u/Juicydicken

Surah At-Tariq 86:6-7 states that humans are created from a fluid ejected from between the backbone and the ribs.

Sperm is produced in the testes. This has been understood for centuries and is not disputed by anyone. The backbone and ribs are nowhere near the testes and play no role in sperm production.

Muslims typically have three responses. The first is that it refers to the embryo implanting between the spine and pelvis area. This does not work because the verse is describing the origin of the fluid, not the location of implantation, and the Arabic is not ambiguous about this. The second is that it refers to the embryonic origin of reproductive organs. This is retrofitting modern biology onto a text that shows no awareness of embryonic development elsewhere.

A third response is that the verse refers to other fluids involved in reproduction, such as seminal fluid from the prostate or seminal vesicles, which do sit closer to that region. This also fails. The verse is not describing a supporting fluid. It is describing the substance from which the human being is created. That is sperm. If God meant a broader mixture of fluids he would not have used it as the basis for human creation. And even if you accept this interpretation, the seminal vesicles are still not between the backbone and the ribs. They are in the pelvis, well below the ribs

The more important point is that this is not a hadith. Muslims can and do dismiss inconvenient hadith by questioning the chain of narration. That escape route does not exist here. This is the direct word of God in the preserved text that 1.8 billion people believe is perfect and uncorrupted.

A perfect book written by the creator of human biology should not get human biology wrong.

At work, colleagues walk past me to chat with someone else. At the school run, parents avoid eye contact even when I’m trying to catch their eye just to say hi. The other day I was walking back with another parent who said they needed to go a different way, then I saw them turn back onto the same road further down. The same people are warm and friendly with my wife even when I’m standing right there with her.

At work recently a new person joined and was talking to me and another colleague. The colleague kept making eye contact with the new person but seemed to avoid looking at me throughout the whole conversation. I have vitiligo so that might be a factor for some people, but I think the bigger issue is that I come across as arrogant before I’ve even spoken. I’m actually quite shy, which probably makes me seem distant. And even people who do get to know me a bit still seem intimidated, despite me being respectful and polite.

How do you work on changing the impression you give off when you’re not even sure what’s causing it?

God is said to be omniscient and omnipotent. He created Iblis(Satan). He knew before creation that Iblis would rebel, refuse to bow to Adam, and spend eternity corrupting human souls. He created him anyway. He then placed two naive humans in a garden with this being, knowing they would be deceived. Then he punished them and all their descendants for it.

The free will defence does not apply here. Satan is not a human being given free will as a gift. He is an angel created for obedience who somehow overcame divine design to rebel. If God did not foresee that, he is not omniscient. If he did foresee it and proceeded anyway, he is not good.

Muslims often say Satan serves a purpose, that he is a trial for humanity. But this concedes the point entirely. It means God deliberately introduced a corruptor into human existence, knowing most people across history would fail the trial and burn forever. A God who engineers mass damnation for his own purposes is not worthy of worship. He is worthy of prosecution.

The honest explanation is simpler. Satan is borrowed mythology, a figure that made sense in polytheistic pagan times where good and evil gods competed. Jammed into strict monotheism, he becomes a logical catastrophy. You cannot have an all powerful, all knowing, all good God and a successful cosmic deceiver. The two cannot coexist!

When Mohammed wanted to marry Zaynab, the ex-wife of his adopted son Zayd, there was a cultural problem. Arabs at the time treated adopted sons like biological sons, so marrying your adopted son’s ex-wife was seen as wrong. Convenient then that Quran 33:37 came down at exactly that moment, telling Mohammed he had to marry her, and also abolishing the custom of treating adopted sons like biological ones. Two problems…one verse…perfect timing.

When the four wife limit became an obstacle, Quran 33:50 arrived. It gave Mohammed specific permission to take more wives than any other Muslim was allowed. Not a general ruling. A personal exemption. For one man. Delivered by God.

When Aisha mocked Mohammed for always getting revelations that benefited him, his response was a new revelation. Quran 66:5 warned his wives that Allah could replace them all with better women. The criticism was answered not with an argument but with a threat, wrapped in scripture.

