Comments by "Sandy Tatham" (@sandytatham3592) on "Religion in Pre-Islamic Arabia" video.

@yade5979 : There's a problem with the research that historians can do about Muhammed because there's no hard evidence of Muhammed's existence. The 'history' is all compiled decades after he is said to have lived and much of it relies on circular reasoning. However I've never doubted the ability of people like Muhammed to receive revelations. Millions of people 'speak to God' today. Hundreds of scholars study linguistics and ancient texts, and they publish their findings online for everyone to assess. Islam is currently undergoing the rigorous examination that other religions went through in the last centuries. Yes, I do believe that all humans are loved unconditionally by our Creator-God, even the 'sinners'. They all play their roles in teaching the human collective how to evolve in consciousness. The difficulty in spiritual evolution comes when humans are bound to outdated dogma. So you have no issue with the male-centric revelations? You see nothing wrong with the rights for women in Islam which are considered applicable for ALL time? #Sharia
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How do you know that the Qur'an comes from God? If so, it's a very different 'god' than the one of the Christians and Jews. Even Muhammed wasn't sure when he began to receive the revelations. Many entities could use humans to spread whatever message they want, as we are not alone in this Universe. I find the Qur'an to contain too much division, intolerance and judgement to be from a high-vibrational god of love.
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@yade5979 : I understand what you say: "God isnt just love, he is mercy, he is just." However the 'god' of Islam is VERY different from that of Christianity. It makes much more sense for a Creator-God to love me unconditionally. Being 'just and punishing' is very much reflective of the ethos of the Bedouin Arabs at that time. I'm not religious and I also don't believe in the traditional Christian concept of hellfire, and nor do a lot of practising Christians. I believe 'hell' is simply the state of a soul who doesn't know God or love. Muhammed was very likely skilled in the Arab Bedouin form of oral recitation, so there's nothing unusual in him receiving 'revelations' that conform to his time and abilities. The Qur'an doesn't consist of very sophisticated writing. Over 30% of it is repetitive, some not even able to be understood, it re-tells a lot of apocryphal (dubious) stories of earlier religious belief, and there are many inconsistencies and abrogations. It also bothers me that a good many of the revelations were conveniently favourable to Muhammed, ie. he should continue to have sex with slave girls, he was permitted to marry more than four wives (when more than one wife per man effectively commodifies women), those wives couldn't marry anyone after his death, the reward in Jannah appears to be very male-centric, males dominate women with no path to equality between male-female, there is no lower age limit for girls to be married off, etc. I find it disturbing if Muhammed is considered to be the 'best example' for all time and he accepted all of these 'revelations' without voicing any doubt. I believe there is a 'universal consciousness' that we can all receive wisdom from, ie. everything in time and space is connected. There are also entities which can manipulate the human race by seeding a message through the consciousness of a human. It's important to use discernment. If the messages are full of peace and love, then fine. If they contain any intolerance or hate, then I would be extremely suspicious of their origins.
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@worfoz : Muhammed's story about being taken up into the heavens has parallels with the Raelian Movement, whose founder has a similar experience on a spaceship. He was told how life on Earth was created by extraterrestrials, and that there was a competition to create the best humans. The group of scientists who made the Jews were the winners of the quest to create the most sophisticated human race. Their laboratory was on Temple Mount.
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@yade5979 : There are no very early preserved records of The Qur'an. And influential Muslim leaders are now saying that up to 90% of the Hadiths might not be trustworthy. Criticism of the Islamic sources was hampered because of the dangers of retaliation due to the blasphemy law. People who 'slandered' Islam or Muhammed were literally killed or had to go into hiding. However, since the advent of the internet, and with the growing trend worldwide for Muslims to leave Islam, there are now many more people speaking out and publishing their analyses of the early source documents. Plus 'evidence' means much more than books such as the Qur'an, The Sira, Hadiths and Tafsirs. It includes writing by people from outside Islam, historians of the Middle East in the 7th century. Hard evidence also includes coins and inscriptions, of which there are few found from the earliest time of Muhammed, and those that have been found provide contradictory stories. As for rights for women and girls and Islam, the most abhorrent one for me is that there is no age limit for girls to be married off [Qur'an 65:4]. A girl who has not yet menstruated can be handed over to a much older man by her guardian, and it's considered honourable because Muhammed married Aisha and consummated their marriage when she was nine and still playing with dolls. The practice of polygamy is also very damaging to the social structure of a community because it treats women as commodities, and it leaves the poorer young men with less of a chance to get married. No I don't believe Sharia is "some sort of book". And I do know that implementation of Sharia varies depending on the caliph or ruler, the school of jurisprudence that is followed, and the wider society. For example, the Ottoman Empire was known to soften its implementation of Sharia, possibly because of pressure from European society which valued individual freedoms more than the collective.
