“Answering Muslims” by David Wood

This blogging business is quite a futile exercise, I must say. At some point, after giving it a feeble try, I decided to abandon the idea of “blogging”, as the world probably doesn’t need another faceless, nameless and, perhaps, useless page on the Internet.

I am going back to writing here, however, since my comments miraculously stopped appearing on a blog that I personally felt very much inclined to comment on. Not that my remarks contained any profanity or personal attacks. Nor they deviated from the main topic of the blog and the article in any way. But, for the reason we might discuss here one day, they just stopped being approved by the blog moderator. C'est la vie.

The blog that I am referring to is “Answering Muslims” run by David Wood and Co. The article that left me out in the middle of my conversation with other blog visitors is “Islam’s Secret Santa”, which can be found here: www.answeringmuslims.com/2011/11/islams-secret-santa.html

First, about the video: it is yet another great job by David. It is worth every minute of your time and I strongly encourage you to watch it. As often, David is clear, concise and humorous in delivering a shutter-proof argument.

However, here is an issue: the argument David has recorded in this superb video appearance applies equally well to both Judaism and Christianity. Sure enough, the decorations and story ornaments of the Judeo-Christian tradition are different from Islam. After all, it is foolish to expect an illiterate caravan driver of mediocre intellectual and story-telling abilities to match a much more sophisticated and thought-out work of many, many writers who created the Torah and the Bible over the years.

But, the argument is simple – God desperately needs sinful people because their sins compel them to repent and ask for forgiveness continuously. Yes, that God. Actually, all three of them – Yahweh, the father Holy Spirit and Allah.

Simple thoughts coming from a simple mind of Muhammad make the idea amusingly clear – we sin because God wants and needs us to sin. The Torah and the Bible veil this notion with obscurity without negating the fact that it is exactly the same – God created us sinful, whether by design or mistake, and he intends on keeping it so.

How is that possible? Read Genesis. God is our creator, it says. Everything we are is done by God. Therefore, the mischievous nature of humans is designed by God too. The sequence of events recorded in the Torah/Bible can be stripped down to the essential components:

1. God creates rules
2. God creates humans in a way that they cannot follow the rules
3. God gets upset and punishes humans he designed and created for not following the rules that he designed and created

This is where the issue with my commentary begins. Many Christian followers of David feel really strongly that their book of fables is somehow less absurd than that of Muhammad. Yes, it is more polished. Yes, it is less direct. Yes, it is more obscure. However, conceptually, it is not much different in many respects. Now, we get to the point of my message. I want to respond to several individuals who I was restricted from responding to using David’s blog.

@Baron Eddie: Genesis, Chapters 2 and 3 describe the process of creation. Everything that follows is the direct result of how God created men. It is foolish to blame men for the way they were created by God.

@Foolster41: Nowhere in my original post it is suggested that the Bible/Torah says the same absurdity as Hadith does in open text. The notion of what they say over many chapters, however, is exactly the same. God created sinful men and he never attempted to fix his mistake by righting them. Instead, he continuously tortures and punishes humans, which he clearly enjoys doing, as Exodus describes. Read your statement again – God creates sinful people – how is that different from the notion in Hadith that was identified by David – God creates sinful people?

Furthermore, Foolster41, you mentioned that God gives people a choice to follow or not follow them. Not according to the Bible. It is true that this is an excuse that Christians have come up with to explain the absurdity of the fundamental ideas underpinning the Judeo-Christian ideology. But it is not true. God punishes those who don’t submit to him. Christian God created Hell to burn people who do not follow him. This is not a choice, but rather an entrapment to ensnare, condemn and torture humans for eternity.

Foolster41, your assessment about God not wanting humans to be mindless robots contradicts the Bible/Torah. Genesis 3:22 – the whole story of Adam and Eve – openly state that God punishes Adam and Eve for acquiring knowledge. God wanted people to stay dumb, blind and stupid, but they managed to gain the knowledge of good and evil, so God contemned them to suffering and expelled them from the garden of Eden. Interesting enough, the same verse – Genesis 3:22 – shows that Judeo-Christian God is wary of humans, since eating from the “Tree of Life” would elevate us to become equal to God.

@D335 – this is a great analogy for this situation – a programmer and a program. The Torah/Bible/Quran describes a programmer (God) who creates a program (humans) that does not work as expected (doesn’t follow God’s laws). Who is to blame for it? The program or the programmer? The program only does what its creator has put in it, whether by design or by mistake. A good programmer would troubleshoot his code and fix bugs that cause the application to misfire. Judeo-Christian-Muslim God follows a different path – he curses, condemns and tortures the program, tries to erase it a number of times, but all that time he doesn’t make a slightest attempt to fix the bugs he is so unhappy about. Christian God also tortures his son so that he can forgive his flawed program for not working correctly. All that time, somehow he never goes about fixing the problem or adjusting his expectations, if the program cannot be fixed.

@Mr McStizzle,

Let’s dissect your post and address each point individually.

The biblical God had an intention for mankind when he created it and this intention was for them not to sin. This is a false proposition. Read Genesis – the only intention of God that is mentioned in the Bible/Torah is that he created a man only to “work and take care” of the Garden of Eden. God created a slave, a mindless drone, a worker to maintain the garden for God. God had not defined any meaningful laws or regulations until after the Exodus – until then he punished and tortured countless generations of men for not complying with the rules that even God himself didn’t know existed.

God stacked the odds in favour of mankind? How so? He left a gullible, inexperienced and easily corruptible man – how else would you explain that a serpent was able to convince Eve in just two sentences to violate the prohibition of God – alone in the garden with a ascendant temptation: the tree of knowledge. It is the same as leaving a 4-year-old home alone with an open cookie-jar sitting in the middle of the room and expecting the child not to eat a single piece. Any intelligent entity will understand the consequences of such decision.

In the Bible, had man not sinned, the world wouldn’t have been corrupted. First, there were no rules to violate, why do we blame man for sinning? Second, the mankind and all its traits were created by God, why then God punishes mankind for it? Third, aside from having a garden-carrying slave, there are no other intentions of God mentioned in the Bible.

Intentions are borne from love? Love? Love? The picture of God that the Bible portrays can be described as anything, but love. There is injustice, lies, deception, sexism, jealousy, treason, torture, condemnation, countless homicides, infanticides and genocides, but there is no love in the Bible. For the crime of eating an apple, which was arranged by God, by the way, man and all his descendants are condemned eternal suffering. You call it “love”?

You attempt to contrast Allah to Yahweh, but there is no difference. Yahweh decided that torturing and killing his own son Jesus is the best way to showcase his love and mercy. He rewards otherwise undeserving Abraham merely for building altars to worship him. He is jealous of men honoring other Gods. He is afraid of mankind rising to his level (Genesis 3:22). No, Allah and Yahweh are not different.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Please feel free to leave your comments below.