Quran 33:53 also tells believers not to enter Mohammed’s house without permission, to leave immediately after eating, and not to linger for conversation. It also tells them not to talk to his wives except from behind a curtain. God has to step in to tell dinner guests to tell them they are staying too long. A verse for all times apparently.

This is not a pattern you would expect from divine revelation. It is exactly the pattern you would expect from a man who had discovered that “God said so” was the most effective way to end an argument.

Every major religion has human fingerprints on it. But most do not have the founder’s personal love life, property disputes and household arguments showing up line by line in the holy book.

Muslims believe Mohammed is the perfect example for all of humanity, for all time. His life is a living guide. That is not a fringe position. It is mainstream Islamic theology.

Aisha was six when he married her. Nine when he consummated the marriage. This is in Sahih Bukhari, narrated by Aisha herself. It is not disputed by classical Islamic scholarship. It is the most authenticated category of hadith that exists.

So if a Muslim man today said he wanted to follow this sunnah exactly, what is the Islamic argument against it?

The three answers apologists reach for, and why none of them work:

“It was normal back then”
So what. The whole point of the sunnah is that it transcends time. You cannot simultaneously argue the prophet’s example is eternal and that this particular part has an expiry date. Pick one.

“She was mature for her age”
This is not an Islamic argument. This is a desperate biological claim invented to survive modern scrutiny. No classical scholar made this argument. They did not need to, because they had no problem with it. You do. That gap is the problem.

“We follow the spirit of the sunnah, not every action literally”
Then you do not actually believe the prophet is the perfect example. You believe he is a useful guide you edit when convenient. That is a very different claim, and you should say that out loud instead of pretending otherwise.

There is no Islamic argument against this practice that does not quietly borrow from secular modern morality. The moment you make any of these objections, you are admitting that something outside Islam is doing the moral work. Not the Quran. Not the hadith. You.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Muslims believe Mohammed is the perfect example for all of humanity, for all time. His life is a living guide. That is not a fringe position. It is mainstream Islamic theology.

Aisha was six when he married her. Nine when he consummated the marriage. This is in Sahih Bukhari, narrated by Aisha herself. It is not disputed by classical Islamic scholarship. It is the most authenticated category of hadith that exists.

So if a Muslim man today said he wanted to follow this sunnah exactly, what is the Islamic argument against it?

The three answers apologists reach for, and why none of them work:

“It was normal back then”
So what. The whole point of the sunnah is that it transcends time. You cannot simultaneously argue the prophet’s example is eternal and that this particular part has an expiry date. Pick one.

“She was mature for her age”
This is not an Islamic argument. This is a desperate biological claim invented to survive modern scrutiny. No classical scholar made this argument. They did not need to, because they had no problem with it. You do. That gap is the problem.

“We follow the spirit of the sunnah, not every action literally”
Then you do not actually believe the prophet is the perfect example. You believe he is a useful guide you edit when convenient. That is a very different claim, and you should say that out loud instead of pretending otherwise.

There is no Islamic argument against this practice that does not quietly borrow from secular modern morality. The moment you make any of these objections, you are admitting that something outside Islam is doing the moral work. Not the Quran. Not the hadith. You.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The hadith is in Sahih Bukhari (3404) and Sahih Muslim. Fully authenticated.

The story is that Moses bathed alone because the Israelites suspected he had a skin defect. A stone grabbed his clothes and ran. Moses chased it naked through a crowd shouting “my clothes, O stone!” God’s solution to restoring Mohammeds reputation was apparently a cartoon level idea of sentient rock and public nudity.

The theological problem isn’t just that the story sounds like a comedy skit. It’s that Muslims cannot dismiss it without dismantling their own epistemology. The hadith sciences exist precisely to separate reliable narrations from fabricated ones. This one passed every filter. If the methodology can certify a running stone as historical fact, what exactly is it screening for?

The options are:
- It’s literally true, meaning God intervened in human history using a mobile rock to solve a modesty dispute.

