₦airaland Forum

Asmara, Eritrea
Asmara was named the world’s safest city by Madote.com. Visitors to the city have observed that strangers will offer to help you if you’re lost, and crime is so low that people don’t even lock up their bicycles.

Stupid choice

Because Eritrea is ruled by a fascist police state. Their government is the most repressive in all of Africa hands down. No wonder there is not any crime. In addition a large percentage of young men have fled the country to avoid military service.

Abuamam:
Whatever non-Islamic sources exist were still narrated by Muslim historians. Also, the emphasis on written documents is not valid in Islam, since Muslim narrators took pains to collate the names and background of every single narrator in their chain of narrations.

Your post implies very little knowledge of history. Islam was revealed over the lifetime of the prophet (saw) and was a totally radical change away from the religious status quo. The opposition he faced from his own family members and tribal leaders was evidence of this.

Also, if you look at pre-Islamic Arabian structure as compared to Roman Empire, you would realise how far-fetched your idea of Islam being developped over the centuries is. The Arabs had no central command or rulers like the Romans. They were essentially feudal tribes or villages centred around major oases and minor village structures. Many consisted of a few family units banded together for protection and alliances against other tribes. The idea that they came together to create anything is preposterous. Even if we were to agree, for the sake of argument, that they did create the religion, why did they put a relatively poor and unknown person as the head of the new religion? The prophet (saw) was not one of the rulers, even in his provincial town of Mecca. He was neither rich nor prominent; choosing him to be the leader of all Arabs would have been highly improbable. Another notable difference from xtianity is that, unlike Jesus, the historicity of the prophet (saw) is too well established to be in doubt... even from non-Islamic sources, let alone the whole body of hadith and seerah.

There is also the argument that Muslim scholars and historians over 15 centuries, came together with all the Arabs that they had duped imto Islam (because Islamic knowledge has never been restricted to a possibly conniving priestly class, but is openly accessible), and created a hoax of such magnitude, along with Scripture, history, narrations, laws and codes of conduct, all in an age where the whole of Arabia probably had less than a couple of hundred people who could read or write. Come on; how plausible is that.

Actually, my training is in history and I work in the field of history. Doesn't mean I know everything, but I know what to do with information.

Sharia was developed over several centuries (thus Islamic practice). Look at the various madhabs, whose origins were a couple of hundred years after Muhammad. Prior to the founders of those madhabs, there is almost nothing to suggest that the rulers had any standard source of practice, outside of what is in the Quran, which actually isn't very much. Oral tradition, if you know much about historiography, is highly unreliable as a means of precisely transmitting information, so it doesn't really matter whether or not we have names of the transmitters from Muhammad. All we can do is put a big question mark on the whole lot of hadiths, until we can find written sources to corroborate.

There are way too many holes in the early Islamic tradition. In fact, upon the arrival of the Arab armies in Palestine, the earliest non-Islamic commentators give some information that challenges the hadiths. In addition, the earliest biographies of Muhammad, written by Urwah ibn Zubayr and Ibn Ishaq, do not exist anymore. Strange that the earliest biographies of what is an extremely important person should not come down to us, and in fact some people who read ibn Ishaq's biography complained that it did not portray Muhammad in a good light all the time, which may be why it was destroyed. But we will never know what was in his biography of Muhammad. Instead we are left with histories and books of hadiths written down later on. This is not reliable history by any stretch.

And why, you ask, would the rulers of the Arab empire choose Muhammad, from a small town in Arabia, as a prophet? Well I can believe that he himself claimed to be a prophet. I don't dispute that, but the rulers of the Arab empire were from his town and maybe even related to him, so it would fit in well with their claim to religious as well as political authority. After all, religion is an excellent tool to control ignorant masses.

In other words, the story given by Muslims is hardly reliable. Though I believe that at least some of it is true, I don't know how much. Early Christianity has the exact same problem. Coincidence? Maybe not.

Abuamam:
She's a born again xtian.

What's the difference between born again and insane?

nsiazu:
What has the bible prophesied that haven't come to pass?

Uh.....Jesus has not come back.

nsiazu:
She's not. No wonder the bible says the truth is always bitter.

And the bitter truth is that Jesus is not returning.

She's insane.

mmsen:
The problem with relying on Islamic sources is that you ignore the non-Islamic sources. There were Arabs who were not Muslims and there were people in that region who were not Arabs who would have mentioned the Kaaba in their writings.

That's the whole problem right there. There is a lack of non-Islamic sources, either writing or archaeological, to corroborate the Islamic sources, virtually all of which were written down more than 150 years after the time in question.