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@yade5979 : I see my last reply disappeared so I guess I've been reported or the YouTube system doesn't like what I say 😕. A couple of final points: I judge a religion by what its religious scholars say in their rulings, not by what Muslims do. Most Muslims have FAR better morality than what is found in The Qur'an or Sunnah. Just because a person can't read and write, it doesn't mean they don't have the intelligence to be great orators. Muhammed was from a community which had a strong oral tradition, so I'm not at all surprised by the quality of The Qur'an which could easily have been written down by others around him. What does surprise me is that your 'god' says many times in The Qur'an that Muhammed is the "best example" for ALL time. Muhammed is said to have done many horrible things which the majority of Muslims wouldn't do today, thankfully. Back to my original point, please always be discerning when any person receives 'revelations'. If such revelations were received in the 21st century they would NOT be taken seriously because of the violence and intolerance that they contain.
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@yade5979 : The maker of the video would never be so petty as to remove my comments. It's probably YouTube's #Sharia police, or a Muslim who felt hurt by something I said.
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@yade5979 : "Up to 90% of the Hadiths might not be trustworthy." Your reply: Source please. And nobody ever claimed all hadith are trustworthy, not sure what you are arguing against, There is a really strict science to judging hadiths as trustworthy or not. Are you really sure that there is a 'strict science' to judging hadiths? "There is no unanimous consensus among experts on the very issue of how many the mutawātir hadīths are. For Muhammad ‘Abduh, one of the fathers of Islamic reformism of the early twentieth century, the sayings mutawātir can be counted on the fingers of the hands, for the theologian and exegete al-Suyūtī (d. 1505) there were 113, while the Moroccan traditionalist and jurist al-Kattānī (d. 1927) counted 310 mutawātir hadīths.". This whole article is very interesting.. https://www.oasiscenter.eu/en/saudi-vision2030-and-mutawatir-hadith-an-unexpected-combination Maybe the 10% figure, which is quoted by many Islamic sources, is about right?
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@yade5979 : You are very hard to please!!! It would help me understand the way you think if I knew what country you lived in. Why do you hide your identity? If people cared about everyone's feelings all the time, our societies would never progress. Social change happens when people criticise bad ideas. #FreedomOfSpeech
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@yade5979 : Yes there are a few limits to freedom of speech. You can't incite violence, and you might get sued if you slander someone. But you do have the freedom to offend, and everyone has the freedom to be offended.
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@yade5979 : Using speech that offends isn't the same as burning a nation's flag. I would always be extremely careful about what I said or did in Algeria, because Islamic countries curtail freedom of speech. Look at the high number of journalists they imprison.
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@yade5979 : Yes I do agree that freedom of speech is sadly under threat everywhere today, but Islamic nations have never had the freedom of speech that we have in the West. Offensive speech is easy to handle if you are strong in your beliefs and values. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me" is the advice that I grew up with. Also..."Turn the other cheek" and "forgive them for they know not what they do."
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@worfoz : I don't know anything about the Ark of the Covenant and I don't know Oannes or Apkallu (will check their story out), but I have half-read a book about Inanna and her father Enki. My interest in the Raelian story was mostly about the 'missing DNA link' being inserted via Intelligent Design into the animal vehicle on Earth. From memory, there were seven different laboratories working on the project, with the most successful result, aka the 'chosen ones', being the Jews from the Temple Mount laboratory. This fascinates me and I'm not Jewish.
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@worfoz : Yes I pretty much agree with what you say, though I'm not exactly certain what part the Ark of the Covenant played. I found 2 Samuel 6:3–8 very interesting!!! I think life on Earth is a huge experiment and we are privileged to get the chance to experience it. When our 'collective consciousness' evolves sufficiently, ie. when enough of us are able to re-attune to the higher frequencies of ancient times, we will be able to bring more beneficial knowledge from other planets to our Earth. We will once again become like the ancient gods and ascended masters.
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@Dharmik Rakshak : Where are Jews and Christians at each other's throats today?
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@dharmikrakshak8340 : "Hitler was Christian". That's rubbish. And even if he was, he wasn't acting on the Christian faith. He had his own personal ideology. There's nothing in Christianity that encourages people to enact physical violence against others. You talk about being "at each other's throats". I can only see Islam involved in that scenario today. And let's see how peaceful the 'Indian' faiths truly are as the spirit of nationalism grows stronger (with the exception of Jainism).
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@dharmikrakshak8340 : Sinn Fein are an Irish nationalist political group. The papal bull "Inter Caetera" of 1493 was issued prior to the Reformation of Christianity. My question was about Christianity in the world TODAY.
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@dharmikrakshak8340 : Just because the majority of members of a political movement are religious, it doesn't mean that their religion 'commands' them to fight. As with the Buddhists who have been fighting against Muslims in Myanmar, sometimes nationalism overrides pacifism. I guess it's similar in India where Hindutva represents 'cultural nationalism' and not a religious movement?
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@dharmikrakshak8340 : Myanmar government are fighting against the Rohingyas who were using terrorism to create an Islamic nation out of the Rakhine State. The government's Buddhist faith is not relevant. It is a political fight. The Irish were fighting for an independent state. Their Catholic religion is not relevant. The Irish people were driven by nationalism.
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Ale Eee : Or the messages may have been 'seeded' to Muhammed from some external source in order to create division and mistrust between the humans who followed the established religions and Muhammed's new ideology. It would have been easy for the god of this new ideology to say that all the messages which came through previous prophets had been 'corrupted over time'. The fact that Islam's message contains more violence, inequality, judgement, intolerance, control and fear than most religions makes me very suspicious of the source of Muhammed's 'stream'.
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