- It’s metaphorical, meaning sahih hadiths require
allegorical interpretation, which opens every authenticated hadith to the same treatment.

- It’s false, meaning the authentication system certified a fabrication, which means it can certify other fabrications.

There is no fourth option where this hadith is both literally sahih and intellectually defensible. Pick one and follow it to its conclusion.

The Quran and several Hadiths lay out the process of wudu (ablution) that Muslims must perform before prayer… like wash your hands, mouth, nose, face, forearms, wipe your head and ears, then wash your feet up to the ankles.

The problem is wudu has nothing to do with actual cleanliness. You can be covered in mud and filth and still be considered ritually pure after going through the motions, while a perfectly clean person who just farted is impure and cannot pray.

The things that break wudu make this even stranger: farting, touching your genitals, bleeding, sleeping, or eating camel meat in some schools of thought. There is no coherent logic connecting these. It reads like a list of ancient taboos that got copied into divine law.

The water itself gives the game away. Stagnant dirty water can make you ritually pure, but clean water used after a nullifier like farting does nothing. And when water is unavailable, rubbing dry sand on your face is accepted as a valid substitute. If sand does the same job, the water was never cleaning anything to begin with.

If god is omniscient, he already knows your state and your intentions. The idea that he requires you to wet your forearms before accepting your prayer suggests he cares more about procedural compliance than sincerity. It reduces approaching god to a bureaucratic checklist, and a fairly arbitrary one at that, which also happens to bar menstruating women from prayer entirely, punishing a biological function they have no control over.

If the point is mindfulness before prayer, there are far better ways to achieve it than a ritual most people perform on autopilot.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

All three Abrahamic religions claim their god is the perfect moral authority for all time. So his position on slavery is his eternal moral position. And that position is: it’s fine, here are the rules.

The Old Testament doesn’t abolish slavery, it regulates it. Exodus 21 says you can beat your slave as long as they survive a day or two because they’re your property. Leviticus lets you buy slaves from neighbouring nations and pass them to your children as inheritance. God supposedly dictated this to Moses personally. That’s not humans being flawed, that’s the manufacturer’s instructions.

Jesus never condemns slavery once. Paul tells slaves to obey their masters. Philemon is an entire letter about returning a runaway slave to his owner. For 1,800 years Christians used these passages to defend the slave trade and they weren’t misreading anything. Abolitionists had to argue against the plain text to reach a conclusion the text never reached on its own.

Islam is no better. The Quran explicitly permits sex slavery of captured women. The phrase “what your right hand possesses” is not a metaphor, every major classical scholar understood it as slaves. Mohammed owned slaves, gave them as gifts, received them as gifts. Islamic law never abolished slavery from within. It took Western pressure in the 19th and 20th centuries. When ISIS enslaved Yazidi women they cited mainstream classical Islamic ideology. Their scholars weren’t being radical, they were quoting the textbooks.

The standard defence is that god was regulating slavery and limiting it, not endorsing it. But a law that says don’t beat your slave to death is not a moral framework, it’s a management guide. Another defence is that it was a different time. Fine, but then your god isn’t the eternal perfect moral authority you just claimed he was.

Every major Abrahamic civilisation abolished slavery because of Enlightenment philosophy, not theology. The theology was on the wrong side of the argument. If your moral framework can’t arrive at “slavery is wrong” without external secular pressure, it has no business calling itself a universal guide to right and wrong.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Most chippies ask “salt? Vinegar?”.

Then they splash some vinegar on top, let it sit there, and maybe a bit drains down to the lucky chips directly beneath. Then a sprinkle of salt on the top layer. Job done, apparently.

The chips underneath get almost nothing. And by the time you realise this, it’s too late to shake the bag because the salt is already wet and glued to the top layer going nowhere.

How is it not standard practice to sprinkle the salt first, give the bag a shake, then add the vinegar and shake again? Every chip gets seasoned. Every chip gets a fair go. The whole thing takes an extra five seconds.

Instead we’ve collectively accepted a system where the top chips are delicious and everything underneath is just hot, unseasoned potato.

