The Koran
Reader comment on item: Study the Koran?

Submitted by Arlinda DeAngelis (United States), Jan 23, 2004 at 00:49

I am one of those people who read the Koran on the web. I sat there for hours trying to figure out what I was reading.

This holy text advocated the killing of infidels, the Christians, and held a particular venom for the Jews who also deserved death.

Then I found the oddest text that said something to the effect that if an enemy appears at the home of an Islamic, he is honor bound to house him and feed him. (I guess he could kill the Jew or infidel in the morning.)

I came away from the Koran more confused then ever. It was Genghis Khan meets Martha Stewart.

I do not know what value this text has to civilization or to the West. It is my interpretation that the Koran is a... version of the Bible. It was, indeed, a very strange book.

The importance of the Bible is the story of the religious concept of one God. The God of Abraham. This is the best cosmology for mankind to find the truth. It freed the mind of the need to please three hundred Gods, living and dead and it opened the way for Western civilization to expand, grow and change the world forever. The God chosen by the Hebrews was the God of peace because peace is more virtuous than war.

The Ten Commandments in word and structure are 10 simple rules on which nations and people, particularly our own, have become bastions of liberal democracy and orderly societies. It became the crux of Christianity in which we are all equal under one God.

As an atheist, raised as a Christian, I find meaning and poetry in Biblical texts but none in the Koran.

I am not a scholar of Midddle Eastern anything. But the Koran to a lay person makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. And, I would not trust Islam to give me a interpretation as that seems to change daily by the level of hatred the "religion of peace" is slinging at the moment.

Thank you Dr. Pipes for giving us the proper texts to read in order to understand the imperial Islamist army of terror because the Koran seems to be a book of contradictions, obfuscations and meaningless prattle in favor of the few at the expense of the many.

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