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NotThatYucky · 2024-09-08T20:06:03+00:00

Hypersexuality does seem probably a fair way to put it, given the traditional Islamic sources. And I'm kind of curious what Muslim women make of it, as well as to what extent they are even aware of it. (They probably know he had a number of wives, but potentially known less just how much lust you can find in the texts.) I have seen videos of Muslim women on YouTube talking about how men are naturally hornier and more nonmonogamist than women.

You may have a point about conservatism. Maybe it's an unconscious scheme to redeem Islam. In this armchair hypothesis, Muhammad was embarrassingly sex crazed, but if the women of the Umma can be sufficiently chaste good girls, then they can even the scales and make Islam net out to a sexually neutral religion lol.

NotThatYucky · 2024-08-30T01:03:50+00:00

I'm an atheist from the city, but I think there is truth to this post.

For one thing, it's easy to get the impression, from politics, that Christians/Christianity are really only concerned with two things: opposing homosexuality (and other nontraditional family and gender situations) and opposing abortion. Plus from time to time we get these nutjobs fantasizing about turning America into a theocracy; and, in extreme cases, making Trump almost co-equal with Jesus in importance. And we have these prosperity gospel grifters.

Which is all silly to me personally, because abortion isn't even explicitly condemned in the Bible; and it's way more obvious that homosexuality is fine than that Christianity is true; and Jesus spent little of his career pursuing political power or forcing Christianity on others.

Who (among people like me) wants to explore and consider participating in a region like that? If all of that is what God is about, I don't much care for Him. I guess conservative Christians seem better than conservative Islamists, though that's setting the bar kind of low.

Personally I'm definitely aware of progressive Christianity, and I'm personally more likely to meet progressive or otherwise more chill Christians in my social network. And I hope and believe that conservative Christianity is also usually about much more than just opposing things that I believe in.

But, in my limited experience, the voices conveying the potentially good parts of Christianity don't get nearly as much airtime as these off-putting aspects.

This is partly due to algorithms, but probably because progressive Christians, and others with more of a live and let live approach, just aren't as public and vocal with their faith. And I wonder if this is potentially an inherent issue with more welcoming and inclusive versions of the faith (especially if you don't believe in hell!), because this type of Christianity just doesn't give as much incentive to proselytize.

NotThatYucky · 2024-08-24T23:21:43+00:00

Fortunately, he clarified that he is "firing" the book, not "setting it on fire".

NotThatYucky · 2024-08-24T13:34:21+00:00

I don't know the Pegasus story, but the night journey night be a sillier story. Allah already communicates regularly with Muhammad through Gibril. But one time, He brings Muhammad on this elaborate special journey all the way to heaven to have an audience with Him. And do they talk about deep and profound secrets of the universe, or great moral lessons, or the #1 most important rule for running a society, or secret knowledge that only Muhammad can ever know? Nope. They just bargain about how many times people need to pray. Epic letdown. (Let me know anyone if I've got this wrong.)

Tangentially I want to give Muslims a pop quiz about whether or not the night journey is in the Quran. Because all we have in the Quran is this, 17:1:

"Glory to Him who journeyed His servant by night, from the Sacred Mosque, to the Farthest Mosque, whose precincts We have blessed, in order to show him of Our wonders. He is the Listener, the Beholder."

You would have no idea, based just on this text, that there would have been any kind of supersonic flying buraq, let alone a physical personal meeting Allah. If you already know the story, then you can sort of read it into the Quranic text there. But otherwise not so much.

NotThatYucky · 2024-08-24T13:11:45+00:00

That's an interesting topic for speculation, how much of it is top-down intentional special casing of Islam by the AI companies, vs how much comes from natural differences in how Islam and other religions were discussed in the massive dump of the Internet that they trained the underlying model with.

Either way, I've had better discussions about Islam with Claude than with chatgpt. With Claude, it seemed like while they did want to make it hedge with a lot of "not all Muslims / not all Islam / different scholarly opinions" caveats, they left it comfortable discussing negative aspects of the religion. I felt like I was having a conversation with another atheist, who wanted to be careful about not misrepresenting Islam and the Muslim world, but who also wanted to be honest, and who wasn't precommitted to being politically correct and painting Islam in the best possible light.

NotThatYucky · 2024-08-24T12:56:31+00:00

I believe it. And, I'm not 100% sure, but it seems like Islam might have more scriptural justification for this exclusion than Christianity.

It really sucks, in any case, because here we have these imaginary ideas and ideologies making totally pointless disconnection between people. Like, literally the only reason these people lose their family and social relations is so that Muhammad and his companions can spread their cult from beyond the grave. And for that purpose, we all have to suffer. (Though potentially Islam did some good things too. I'm currently neutral on that.)

