The stupidest book ever written...

There are so many books deserving of this title. According to Red Dwarf, "Football: It's a funny old game" gets the award, but in my opinion, it really has to be the Qur'an. What's even more terrifying is that Qur'anic literacy seems to be much higher in the Islamic world that Biblical literacy is in the Christian world. I mean, most Christians don't really seem to have a clue what's in the Bible, and yet many muslims spend years memorising the Qur'an from go to woe. Admittedly, it's in Arabic, and classical Arabic at that, so there is a sizeable chunk of the world's muslim population who have to rely on translation than the actual text, but nevertheless, devout muslims seem more familiar with the book than devout Christians are with theirs. This is what really worries me - can' they see just how amazingly, stupidly, incredibly erroneous this book is?

The Qur'an starts with a prayer, which, to the skeptical mind, might straight away bring into question the idea that it was dictated by god verbatim. After all, why does god need to pray to himself? Oddly enough, the one "atheist" I found who converted to Islam (and is now a lecturer in mathematics at Kansas university) considered this to be a really smart move - it really pulled him. I don't see it for myself, but there you go. The book itself is not organised thematically, or chronologically, but rather by length, and often the suras themselves will jerk randomly from one topic to another, without any kind of coherent reason. Many of the topics raised in the Qur'an require some kind of relevant historical knowledge that most people don't have today.

Despite what muslims say, the Qur'an just repeatedly contradicts itself, again and again and again, hence the necessity of the doctrine of abrogation, where by later suras abrogate earlier ones. This leaves us with a situation where all the Qur'anic nasties (jihad, killing infidels, beating women etc) are pretty much the only ones still relevant. All the niceties (don't force your religion down other peoples throats) are abrogated. On top of this, the Qur'an is piled high with really boring, uninteresting, go nowhere stories. It's kind of like Muhammad picked the worst, most bland stories from the bible, forgot most of the details, and cobbled together just the bare bones of the story. How 1.3 billion people can believe (or at least, claim to believe) this is the pure word of god, unadulterated, good forever, is really beyond me. Worst of all though, is that I've never heard a muslim give a good answer. They always fall back on the "you haven't translated it properly" excuse. Well, I'm reading muslim sources guys, you'd think they'd at least try and get it right.