User talk:Crazymulgogi

Crazy, why did you delete the sentence re Luxenberg not being widely accepted in the academic community? It's true, as you can see at the article on the man. If we have the OTHER sentence without that caveat, it gives his views more weight than they deserve. If we don't have the caveat, I'm going to remove the other sentence.

If this is all about criticizing Islam, arguments re the textual integrity of the Qur'an seem to me to miss the point. If Muhammad had had a tape recorder going the entire time he was giving revelations, and we had a Qur'an that was guaranteed to contain every "um" and throat-clearing, that would still be no proof that the Qur'an was a divine revelation. I could take some mind-altering drug, free-associate for several hours, tape it, and publish a transcript ... but an exact transcript of nonsense is still nonsense. The question is whether the Qur'an is revelation or nonsense, not whether or not it's a good transcript. Zora 12:05, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Zora, Well, I'm sorry if it upsets you, I wouldn't really mind putting the line back. However, what I was thinking: in scholarship, the number of people that agree or disagree with someone's arguments is virtually meaningless. We're dealing with who's got the best arguments, not with democracy or something. I was actually preparing a criticism of his thesis showing that his use of Syriac isn't always sound. The statement that some, or many, or the majority of people disagree with something is a commonplace. Therefore, out of these considerations, I thought I might as well remove it. The fact that some people could be led to give his views "more weight than they deserve" could be compensated by mentioning other people's interesting minority opinions. Crazymulgogi 13:22, 2 May 2006 (UTC)