This conversation is interesting, but I would like to ask you to please circumscribe each post to a single topic and, if possible, to a single passage of the Bible. Otherwise it is impossible for me to keep up with all of the topics and objections that you are raising. Let's focus for the moment on the issue of morality. You claim that I said that morality was relative. This is not the case. What I said is that God had to prepare the people of Israel for the arrival of the Messiah and for the Messiah's propitiatory sacrifice. The Law of Moses was a significant part of these preparations, since it introduced the idea of sin as an offense against God, the idea of a propitiatory sacrifice involving a perfect and innocent victim, the importance of holiness, etc. There is progressive revelation in the Bible, but notice that in the Bible progressive revelation makes sense because it took place during a period of about 2000-3000 years. This is the time needed to introduce revolutionary ideas into a civilization that is refractory to such ideas. There is progressive revelation in the Qur'an as well, but in the Qur'an the whole process takes place in 20-30 years. In some cases, in a period of time that is even shorter than that. That's why progressive revelation does not make sense in the Qur'an, especially taking into account that the ideas that were being introduced by Muhammad were vastly inferior, from a moral perspective, to the ideas that had already been introduced centuries before by Jewish and Christians, both of whom were present in 7th century Arabia. For instance, monotheism was part of both Judaism and Christianity. In fact, Christian monotheism is a much more developed idea than Islamic monotheism, since it is much more complex while at the same time being faithful to the ideas contained in the Old and New Testament. Hence, Islamic monotheism represented a regression to coarser, more primitive ideas. The same can be said of almost all of the morality that was introduced by Islam. You don't need to prepare a population to accept ideas that are inferior to those that they already held.

 

Language (The language you are writing in)