Wednesday, December 20, 2006

The Bible and the Quran: Which You Believe More?

When Muslims and Christians stuck in their religious dialogue each one rightly use his book as the decisive reference. This is an inherited bias. So the most important question in religious dialogue is which reference is the decisive one. Let us examine the differences between both books:
1- According to the author Dr. Gary Miller: The Bible is a collection of writings by many different authors. The Qur'an is a dictation. The speaker in the Qur'an - in the first person - is God talking directly to man. In the Bible you have many men writing about God and you have in some places the word of God speaking to men and still in other places you have some men simply writing about history. The Bible consists of 66 small books. About 18 of them begin by saying: This is the revelation God gave to so and soÂ… The rest make no claim as to their origin. 2- The Quran dictated to Muhammad by God in 23 years, the bible is inspired in part by God over thousands of years and only partly so. The man who had the Quran dictated to him, has his life as open book recorded in precise matter than the writers of the Bible.
3- As Gary Miller indicated: The Quran make it clear that this book form God the verse. 2:2 "THIS DIVINE WRIT - let there be no doubt about it is [meant to be] a guidance for all the God-conscious". Compare that to one of the four accounts of the life of Jesus, Luke begins by saying: “many people have written about this man, it seems fitting for me to do so too”. That is all… no claim of saying “ these words were given to me by God here they are for you it is a revelation”, there is no mention of this. The Bible does not contain self-reference, that is, the word 'Bible' is not in the Bible. Nowhere does the Bible talk about itself.
4- Gary miller says as well: So that the Qur'an does not demand belief - the Qur'an invites belief, and here is the fundamental difference. It is not simply delivered as: Here is what you are to believe, but throughout the Qur'an the statements are always: Have you O man thought of such and such, have you considered so and so. It is always an invitation for you to look at the evidence; now what do you believe ?
The citation of the Bible very often takes the form of what is called in Argumentation: Special Pleading. Special Pleading is when implications are not consistent. When you take something and you say: Well that must mean this, but you donÂ’t use the same argument to apply it to something else. To give an example, I have seen it in publications many times, stating that Jesus must have been God because he worked miracles. In other hand we know very well that there is no miracle ever worked by Jesus that is not also recorded in the Old Testament as worked by one of the prophets. You had amongst others, Elijah, who is reported to have cured the leper, raise the dead boy to life and to have multiplied bread for the people to eat - three of thfavoritevourite miracles cited by Jesus. If the miracles worked by Jesus proved he was God, why donÂ’t they prove Elijah was God ? This is Special Pleading, if you see what I mean. The implications are not consistent.
5- The Quran has miracles both scientificallyifically and linguistically that the Bible is not up to.
6-The Bible has inconsistancies and the Quran do not. The verse "If it was not from God they would have found a lot of inconsistencies".

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