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mahfuz1019 (October 1, 2008 at 4:28 am)
what have made you think that you are worthy of God's love? God loves only those who are worthy of His love.
grezkorave (August 28, 2008 at 11:26 pm)
a god that loves you will send you to a horrible place with pain 4ever if you wont accept him.. what a retard world we are living in!
wayofsalaf (June 7, 2008 at 12:06 pm)
yassir qadhi has been refuted and warned aginst by the ullamah
ehsanul (May 11, 2008 at 3:11 am)
3)(continued 3) - This is true for any verse in the Qur'an, it is open to interpretation and I'd say that it is meant to be interpreted, but some interpretations are invalid (basically when they contradict reality, or something else in the Qur'an). For the sun setting example in particular, it should be easy to see. When I say "I love watching the sun set in the ocean", I do not mean it actually sets into the ocean, but this is simply the way we talk.
ehsanul (May 11, 2008 at 3:06 am)
3)(continued 2) - But now that we know that the literal interpretation cannot be correct, we cannot use it, and have to interpret the verse in some other manner. That is not to say that the other interpretations were not valid before, they certainly were always valid. The preference was simply for the most literal interpretation, when it did not contradict anything else, but any other interpretation that is consistent with reality and the rest of the Qur'an is also valid.
ehsanul (May 11, 2008 at 3:02 am)
3)(continued) - Thus, the tradition in interpretation has been that the most literal interpretation of verses is to be taken when it seems acceptable, and metaphor is turned to only when the literal meaning is clearly unacceptable, so as to minimize speculation on the meaning of verses and discourage private interpretation. There are many verses that are clearly not to be interpreted literally, but to some interpreters in the past, a literal setting of the sun did not seem unreasonable.
ehsanul (May 11, 2008 at 2:55 am)
3) The Qur'an says of itself that it contains verses which are not open to interpretation, and those which are not. What category a verse falls into is to be apparent by its very nature. For example, a statement in the Qur'an saying "God is one" cannot be interpreted away. We are told not to rely the most on interpretable verses, but that the clear ones come first. When something falls into the second category, one cannot insist on a certain interpretation when others are also viable.
ehsanul (May 11, 2008 at 2:45 am)
2) I hadn't heard of this "egg shaped earth" thing before, and just answered without doing research. But it occurred to me that there might be a subtlety in translation, as I've known there to be elsewhere, given the richness of Arabic. So I did some trivial "research" and found a few of those sites that make exaggerated claims of science in the Qur'an in an almost propagandist manner, but then I found a more reputable site which seemed to provide a reasonable answer, and I'll provide the link.
ehsanul (May 11, 2008 at 2:33 am)
1)(continued) - Thus, it isn't that a number that's both even and hard is too difficult for God or anyone, but that such a number cannot exist, and is not a thing to be brought into existence, by definition. I say the same of triangles with 4 sides, a being who is both mortal and immortal, and any other "thing" which basically contradicts itself, because these abstract "things" are not really things at all, but words strung together that can have no real meaning.
ehsanul (May 11, 2008 at 2:28 am)
1) There is a distinction between practical impossibility and logical impossibility. Things like miracles etc. would be practical impossibilities. But what this means is that these things are extremely difficult. A lot of the things our computers can do now would've been thought impossible and miraculous years ago. But logical impossibility is different. A number that is both even and odd is logically impossible due to the definition of even and odd. The definition makes them mutually exclusive. |