Let’s establish what Islam actually teaches before anyone retreats to “that’s not mainstream”:

- Allah created everything, including the future

- Every human’s fate, including their eternal destination, was written 50,000 years before creation (Sahih Muslim 2653)

- Nothing happens outside Allah’s will

- Allah is all-knowing, meaning he knew at the moment of writing who would burn

This is not a fringe position. This is orthodox Sunni aqeedah. The Ashari and Maturidi schools, which cover the overwhelming majority of Sunni Muslims, both affirm this. So we are not talking about a heterodox edge case. This is the mainstream product.

Allah created people he knew would go to Hell, then created Hell for them, then sent them to it, then asks for your eternal gratitude for not doing that to you specifically. This is Stockholm syndrome.

The standard apologetic response is “humans have free will.” But this does not survive five seconds of scrutiny. Free will as a defence requires that human choices be genuinely open, meaning Allah did not know which way they would go. Islam explicitly denies this. Allah knew. Allah wrote it down. Allah then created those people anyway. The “free will” defence requires a version of Allah that Islam itself rejects.

The second apologetic response is “Allah’s knowledge doesn’t cause the action.” This is hollow. If I write a script, cast the actors, build the set, and roll the camera, I cannot then hold the characters morally responsible for their lines. Knowledge that is certain, eternal, and precedes the subject’s existence is not passive observation. It is authorship.

The third response is “we cannot understand Allah’s wisdom.” This is not a theological position. This is an admission that the doctrine cannot be defended, dressed up as humility.

What Islam is actually asking you to accept is this: a being of infinite power created a process he designed, populated it with people whose ending he wrote, and will then punish those people for following the story he authored. And you should be grateful. And if you are not grateful, that ingratitude was also in the script. And he will punish you for that too.

edit:
Yes I am aware of the ikhtiyar/jabr debates within Islamic theology. The fact that Muslim scholars have been arguing about this for 1,400 years without resolution is not a defence of the doctrine. It is evidence that the doctrine is incoherent.

This claim gets repeated by Muslims, but it’s a comical claim.

The hadith in Sahih Muslim, part of the famous Hadith of Jibril. When asked about the signs of the Hour, the response given was: “that a bondswoman gives birth to her own master, and that you will find the barefooted, naked, poor shepherds competing one another in the construction of higher buildings.”

The text describes the builders as barefoot, naked, and destitute. The people behind Dubai’s skyline are not that. The person behind the construction of the Burj Khalifa was Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, a member of Dubai’s royal family and son of the second Prime Minister of the UAE. None of those behind the building of Arabia’s tall buildings were ever barefoot, naked, destitute shepherds. Apologists quietly drop this detail when making the argument. They cannot have it both ways.

It is a sign of the apocalypse, not an achievement. This hadith is classified as one of the Minor Signs of the Hour, events that appear before the major catastrophic signs of the end of time. Apologists present it as a proud fulfilment. The text frames it as a warning that the world is deteriorating. They are essentially bragging about fulfilling a bad omen in their own scripture.

This hadith is widely preached across Gulf mosques and is embedded in the culture of the region. When rulers and developers operate in a society where this text is well known, the question is not whether the prediction came true. The question is whether they built knowing the prediction existed. A forecast that shapes the behaviour of those it supposedly forecasts is not prophecy.

The description is not specific. No timeline. No location. No defined height.

I want to be clear about the argument. Not “God doesn’t exist.” Not “religion is bad for society.” The specific claim is that the process by which religious people form and protect their beliefs is irrational. The same reasoning applied to anything else in life would be laughed out of the room.

You already know this, because you apply different standards to religion than everything else.

If your doctor said “trust me, this treatment works, it’s in an ancient book and billions believe it,” you’d walk out. If a judge said “we’re taking the defendant’s guilt on faith,” you’d call it a scandal. But for the biggest questions imaginable, how the universe began, what happens when you die, what morality actually demands, people accept exactly that standard. Old text plus community pressure plus a feeling equals unshakeable conviction. This is not reasoning… it’s what you absorbed before you were old enough to question it.

