Tag: Goddy epistemology

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.

The problem of knowing what to submit to is connected to the idea that “god” can stand for a kind of person that is better than the human kind and thus a way to focus aspirations. The connection is that both are about knowledge, or transmission. Unless “god” is purely personal and individual, there has to be some way of connecting “god” and humans. There have to be intermediaries.

And there are intermediaries, but what good are they? What do they know that no one else knows? What do clerics know? What is it about them that makes them reliable intermediaries?

What is there? Is there some thing – some bit of esoteric knowledge, some secret ceremony, some garment, that is supposed to transform Mr X into a reliable intermediary? Our friend Eric MacDonald would know, since if there is such a thing, he must have been vouchsafed it at some point.

A few weeks ago, I saw a discussion of Sura 4:34, the usual thing: does “beat” really mean “beat” and all the rest of it. There was a woman who kept saying “Only Allah knows what he meant, we can only interpret.” But in that case, why pay any attention at all? If only Allah knows what Sura 4: 34 means, why should any humans even try to obey it? If someone says to me, “Ooh ooh urrp urrp,” I can’t “obey” that, can I.

The intermediary problem seems to me to be insoluble.