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May 31, 2014 - July 11, 2020
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Dear Little Six Billionth Living Person,
How did we get here? And, now that we are here, how shall we live?
It is possible that they may, at some point, come to feel inescapable, not in the way that the truth is inescapable, but in the way that a jail is. They may at some point cease to feel like the texts in which human beings have tried to solve a great mystery, and feel, instead, like the pretexts for other properly anointed human beings to order you around. And it’s true that human history is full of the public oppression wrought by the charioteers of the gods. In the opinion of religious people, however, the private comfort that religion brings more than compensates for the evil done in its
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There was no celestial churning, no maker’s dance, no vomiting of galaxies, no snake or kangaroo ancestors, no Valhalla, no Olympus, no six-day conjuring trick followed by a day of rest. Wrong, wrong, wrong. But here’s something genuinely odd. The wrongness of the sacred tales hasn’t lessened the zeal of the devout. If anything, the sheer out-of-step zaniness of religion leads the religious to insist ever more stridently on the importance of blind faith.
So, how did we get here? Don’t look for the answer in “sacred” storybooks. Imperfect human knowledge maybe be a bumpy, pot-holed street, but it’s the only road to wisdom worth taking.
As the song says, It’s easy if you try.
As for morality, the second great question—how to live?
To my mind religion, even at its most sophisticated, essentially infantilizes our ethical selves by setting infallible moral Arbiters and irredeemably immoral Tempters above us: the eternal parents, good and bad, light and dark, of the supernatural realm.
Imagine there’s no heaven, my dear Six Billionth, and at once the sky’s the limit.
44
The Koran
From Why I Am Not...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
IBN WARRAQ
For the average, unphilosophical Muslim of today, the Koran remains the infallible word of God, the immediate word of God sent down, through the intermediary of a “spirit” or “holy spirit” or Gabriel, to Muhammad in perfect pure Arabic; and everything contained therein is eternal and uncreated. The original text is in heaven (the mother of the book, 43.3; a concealed book, 55.77; a well-guarded tablet, 85.22). The angel dictated the revelation to the Prophet who repeated it after him, and then revealed it to the world.
Both Hurgronje and Guillaume point to the mindless way children are forced to learn either parts of or the entire Koran (some 6,200 odd verses) by hearing at the expense of teaching children critical thought: “[The children] accomplish this prodigious feat at the expense of their reasoning faculty, for often their minds are so stretched by the effort of memory that they are little good for serious thought.”
The rules are not difficult but not a thought is ever given to the meaning of the words; the Quran is chanted simply because its recital is believed to be a meritorious work.
The Word of God?
The Foreign Vocabulary of the Koran
Variant Versions, Variant Readings
Perfect Arabic?
Verses Missing, Verses Added
Abrogation of Passages in the Koran
The Doctrines of the Koran
The Muslim Concept of God
God’s Weaknesses
And Muhammad Is His Apostle
Each of those churches accuses the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all. —THOMAS PAINE, THE AGE OF REASON
Abraham, Ishmael, Moses, Noah, and Other Prophets
Noah and the Flood
David and the Psalms
Adam and Evolution, Creation, and Modern Cosmology
The Origins of Life and the Theory of Evolution
God the Creator
Food, Famine, and Drought
Miracles
Jesus in the Koran
The Annunciation and the Virgin Birth
The Birth of Jesus
Did Jesus Exist?
The Arguments
Strauss
Bauer
Wrede
Kalthoff
Non-Christian Evidence
The Gospels
The Epistles of Paul
The Date of Mark’s Gospel
The Rise of Islam and the Origins of Christianity