Prayer has actually been tested…and it went badly.

Harvard ran the most rigorous controlled trial of intercessory prayer ever conducted in 2006, the STEP study. Cardiac patients. Double blind. Proper controls. Prayer made no difference. The group who knew they were being prayed for actually did slightly worse.

The response from believers was instant: “You can’t test God like that.” But here’s the thing. They were praying for outcomes before the study existed. Either it does something or it doesn’t. Saying it works but conveniently can’t be measured is just wanting both.

The books contain flat out errors and nobody updates their confidence accordingly.

The Quran says sperm originates from between the backbone and ribs. It doesn’t. It describes the sun setting in a muddy spring. It doesn’t do that. Genesis says bats are birds and hares chew cud. They don’t. There’s a global flood in there for which geology has found precisely zero evidence despite that being exactly the kind of thing geology would find.

The rational move when your primary source gets basic biology wrong is to revise how much you trust that source. Instead you get increasingly creative reinterpretation designed to protect a conclusion that was never up for revision. Mental gymnastics!

The same God gets credit for everything and blame for nothing.

Survived a car crash? God saved you. Won the match? Blessed. Child dies of cancer? His plan. Earthquake kills ten thousand people? Mysterious ways.

This is not a model of causation. This is a narrative applied retroactively to every possible outcome so that nothing could ever count against it. That’s not faith. That’s an unfalsifiable story you’ve decided to tell regardless of what happens.

If the beliefs were solid, they wouldn’t need this much muscle to survive.

Apostasy in Islam carries a death penalty across multiple classical schools of law and social annihilation in most practicing communities. Orthodox Jewish families sit shiva for members who leave, treating them as dead. Evangelical communities cut people off completely.

Heliocentrism didn’t need apostasy laws. Germ theory didn’t need shunning. Ideas that are actually true tend to survive scrutiny without threatening people who stop believing them. The enforcement exists because on some level everyone involved knows the beliefs don’t hold up when someone’s genuinely free to walk away.

Also, “I felt God” is not evidence of God. That’s just you talking to yourself.

It’s the most common justification and the weakest. Muslims feel Allah. Christians feel Jesus. Mormons feel the Spirit specifically while reading the Book of Mormon, which is convenient. They cannot all be perceiving the same thing.

Temporal lobe stimulation produces religious experiences. So do psychedelics, extreme grief, sleep deprivation, and prolonged meditation. The feeling of divine presence is a neurological event. It tells you something about your brain. It tells you nothing reliable about what’s actually out there.

Btw irrational doesn’t mean stupid. Smart people believe this stuff. But intelligence doesn’t validate a method, and the method here is rotten…fix the conclusion, reinterpret the errors away, ignore disconfirming evidence, and use social consequences to stop people leaving. Religion is essentially just cultish and tribal.

Nobody wants to say this out loud, but it needs to be said. ISIS is not a distortion of Islam. It is a very literal reading of it.

ISIS did not make up its theology. It pulled it straight from the Quran and Mohammed's actions. The Dabiq and Rumiyah magazines cite classical rulings, Quranic verses, and authenticated hadith throughout. Jizya on Christians? Surah 9:29. Yazidi women as slaves? Maliki and Shafi’i rulings on concubinage in enemy territory. Executing apostates and gay men? Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn Qudama, al-Nawawi. These are not fringe scholars. They are taught at Al-Azhar today.

Is it horrific? Yes. Is it un-Islamic on its own terms? That is a harder question than most people are willing to sit with.

Classical Sunni theology treats the caliphate as a religious duty, not a political preference. Al-Mawardi spells this out in Al-Ahkam al-Sultaniyya, which is about as foundational as Islamic political theory gets. When Baghdadi declared his caliphate, the mainstream response was not “that is forbidden” but “the timing is wrong” or “he lacks legitimacy.” That is a very different objection. ISIS took seriously something most modern Muslims had quietly parked for practical reasons.

