Islam's founder, in my opinion this is a valid use of Islam's own literature. As for those Hadiths that document Muhammed's virtues, I can't speak for Dr Sina, but I have never, ever postulated that Muhammed was without virtue. Like most human beings, he was an amalgum of good and evil. It is the Islamists who again are in denial about their prophet in this regard. If one accepts the Hadiths as factual, one must accept that, while Muhammed did indeed exhibit wisdom and virtuosity as a statesman and a leader, he also raped his nine-year-old child-bride Aysha... he ordered the murder of several of his detractors including a woman and an elderly man... he cut-off the limbs and blinded the eyes of apostates (referred to in the Hadith as renegades) and left them to slowly die...and he sanctioned the slaughter of at least 600 adult male prisoners of the Banu Qurayzah tribe. These appalling moral defects of the prophet, as revealed in the Ahadith, completely invalidate his claim to being a messenger from God. As for any miracles Muhammed is supposed to have performed, i'll draw the analogy to Christianity: one can believe in the historical reality of Jesus Christ...that he lived and died...without believing in the virgin birth or the resurrection, claims that clearly defy the laws of nature. This kind of discrimination reflects the value and scope of a rational mind when it is unencumbered with religious dogmatism. But this kind of rational discrimination between plausible truth and obvious falsehood (and ultimately, between right and wrong) is impossible for the devout Muslim. It is the particulars of Islamic theology...the immutability of the Quran and the moral perfection of the prophet to name just two, that create such a necessity for the culture of apologia that we have all become familiarized with, along the inevitable deceptions and distortions that accompany such a culture. A Christian can interpret the bible figuratively... such an interpretation of the Quran would be considered apostasy. A Christian can believe in the teachings of Christ without believing that Jesus was the actual son of God... but a Muslim cannot for a moment accept the moral failings of Muhammed even though they are fully documented in Islamic literature,...because to do so would crumble the ediface of absolutism that is so essential to maintaining the fictions upon which Islam is constructed. As a result, we find that sex between a man over 50 with a nine year old child cannot be immoral because to admit as much would defame the prophet...and for those Muslims with the ethicism to find such sexual behavior revolting, all sorts of rationalizations (apologia) are contrived to justify such an act: Aysha wasn't 9 after all (even though the Hadith are explicit in this regard)...girls mature faster in desert climate, or at least did so 1400 years ago, etc. The story is the same with the slaughter of the Banu Qurayzah and the murder of the poetess and the old man: their "treachery" somehow justified their extermination. These kinds of moral rationalizations have been incorporated by Muslims into the fabric of today's issues...suicide bombings that slaughter women and children in Israel are justified because Palestinians are "oppressed"; the WTC atrocity is "God's punishment" for America's support for Israel, etc. I want to express as concisely as possible my opinion of the greatest danger posed by these kinds of rationalizations: the day that the world begins to accept them as legitimate is the day we adopt the moral standards of Islam.