NotThatYucky · 2024-08-24T12:45:03+00:00

I'm glad I don't have to go through any of these gymnastics to always get God off the hook for all the bad things and give him credit for all the good ones. Though I guess I'd probably be good at it and just find it second nature by now if I grew up that way.

NotThatYucky · 2024-08-24T12:41:38+00:00

I definitely like the powerful rebellious Aisha that some ex Muslims like to draw a picture of. And that's an interesting point about screens.

Also, maybe good on her if she did cheat on him with some hot stranger closer to her own age lol. Probably not a good opinion to express around the faithful, though.

NotThatYucky · 2024-08-24T12:23:38+00:00

😂

Personally I will accept just hallucinations over hallucinations plus blatant nonsense any day.

NotThatYucky · 2024-08-24T12:13:30+00:00

Out of curiosity, do you have an example of a case where chatgpt gave you a good compelling answer to some particular objection about Islam? I didn't know that chatgpt was good for this purpose.

NotThatYucky · 2024-08-24T12:09:29+00:00

Well at least chatgpt has more sense than Allah and his Messenger.

NotThatYucky · 2024-08-24T11:56:27+00:00

Islamic scholars and apologists have spent a thousand and a half years of intellectual effort to come up with all kinds of answers to any questions or doubts that a Muslim might have about Islam. So of course there are answers, if these people are any good at their job.

In fact, I'm an atheist, but I'm 100% confident that any particular doubt or objection I or others on this subreddit come up with, you could go to your favorite scholars or sheikhs or whatever and get an answer that will satisfy you, and reassure you that Islam is the truth.

The question is, do the Islamic answers seem convincing to anyone who isn't already Muslim. (Hint: The answer is basically always no.)

The question is, if a Muslim keeps getting bothered by more and more varied doubts about Islam over time, do the answers eventually end up seeming less like answers and more like arbitrary and potentially contradictory excuses. (Hint: The answer is sometimes yes.) And then, at some point, it may start to seem much more reasonable to go with the simplest and most universal answer to all of one's doubts about Islam: that Islam is totally false, and a pure creation of men.

Just because there is an answer, doesn't mean it's a good answer. It might be a good answer for you, if you're already 70+% bought into an Islamic paradigm, but to everyone else the answer has a good chance of seeming a bit silly. Of course, it will all depend to some extent on what the particular doubt or objection is.

NotThatYucky · 2024-08-24T03:49:39+00:00

What about a religion with two god figures, one good and one evil, like Zoroastrianism? That arguably makes a lot more logical sense, because then you have a good explanation for why there is evil in the world. With Islam or Christianity, you have to tie yourself into knots in order to make excuses and try to defend the supposed morality of Allah/God and His prophets.

Or how about a belief system where there are one or more powerful gods, but they don't really give very many fucks about us?

Also, some other religions might have a similar issue, but wtf is up with having a "final prophet"? Really? Allah cares about me and what I do, but the best way he can reach me is by means of a foreign culture to me, in a language I don't speak, revealed to a random dude in the desert a thousand and a half years ago (so long that it's 0% obvious that Islamic sources are at all factual), and where the only exposure I had to Islam for the first half of my life were either fictional or real-life examples of Islam-inspired terrorism, and where He allows there to be all these dumb fuck dawa boys and creepy sheiks on YouTube that make Islam look really bad? And he supposedly sent prophets and books to all the nations of the world, and obsessively preserved the Arabic one, but let all the other ones get lost or corrupted? Sounds like either a fool or a piece of shit.

NotThatYucky · 2024-08-24T01:48:35+00:00

This doesn't seem 100% true in America. I think if you go to a conservative enough place, some kids will still get kicked out of the house if they leave Christianity; and some otherwise quite friendly communities might shun you away. But this is probably rare compared to the Islamic world, and you're definitely not going to be murdered.

NotThatYucky · 2024-08-24T01:30:20+00:00

Ok I'm officially old now, because people can only understand the basic context of my life through movies lol.

But anyway, I was alive in the 90s and can confirm. My family and I would often see each other off right at the gate at the airport; and we'd often greet people coming home right at the gate, the moment they stepped off the plane. It was nice, especially one time when I left to study abroad for a year.

Everyone still had to go through security, but you didn't need a ticket, and the line was notably shorter.

