Boreal

Children and The Koran

Imagination, Freewill and the Lies We Are Told

So far we have talked about how words that are an invitation to hate, an incitement to violence and which glorify and revel in cruelty can warp a child’s mind and lead not only to a loss of empathy but sadism. There is another, perhaps even more insidious impact in exposing children to the work of an author who insists he has all the answers.

Long before Werner Heisenberg discovered the Uncertainty Principal, Allah gave us its opposite, thereby pre-emptively voiding Heisenberg's discovery along with those of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Pasteur, Einstein, Niels Bohr, Galen and Company.

45:20 This (Qur’an) is an illumination for mankind, a guidance and mercy unto a people who believe with certainty.

It is not because Muslim children are born less inquisitive that the Muslim world, which constitutes 21 percent of the world’s population (2011), has produced, at this writing, only two Nobel Prize laureates in the physical sciences (1979 physics, 1999 chemistry).

God’s Certainty Decree not only denies much of the progress made in the physical sciences but also humanity’s moral development elevating larceny, slavery, murder and rape into rights and virtues. And, did I mention lying?

4:71 O believers, be on your guard; so march in detachments or march altogether.

4:72 Indeed, among you is one who will stay behind, so that if a disaster befalls you, he will say: “Allah has favoured me, since I have not been a martyr with them.”

4:73 If, however, a bounty from God comes to you, he will say, as though there was no friendship between you and him: “Would that I had been with them; then I would have won a great victory.”

God would even have Mary, shortly after giving birth, lie about Him providing for her and the son whose paternity He vociferously denies throughout the Koran.

19:22 So, she conceived him and she withdrew with him to a distant place.

19:23 Then labour pangs drove her towards the trunk of a palm tree. She said: “I wish I had died before this and had become completely forgotten.”

19:24 Whereupon [the babe (Jesus) or (Gabriel)] called her from beneath her: “Do not grieve. Your Lord has created below you a stream.

19:25 “Shake the trunk of the palm tree towards you and it will drop upon you fresh ripe dates.”

19:26 “Eat, drink and rejoice. Then if you see any human say: ‘I have vowed to the Compassionate to fast, and so I shall not talk today to any human being.’”

Civilization’s progress is very much the story of people who refused to believe with certainty. If enough of us subscribe to Allah’s Certainty Decree — especially His dubious understanding of natural phenomena, which is very much evocative of superstitions from the age in which He communicated His Wisdom to Muhammad—then the march of civilization will not only come to end, it will become a march backwards in time to the period known as the Dark Ages.

The Dark Ages is when we saw revealed truths come into their own. In Europe, the catalyst was the Catholic Church; in the Middle East, that honour went to Islam, a product of the period. Europe emerged from its Dark Ages, in part, because the Bible was not as dogmatic as the clergy would have the faithful believe, and enforcement proved problematic with the central message of the Gospels being about loving your enemies.

William Tyndale’s (1494-1536) translation of the Bible into English ended the dominance of the clergy once and for all and ensured that the Renaissance would not simply be a flash-in-the-pan. The Arabs were not that lucky. Their civilization, before the doom and gloom that was emblematic of the Dark Ages arrived on the Peninsula to stay, was a civilization that loved life and all it had to offer.

I am not aware in the entire history of civilisation of a more gracious, more loving, more vibrant society than that of the Arabs before Islam … [it was a time] … of unbound freedom, lofty sentiments, a nomadic and chivalrous way of life, [a land] of fantasy, joy, mischievousness, bawdy impious poetry, refined love-making …

Ernest Renan, cf. Robert Montagne, La Civilisation du désert

Islam came along and imposed a love of death with a book that offered no compromise, and the Arabs became the Words in both outlook and demeanour.

They were a people of primary colours; or rather of black and white … They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns. They did not understand our metaphysical difficulties, our introspective questioning. They only knew truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our hesitating retinue of finer shades.