The same applies to dar al-Islam versus dar al-harb, the duty to migrate toward Islamic rule, and offensive jihad to expand Islamic territory. None of that was invented in Raqqa. It is in the Quran, in the major hadith collections, and across all four Sunni legal schools. What happened is that reformist Islam quietly stopped applying these doctrines without ever officially cancelling them. ISIS just refused to go along with that.

When scholars say ISIS misunderstands Islam, they usually mean one of three things:
The context has changed, the caliph was not legitimate, or the violence went too far.

The first argument is modernism dressed as theology. The second is a procedural point, not a doctrinal one. The third accepts the jihad framework and argues about proportionality within it. None of them say ISIS got the texts wrong. They say the texts should not be applied right now, or not by these people. That is a much softer challenge than it sounds.

Graeme Wood made this argument in The Atlantic in 2015 and got a lot of pushback for it. But his point was simple...ISIS is medieval in the literal sense. It takes 7th century rules and applies them like it is the 7th century. That is not a warped reading. That is what happens when you take the texts at face value and have the power to act on them.

Most Muslims alive today are decent people who have, in practice, moved past a lot of this. That is a good thing. But it means the line “ISIS has nothing to do with Islam” is not honest. It has everything to do with one specific, classically grounded strand of Islamic jurisprudence. The real argument reformists need to make is that Islam should update these teachings openly, not that the teachings never said what they clearly say.

The counter from scholars like Khaled Abou El Fadl and Sherman Jackson is that ISIS lifted rulings out of a much wider tradition that prioritises the preservation of life and society. Jonathan Brown adds that classical jurists had strict procedural requirements for declaring jihad that ISIS skipped entirely. And there is a reasonable case that the whole caliphate model was made obsolete by the modern nation state centuries ago, not just recently.

These are fair points. But they only work if you are willing to do the hard theological labour of showing a better reading from within the tradition. Saying ISIS got it wrong is not enough. You have to show where a more authoritative reading leads somewhere else. That is the actual work, and most of the people shouting “nothing to do with Islam” are not doing it.

Muslims claim the Quran is the direct, unaltered word of an all knowing God. Not inspired, dictated. The literal speech of the being who invented mathematics. So let’s do some maths.

Surah An-Nisa (4:11-12) assigns explicit inheritance fractions. Here’s a scenario the Quran itself creates:

A man dies leaving a wife, two daughters, a mother, and a father.

- Wife: 1/8 (reduced because there are children, per 4:12)
- Two daughters: 2/3 (per 4:11)
- Father: 1/6 (per 4:11)
- Mother: 1/6 (per 4:11)

Add them up: 1/8 + 2/3 + 1/6 + 1/6 = 3/24 + 16/24 + 4/24 + 4/24 = 27/24

God has distributed 112.5% of an estate. The numbers don’t work.

Non divine Muslims invented a fix called Awl, proportional reduction of all shares so the total scales back to 1. But God never mentioned it.

Awl was invented by Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second Caliph, decades after Muhammad’s death, when jurists encountered this problem and panicked.

It gets worse. Ibn Abbas, Mohammed own cousin and the most authoritative Quranic scholar among the Companions, explicitly rejected Awl. He argued that God set these fractions and that you must prioritise heirs based on Quranic hierarchy rather than invent a mathematical operation God never authorised.

So either Awl is valid, meaning God forgot a critical instruction for His own legal system, or Ibn Abbas is right, meaning Muslims have been misapplying Quranic inheritance law for 1,400 years. The text is broken either way.

What an Omniscient God Would Have Written

One sentence: “If shares exceed the estate, reduce proportionally.” Or just check the arithmetic before dictating. Both options were available to an infinite being.

Instead, God produced a legal system that overflows under common, foreseeable family configurations and left 7th century humans to patch it decades later.

This is not a translation issue. It is not a metaphor. The Quran provides explicit numerical fractions that sum to more than one under conditions the Quran itself creates. An omniscient God cannot make an arithmetic error. A human author writing inheritance law without checking edge cases is entirely expected.

Also, “scholars eventually worked it out” is not a defence of the text being from God. It is a concession that the text needed human correction.

