Preliminary Findings: The Quran

I have had a lot less free time lately, but I use what little I have to the fullest. I even keep a Quran by the toilet to read while I shit. This is a great way to read a book that you would never just sit down and finish in a weekend. I once ate Taco Bell two meals a day for a week and a half in order to finish Tom Wolfe’s “The Pump House Gang.” Club-footed Turkish lovers and a young Hugh Hefner… what more can I say?

I’m over half-way through the Quran. If I were a Jewish lawyer in the seventh century, I would have sued Mohammed for plagiarism. The overwhelming majority of what I have read is nothing but a rehashing of the Bible (not just the Old Testament, because Jesus is mentioned a handful of times). Except… people like Abraham, Moses, Aaron, even Jesus and the apostles are referred to as “Muslims.”

This will make sense to anyone familiar with Islam. For one thing, the word “Islam” means “submission,” and it is implied to include “to God/Allah.” In the original Arabic, a Muslim literally means, “one who submits [to the will of God/Allah].” To someone unfamiliar with the linguistic implications, this may appear to be a revisionist history.

This all made me curious: how do Muslims feel about Jacob? It turns out, they consider him a prophet, but little else is said about him. Jacob is ideologically important to Jews. The name Jacob means “heel” in the sense of one who usurps (professional wrestlers use this term in reference to the “bad guy”). Jacob wrestled with an Angel of God, and was renamed Yisra-el, which means “one who struggled with God/El.” The Jewish nation of Israel derives its name from this man.

Jews struggle with god… Muslims submit. It’s not difficult to see why these two can’t seem to get along.

Another strange thing I noticed required a test. I have to restart it and document it better in order to feel satisfied with the science, but from anecdotal evidence I have deduced there is a threat of violence on roughly every other page. Randomly flipping to pages and scanning them yielded a near 50/50 chance of violence against non-believers being glorified, and deciding to include both open pages increased this to over 70%. If you include punishments in the afterlife for those who disobey, I am confident it approaches 90%.

The Quran is, without any shadow of a doubt, the most vile and wretched work the world has ever wrought. People who say, “Islam means peace,” should stop reading gibberish in a language they don’t even understand and wake up to the fact that they follow the most overtly militant ideology I have ever read. I have read many religious texts, myths, fables, I’ve even read the biographies of despots. The Quran makes Mein Kampf look like Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

How brave of me to bash Islam to a bunch of atheists and the occasional Christian…