This people was black and white not merely in clarity, but in apposition. Their thoughts were at ease only in extremes … they never compromised; they pursued the logic of several incompatible opinions to absurd ends, without perceiving the incongruity.

They were a limited, narrow-minded people, whose inert intellect lay fallow in curious resignation. Their imaginations were vivid, but not creative.

T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Tyndale translated a much more complex and lengthy document than the Koran with its simple repetitive sentences and uncomplicated recurrent message of fear Allah and hate anyone who doesn’t and gain Paradise.

There is no denying the Koran is unlike the religious text westerners are most familiar with, the Bible. For one thing, it is more monotonous.

The Bible, is a cornucopia of genres: the cosmic mythology of Genesis, the legal and ritual code of Leviticus, a multibook national history of Israel, the plaints and alarms of the prophets, the pithy self-help and deep reflection of the wisdom literature, the poetry of the Psalms, the gospel profiles of Jesus, the mystical theology of John, the early church history Acts, the apocalyptic visions of Revelation and Daniel and so on.

Richard Wright, The Evolution of God

You seldom hear a Christian minister say that unless you read the Bible in the original Hebrew, Greek or Latin, you will misunderstand the message. Yet, this is the argument that is made by clerics and scholars to discourage non-Muslim adults who have not mastered Arabic from reading a translation of the Koran whose message they expect children to grasp, but not an experienced translator.

Could those who know better, but try to dissuade non-Muslims from reading an approved translation of a book they encourage children to commit to memory, be lying about the difficulties, as Allah expects them to do if it will confuse His enemies as to His Message?

What children are expected to easily comprehend is that the world is black and white, truth and untruth, and that if they believe in the truth with all their might, god will be kind. If they don’t, then they are bad people to whom bad things will happen.

17:81 And say (Muhammad): “The truth has come and falsehood has perished. Falsehood is ever perishing.”

17:82 And We reveal of the Qur’an that which is healing and merciful to the believers, and it yields nothing but perdition for the wrongdoers.

This is Allah’s uncompromising position and it is this inflexible view of the spiritual world and an almost total wrongheaded view of the physical, e.g., the Earth is flat, which children are expected to accept without question as soon as they can mouth His words over and over so that they are indelibly imprinted in memory and available at a thought’s notice. Other holy books ask you to reflect on God’s words. The Koran is not meant to be reflected upon but committed to memory through rote learning. Benefitting a conquering religion, it is not unlike a military manual whose objective is to condition recruits into reacting to any situation in a reflexive, i.e., unthinking, and predictable manner.

Immersing children into the Koran also dampens what should be a child’s blossoming lifelong curiosity about his surroundings. For a believing parent, it is literally a god-send. The answer to a child’s every question from, “Why is the sky blue?” to “Where do babies come from?” is all there in the Book, even when it isn’t. As children grow into adulthood and face what should be daunting decisions requiring Lawrence’s “introspective questioning,” those easy answers become even more attractive and provide further incentive to believe with certainty. And in that, you have the reason Muslims have remained stuck in a self-imposed Dark Age.

Not unlike ignorance, believing in the Koran “is healing and merciful” to quote God, for it requires little mental effort except mind-numbing repetition. Like a muscle that gets no exercise, the brain atrophies. Give a child’s imagination free rein and you guard against this degenerate condition. Humanity needs a child’s unfettered imagination and curiosity as an adult to solve the real problems that threaten to bring the march of civilization, if not life itself, to an end.

I would further postulate that when a religion puts too many restrictions on the imagination, insanity is the result. This would explain the suicide bomber and his ilk.

33:36 It is not up to any believer, man or woman, when Allah and His Messenger have passed a judgement, to have any choice in their affairs. Whoever disobeys Allah and His Messenger have gone astray in a manifest manner.

Free will, which allows us to put what we imagine to the test, is effectively extinguished by Revelation 33:36. Why not exercise our free will to imagine a world where the Koran is for adults only and put it to the test?