Let's set aside the culture, the community, the nice music. Strip it down to the bare claim: an invisible, eternal, all knowing being created a universe of 2 trillion galaxies, watched humans evolve for 300,000 years mostly dying of infected teeth and childbirth, then decided the right intervention was to impregnate a woman, produce a son, have that son executed, and call it a rescue plan.

If a stranger told you this on a bus, you'd move seats.

The only reason it doesn't sound insane is that you heard it first from people you trusted, as a child, before your critical faculties were functioning fully. That's not evidence. Thats conditioning.

And here's what gets me: the internal contradictions aren't even subtle:

- An omniscient God is surprised by Adam eating fruit He knew Adam would eat before He created Adam.
- A perfectly just God punishes billions of people for the act of two people He set up to fail.
- A loving God designs a universe where the default destination is eternal torture unless you believe the right things, despite having deliberately hidden themselves.

The standard responses: "mystery", "His ways are not our ways", "you can't understand God's plan". All just intellectual forfeit. If "I don't know" is acceptable for God's contradictions but not for science's open questions, this is not reasonin, its protecting a conclusion.

Religion had a good run as humanity's first attempt at explaining lightning, death, and moral order. But we've discovered truths and learnt. The only question is why so many people haven't.

Religion is also suspiciously convenient geographically. Born in Saudi Arabia? Muslim. Born in rural Alabama? Christian. Born in india? Hindu. The one true faith correlates almost perfectly with where your mum lives. Either God has a very regional distribution strategy, or people just absorb whatever they’re raised in and then construct reasons to believe it.

I’m not saying all religious people are stupid. Many brilliant people hold religious beliefs. I’m saying the beliefs themselves don’t hold up, and smart people are often the best at rationalising things they wanted to believe anyway.

The Quran doesn't just claim to be a good book. It claims to be clear. The word "mubeen" (plain, clear, manifest) is used to describe it over and over. Allah apparently took time out of running the universe to make sure their final message was impossible to misunderstand.

So hows that going?

The Quran contradicts itself so much that Islamic scholars invented a whole system to deal with it: naskh, or abrogation. Later verses cancel earlier ones. Except scholars have argued for 1,400 years about which verses abrogate which. If the book were actually clear, you wouldn't need a system just to figure out which parts of it still count.

The Quran itself admits in 3:7 that some of its verses are "clear" (muhkamat) and some are "ambiguous" (mutashabihat), and that only Allah knows the full meaning of the ambiguous ones. So the clear book... contains parts that are unclear by design. God hid the meaning on purpose. In their clear book….Right….

Mohammed reportedly said Islam would split into 73 sects, 72 of which go to hell. Every single one of those sects is reading the same clear book and reaching different conclusions about theology, law, and practice. Sunni vs Shia vs Ibadi vs Ahmadi vs Mutazilite and on and on. If a set of instructions produces this many different outputs, the instructions are not clear. That's not a debate, that's just basic logic.

Most people don't know there are different official recitations of the Quran with different words in different places. Hafs (used in most of the world) and Warsh (used in North Africa) are the two biggest. They differ in ways that affect meaning, not just pronunciation. The "perfectly preserved" clear book has variant editions that Islamic biased institutions quietly don't talk about.

Classical Quran Arabic is not readable by the average Arabic speaker today without serious study. Millions of Muslims recite it in prayer without understanding a word of it. A book that requires years of specialist training to read in its original language, and loses significant nuance in translation, is not a clear book. It's an obscure book with biased people pushing it hard.

Example verses hotly debated by Muslims themselves:

4:34 - The wife beating verse.

The verse tells husbands to deal with disobedient wives in stages, ending with "wadribuhunna." That word comes from "daraba," which has over 20 meanings in Arabic including: to beat, to strike, to set forth, to travel, to ignore, and to have sex with.

Scholars say it means a light, symbolic strike. Some modern scholars say it means to leave or separate. Others say it means to strike but not on the face. A minority say it has been mistranslated entirely and means to have consensual relations.

