Religion
In reply to the discussion: Many Evangelicals believe/have been taught that the Koran was dictated by demons!!! [View all]Igel
(36,566 posts)"No, it was written by a psychotic-schizophrenic who heard voices." That's much better, I guess.
Now, if I were a Muslim I'm not sure if I would be happier being told that the Prophet was a crazy who managed to dupe people or by a demon who managed to dupe a gullible Muhammed.
Of course, Xians are told either they're duped into believing a simple itinerant populist rabbi was God; that perhaps this itinerant rabbi never actually existed but is a syncretism of various other religions; or, at best, the pre-existing writings that (non-)existent rabbi cited was either put together by somebody who was basically a racist Jewish nationalist or a bunch of similar psychotic-schizophrenics over time. Or maybe charlatans. The difference is that supernatural deception's not usually in the list of options (although I suspect that if you look at rabbinic writings you'll find the claim somewhere that Jesus was crazy or possessed).
The claim that the Prophet was possessed by a devil or by the Devil dates back at least to the early Middle Ages. At first he was a heretic, influenced by heretics and entirely unoriginal but basically bloodthirsty and supporting what we'd describe as ressentiment and imperialism these days. Other Xians or Jews called him "crazy" or "possessed"--keep in mind that they were potential synonyms at the time. Within couple of centuries he was described as a perve or as either possessed or Satan-influenced. Why was this a topic? Look at the history and at relevance.
I suspect that this was either a claim made by Evangelicals after doing some research you didn't or was the obvious deduction that had already been reached very, very many times given a very old set of traditional assumptions and beliefs. This kind of claim is never made in a vacuum. I saw very few denunciations of the USSR in 2002 or 2009, for example. Few got up to say how horrible their proxy wars were, few had much to say about how the "dictatorship of the proletariat" had produced such environmental degradation on such a wide scale, or to talk about the GULags. There being no USSR to argue against, arguing against the USSR seemed rather pointless. You argue against foes. You don't take a lot of time arguing against irrelevancies.
The church I was in in the late '70s and through the '80s had been affected by a set of heresies (it's why it existed). So one minister had a series of sermons on heresies. Islam, originally considered a Xian heresy, was included. And with it, the allegations about Muhammed. This was in maybe '79 or '80, when Islam was still not much of an issue in the US.
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