If it talks like an asshole and acts like an asshole…
A Muslim Facebook friend of mine posts a lot of interesting questions and observations about religion and belief. He’s very non-literalist, but he gets a good many literalist responses. I’ve just been arguing with one such literalist (on a public thread). The literalist said:
It’s a basic rule of interpretation that you can distinguish between the timeless and spirit or divine intent of a verse and the verse’s literal sense.
This is neither apologetics not esotericism. It’s a basic principle of logic.
The quran says to use intellect almost 50 times. You’re supposed to reflect on it with reasoning and analysis.
It is apologetics of course. It’s the classic way to defend all the shitty things in the Holy Books. You have to interpret. You can’t just look at the plain literal meaning and leave it at that, you have to think hard until you can find a different meaning, one that’s not quite so ugly.
Also, it’s not in any way a basic principle of logic that you can distinguish between the timeless spirit or divine intent of a verse and the verse’s literal sense. That claim has nothing to do with logic. It has everything to do with defensive dodging.
What kind of asshole god plays tricks like that on weaker stupider creatures? What kind of reckless god does that? What kind of asshole reckless god does that and then never comes back to correct the mistake? If a god did dictate the Quran surely it should have intervened a long time ago to fix the messes.
I asked those questions, but answer came there none.
I think that overall question is one of the biggies that make religion untenable. The god in question is supposed to be infinitely good yet the god in question lets us torture and slaughter each other to protect or avenge the god. I’m not seeing the goodness.
Updating to add: I did get a response after all, and much to my surprise my interlocutor saw my point. That doesn’t happen every day.
What kind of asshole god plays tricks like that on weaker stupider creatures?
Enough said. Religious people will always have to answer for the ‘asshole god’ conundrum.
But the Quran IS supposedly self-correcting. Since Mohamed, just like Joseph Smith, received convenient divine revelations whenever he was caught with his hand in the till, there is a tradition of ‘abrogation’ built in to Islam.
If god dictates a new Surah, it is always superior to the previous version. As Hirsi Ali likes to point out, the more violent and imperialist chapters were written when Mohamed was an absolute dictator in Medina, AFTER he had written all the warm-fuzzy-tolerant bits while living as a minority leader in Mecca.
For me, there has always been one major stumbling block for the idea that one must understand the sub-text of the Bible, Koran, etc. The holy books were written back when literacy was confined to the religious elite who would read from them to the uneducated masses as a means of explaining the world and probably more often to pass on the rules and regulations.
To assume that the average person of the times was capable of reflecting on the subleties of the texts they’d just heard, and to understand the ‘real’, deeper meanings is, I believe, an assumption too far. As far as I’m concerned, all the convoluted interpretations of scripture are attempts by the theologians over time to keep their beliefs relevant in an increasingly complex world with an evermore intelligent populace capable of poking massive holes through the literalist – or original – meanings.