This is the verse governing domestic authority in Muslim marriages. And nobody agrees what the key word means. In the clear book.

A clear message from an all knowing God should not require 1,400 years of scholars in disagreement, a cancellation system for its own contradictions, builtin mystery passages, variant editions, and a dead language to navigate.

If God wrote this, they are either not as clear as they think they are, or they wanted the confusion. Neither is a great look.

The Quran says stars are missiles God throws at eavesdropping devils. Let’s not pretend that’s fine.

Surah 67:5- Allah “adorned the nearest heaven with stars and made them missiles to drive away devils.”

Surah 37:6-10 confirms it: stars in the lowest heaven pelt every rebellious devil trying to listen in on angels.

The jinn in Surah 72 back this up, complaining they used to eavesdrop on heaven but now get hit with “flames.”

This is not ambiguous. The Quran’s cosmology is:

- Seven stacked heavens
- Stars sit in the lowest one
- They double as a cosmic anti-devil defence system

Apologist reach for the same three exits, and why none of them work:

“It means shooting stars/meteors, not actual stars.”
67:5 uses the same stars that beautify the heaven as the things being thrown. The text explicitly links the two. You can’t say “we decorated the ceiling with chandeliers, which we also throw at intruders” and then claim the thrown objects are something else entirely. The Arabic kawakib means stars/planets.

“It’s metaphorical.”
The jinn in Surah 72 describe this as their lived experience…they tried to ascend, they got hit, they fled. It reads as a reported event, not a poem. If you want to metaphor your way out of this one, you’ve just conceded that Quranic cosmology can’t be taken at face value, which is a much bigger problem than you’ve solved.

“Science wasn’t the Quran’s purpose.”
Fine…but it was apparently Allah’s purpose to tell us how stars work, where they are, and what they’re for. He volunteered this information. If the eternal word of the creator of the universe describes the cosmos as a seven-tiered system where nearest-heaven stars are projectile weapons against supernatural eavesdroppers, that’s not a minor cultural flavouring. It’s just wrong.

The nearest star to Earth is 4.2 light years away. The Andromeda galaxy is visible to the naked eye and is 2.5 million light years away. These are not objects plausibly sitting in a low ceiling above our atmosphere, being lobbed at jinns like cosmic dodgeballs.

There is no interpretation that makes this compatible with reality. There’s only deciding how much you’re willing to tolerate before calling it what it is.

Probably more so to do with the Arabic language. Other words are Halal, Haram.

Similar to English words like Moist, pus, curd, etc

The Quran makes a specific, testable anatomical claim in Surah At-Tariq (86:5–7):

“He was created from a fluid, ejected, emerging from between the backbone (sulb) and the ribs (tara’ib).”

Classical scholars Ibn Kathir and Al-Tabari read this literally. The reproductive fluid comes from between the spine and the chest. That is the claim.

Semen is produced in the testes, which are about as far from the backbone and ribs as you can get while still being on the same body. The being who claims to have designed the reproductive system apparently got confused about where he put things.

The “other fluid” escape does not work. Some apologists say the verse refers to some general fluid near the spine rather than semen. This fails immediately. The passage is specifically about where humans come from. Only one fluid creates a human. If the verse is not about sperm, it answers nothing and is a meaningless statement about human origins. Apologists cannot have it both ways.

Also there is no mention of the female egg anywhere. Half the genetic material required to make a human being. Not even a hint. This is not a small omission in a passage specifically about human origins. It reflects the 7th century belief that men provide the generative substance and women are just the vessel. That is a human cultural assumption, not divine knowledge.

Apologists will claim that “Sulb and tara’ib mean the pelvis” Classical scholars did not read it that way. This is drawing the bullseye after the arrow has already landed.

“Science is always changing”….Testicular anatomy has not changed. Nobody is publishing new research suggesting the spine might be involved.

The verse reflects the ancient belief that semen originates from spinal marrow, a pre-Islamic view common across ancient cultures. Combined with no mention of the female egg, this is exactly what you would expect from a 7th century warlord author and exactly what you would not expect from the creator of the reproductive system.