www.skepticsannotatedbibl.../long.html
Claim in SAQ ::: Give tidings (O Muhammad) of a painful doom to Christians and Jews.
Which Jews and which Christians? Surely a skeptic would want to know. And, if he knew, he would want to say.
From the translation that SAB/Q uses
Quote:
[9:34] O ye who believe! Lo! many of the (Jewish) rabbis and the (Christian) monks devour the wealth of mankind wantonly and debar (men) from the way of Allah. They who hoard up gold and silver and spend it not in the way of Allah, unto them give tidings (O Muhammad) of a painful doom,
So it's about clerics that take money from people (donations in church/temple, perhaps?) and then not spend the money in the way of God.
The way they misused the money was to hoard it for themselves. (They bury it, in the translation of Yusuf Ali). And so, in the next verse, they get branded with it on their foreheads and backs (in hell).
If you wanted a good argument with Muslims, you'd start with [9:31], which talks (in a sense I interpret as a warning) about taking clerics as Lords beside God. This is something it would be good to talk Muslims out of. Some already disagree with the idea of a Muslim Pope -- an infallible Ayatollah.
But (and please excuse the paranoia) there's a nagging voice which tells me that I've misunderstood the purpose of this site. Do you call it "The Skeptic's Annotated Quran" because only skeptics should use it? Because only skeptics would check on the claims before believing they are true?
If the point of this site is entertainment -- fine, have fun. If you want it to be a resource that skeptics can use to find arguments when debating theists, then it can be. But it's going to take a lot of work. Probably too much for one man, but there's a community here!
Personally, I'd rather start such a resource from scratch. We were talking about doing something like that on the JREF. There are too many bad -- easily refuted -- "gems" on SAB/Q, which will simply convince theists that skeptics are shallow, closed-minded fools. That's a big price to pay for a joke.