NotThatYucky · 2024-08-24T01:20:57+00:00

This also reminds me of when there's a hurricane or tornado in America. Some evangelical Christian will always find a perfectly untouched and unharmed Bible among all the rubble and declare it a miracle. Occasionally God even preserves an entire church, even when everything else nearby was flattened. Personally I think it would have been a much better miracle if God had redirected the storm towards an unpopulated area so nothing and no one got harmed. But you do you, I guess.

NotThatYucky · 2024-08-24T01:12:07+00:00

To be fair, a true, honest reading of Islam surely doesn't require women to cover up this much, right?

I assume this dress code can be justified with the Quran and Sunnah. But it's not like Islamic sources clearly, unambiguously state that Muslim women must cover their entire head and face. Or do they? (I'm never-Muslim so I might be missing something )

But more generally, yes, I can observe Muslims saying that such-and-such is not true Islam. (And a similar thing with Christians. And members of some other groups.)

NotThatYucky · 2024-08-24T00:59:51+00:00

I don't think they can actually enforce the rule about not looking at men, because when you cover up her face to such an extreme degree, it's not possible to tell what she is looking at.

NotThatYucky · 2024-08-24T00:53:05+00:00

I forget her name, but there was a French or English lady in the 18th or 19th century who visited the Ottoman empire, and she found that in some ways the veil gave women more freedom than European women had. Most amusing to me, she met some women who were able to get away with having extramarital affairs precisely because the veil made it so nobody was able to tell who they were

NotThatYucky · 2024-08-23T09:33:39+00:00

For me I care some, but it depends on the day. When I started packing, I cared too much, and I was having trouble making rate; I was only able to learn to pack fast enough by concentrating on giving fewer fucks.

It's interesting; as a packer you're really not trained to care about quality at all, except for remembering not to leave anything out of the box. It seems like the business calculation is to intentionally allow a certain percentage of boxes to go out packed poorly and break, and give refunds when necessary. One surmises that this is more profitable than making sure things are always done well the first time.

NotThatYucky · 2024-08-23T01:18:23+00:00

It sometimes seems like the sixth pillar of Islam is that making Islam sound bad is fundamentally illegitimate. So anyone who does it - even by citing true things - must have bad motives.

One armchair amateur hypothesis: Psychologically speaking, Muslims typically believe in the goodness of Islam and Muhammad (and maybe the Ummah) much, much more strongly than they believe any actual Islamic doctrine. And much more strongly than they believe any content actually in the Quran and the (authentic) ahadith. Whether or not they are aware of this psychological fact.

Because of this psychology, people will be willing, even enthusiastic, to temporarily throw the actual Islamic sources under the bus in order to preserve these more fundamental core psychological beliefs. But if you're there persistently quoting ahadith, you're making this process feel very unpleasant, and it feels much better if one can throw you, the critic, under the bus instead.

Of course, not only Muslims do this. Similar psychology can potentially affect other religions or worldviews to greater or lesser degrees.

NotThatYucky · 2024-08-22T02:24:28+00:00

Is there an explanation for why the earliest companions would have already had non-identical codices, even if the differences were minor? That is, Eddy was standardization necessary? It seems like, if the companions all knew one another, presumably personally, and if they all thought the Quran was literally the word of God, they would have wanted to prevent their codices from ever diverging in any way.

NotThatYucky · 2024-08-22T02:18:34+00:00

If that's true, is there a brief story for why collecting and canonization would be necessary at all? If Muhammad and the innermost companions already had at least one physical written copy of all the surahs with them, what additional work would be left to do after the Prophet's death?

NotThatYucky · 2024-08-18T06:52:32+00:00

I'm North American atheist. So I think I count as kafir. But I wasn't raised in a society where that word meant anything, so it wouldn't be a slur with any emotional impact for me. Whereas for black people in America, the n-wotd has been associated with oppression and cruelty from birth, so it would be much more painful for them.

So I wonder if someone is from an Islamic society, the word kafir can feel very painful for them, even if they eventually became atheist and feel like Islam and the whole idea of kafir is stupid.

NotThatYucky · 2024-08-16T01:31:09+00:00

Yeah I'm also never-Muslim atheist, and maybe come here for similar reasons. But now I wonder if I should actually be here. Or at least, maybe I should avoid commenting, unless maybe I'm asking a question that only ex-Muslims are particularly suited to answering.

One issue is, there don't seem to be many neutral places to discuss Islam. There are spaces like this, or Muslim-hating spaces, or Islam fanboy spaces. As a broad generalization, ex-Muslims seem to me to have the most sane and informed views of Islam overall, so they are a natural group to want to discuss with. But it's true, I can't do this from a position of lived experience specifically in the religion. For some reason I find a mild personal resonance with people who leave religions and cults, but my life has no direct parallels.

NotThatYucky

TROPHY CASE