My personal belief is that "Islam" was created over a period of a couple of centuries, and was expressly done so by the Arab rulers who wanted to redirect the beliefs of the people in their new empire away from locations in Persia (Zoroastrian religion) and the Byzantine Empire (Christianity) towards a place where they originated from (Arabia), so that they could not only have political credibility but also religious credibility. And so Islam was born, out of a mix of these religions + Judaism so that they could claim to be a continuation of the most ancient religious tradition in the region.

In my view it is similar to Christianity in this regards, as modern Christianity is largely a product of the politics of the late Roman Empire and not the actual life of Jesus himself (if he existed).

Actually, God/Yahweh is one of the few characters in literature who is even more arrogant, narcissistic, and childish than Kanye.

a favourite

Emmalot121:
Since you don't believe there is God, referring to the things that doesn't exist is not a good argument, is it? In order to make the above statement, you have to prove to me those gods exist.
P.S. Jews shouldn't be in that post.

Look around you at this beautiful world of ours. Isn't that enough to prove the existence of Sango?

Yes it is a mortal sin. I can have god forgive this terrible act if you can give me some money. Dollars only. My fee is $419.

Sleep paralysis affects many people around the world, but westerners do not believe it is caused by witches, rather they say it is just a biological phenomenon, in which the motor nervous system remains switched off for a few seconds after the person has awakened out of REM sleep. No witchcraft, no demons.

Got to love Gore Vidal.....

Here's a few.

Religion is a myth invented by people to oppress and take advantage of other people. Powerful people will always use it to persecute less powerful. Whoever wants to get married, let them get married.

I've pushed several Christians and Muslims into atheism or agnosticism. I'm very persuasive in real life.

Forcing any religion on children is child abuse.

The reason I abandoned religion and am now an atheist can be summed up ironically with a verse from the Bible

"When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways." 1 Corinthians 13:11

I also like the fact that Jesus is doing the 'duckface'.

Macelliot:
Once you becomes an atheist, morality doesn't exit......
Your wife keeps seducing and tempting other men...
No wonder, The rate of infidelity and divorce seems very high....
U have lost your conscience...
THANKS ALOT....
You just defined who an atheist really is.....

So all those people cheating on their wives and divorcing in Nigeria are atheists? Then why are so many of them church- and mosque-goers who profess a belief in god?

Misogynist2014:
Atheists are free from sin. Some people just love deceiving themselves, we have our history books, even the solemn crimes committed today and the killing of Muslim couples. I don't care what you say because the Bible I read doesn't support violence and holy wars (jihad), therefore, anything you type on Christianity, given the considerable knowledge I have, is inconsequential.

"Sin is an imaginary disease invented in order to sell you an imaginary cure"

I am not even sure that Jesus existed. If he did, he was probably Arab-looking.

-- Atheists, agnostics and religiously unaffiliated people will increase in the United States (from 16% to 26%) but decline as a share of the total worldwide population.

Challenge accepted!

This report is an educated guess, not a crystal ball. I see this as an opportunity to change the course of history by proving them wrong. The non-religious portion of the population will continue to grow as long as we have internet, and as long as access to education increases.

I would add that an atheist who is open to the possibility, however slim, that scientific evidence could prove the existence of god, would also be a freethinker.

DProDG:
DO NOT LET ZE ATHEISTS PEOPLE DECEIVE YOU INTO DOUBTING YOUR FAITH! ALTHOUGH EVERYTHING THEY SAY IS VERIFIABLE FROM OVERWHELMING RELIABLE INDEPENDENT SOURCES, THEY IS LIES! LIES I TELL YOU!! LIES!!!















ALSO ZE EARTH IS 6000YEARS OLD

But brother, 6000 years isn't literally 6000 years in our years, it symbolizes 6000 god-years. Using the formula that came to me while praying, I calculated that 1 god-year equals 750,000 of our years. So if you multiply that by 6000 years, it equals 4.5 billion years, which is the actual age of the earth!!!! So the Bible is actually completely true on this issue and agrees with science! How could the Bible be correct thousands of years before scientists confirmed it!!
Checkmate atheists!

Macelliot:
Are u a satanist?

No. I'm atheist. Satan does not exist; I was making a joke.

tartar9:
whether fake or not,nothing can happen except by the permission/will of Allah,ultimately all power belongs to Allah the Lord of the worlds.

Sorry, Allah was killed in a tragic accident on the Lagos-Ibadan highway last year when the taxi he was riding in lost its brakes and crashed into a beer lorry. Satan is now in charge.

I performed a miracle last weekend when I changed beer into urine.