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To Raqib about what is tiresomeReader comment on item: Pope Benedict XVI and the Koran Submitted by Plato (United Arab Emirates), Dec 25, 2006 at 04:39 Brother Raqib, what is getting even more 'tiresome' is your not checking your facts. It is no fun arguing with someone who generates his own facts to suit his argument. You did this about Saad Muad who judged the Banu Quraiza. Now you are doing it with Galileo. Galileo did have a spat with the Inquisition but I don't remember reading anywhere that he was thrown into prison. Can you please show me your source for that claim of yours. So also for Kepler and Copernicus. You say Bible is the word of God including human fabrication. In that case it should be easy to tell God's word from human, since God's words would be far superior to anything man can come up with. If you cant't tell the difference between God's words and human fabrication then what are god's words worth. They would be only as good as human words. For instance if someone inserted a verse of his own in the Koran would it not stand out and be immediately seen as a fabrication as the Koran itself seems to claim. Because if it did not it would mean hunans can come up with verses like the Koran's! The Koran claims that, since it is God's words, it is inimitable. So also, since you admit the Bible was God's word the later human accretions should stand out from the inimitable words of God. Fastest growing religion in Europe and US is Islam. True! Why? Because Muslims, being economically much poorer primarily due to lower educational levels tend to have more children. That is a socio-economic fact. That's why, not because people are converting in droves. There is also the fact of these advanced countries attracting Muslim immigrants from their poor underdeveloped countries, and most Muslim countries are desperately poor despite their scriptures containing any and every kind of knowledge. No Westerner is interested in moving to these poor countries. If someone writes a book with a title The Koran, Vedas and Science showing the Vedas to have better scientific facts than the Koran would you begin believing in the Vedas. In fact there are books available in plenty showing advanced mathematical theories, design for aeroplanes etc in Indian scriptures. Just as I can imagine you laughing at that, people who know even a bit of elementary science laugh at all those Bucailisms. The only people who flash that famous book of Bucaille are the ones who have no clue about what science is all about. You seem to have no idea that all those claims have been shredded beyond recognition by experts in their own fields. Do a search on Dr. Bucaille. And don't just surf the Islamic sites. Study the objections contained in the others as well and show them to someone with some knowledge of physics for his comments on cosmology and an embryologist for human development to see if the arguments are right. A quick search of Wikipedia came up with this. Remember Carl Sagan is no Maurice Bucaille. He was no Hindu nor of any religion for that matter. Do a search on him.Carl Sagan on Hindu cosmology "The main reason that we oriented this episode of Cosmos towards India is because of that wonderful aspect of Hindu cosmology which first of all gives a time-scale for the Earth and the universe -- a time-scale which is consonant with that of modern scientific cosmology. We know that the Earth is about 4.6 billion years old, and the cosmos, or at least its present incarnation, is something like 10 or 20 billion years old. The Hindu tradition has a day and night of Brahma in this range, somewhere in the region of 8.4 billion years." "As far as I know. It is the only ancient religious tradition on the Earth which talks about the right time-scale. We want to get across the concept of the right time-scale, and to show that it is not unnatural. In the West, people have the sense that what is natural is for the universe to be a few thousand years old, and that billions is indwelling, and no one can understand it. The Hindu concept is very clear. Here is a great world culture which has always talked about billions of years." "Finally, the many billion year time-scale of Hindu cosmology is not the entire history of the universe, but just the day and night of Brahma, and there is the idea of an infinite cycle of births and deaths and an infinite number of universes, each with its own gods." Carl Sagan was a distinguished Cornell University astronomer and Pulitzer Prize-winning author.[edit] Roger Bertschausen "We in the West have long had trouble with time. Early Arthur Holmes (1895-1965) geologist, professor at the University of Durham. He writes regarding the age of the earth in his great book, The Age of Earth (1913) as follows:Alan Watts, a professor, graduate school dean and research fellow of Harvard University, drew heavily on the insights of Vedanta. Watts became well known in the 1960s as a pioneer in bringing Eastern philosophy to the West. He wrote: "\ Judaism, Christianity and Islam had no inkling of the long age of the universe. Cosmologies from these religions were based on the notion that the universe started at a finite point in the recent past. St. Augustine set the beginning of the universe at 5000 BCE. For centuries, this figure was embraced by most Westerners. (And some continue to believe it.) Additionally, the early Christians also believed that the end of time as we know it was close at hand."Hindu tradition, for example, one day in the life of Brahma lasts 4,320,000,000 years. And Brahma lives for the equivalent of 311,040,000,000,000 human years. The historian of religions Huston Smith reports one way of conceiving of the Hindu time-frame. Quoted views on Hindu cosmology Professor "Long before it became a scientific aspiration to estimate the age of the earth, many elaborate systems of the world chronology had been devised by the sages of antiquity. The most remarkable of these occult time-scales is that of the ancient Hindus, whose astonishing concept of the Earth's duration has been traced back to Manusmriti, a sacred book." When the Hindu calculation of the present age of the earth and the expanding universe could make Professor Holmes so astonished, the precision with which the Hindu calculation regarding the age of the entire Universe was made would make any man spellbound."To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it." It is, indeed, a remarkable circumstance that when Western civilization discovers Relativity it applies it to the manufacture of atom-bombs, whereas Oriental civilization applies it to the development of new states of consciousness."I bring this up to show what far better scientists and philosophers than Bucaille have to say about science in non-monotheistic scriptures. Carl Sagan and others did not become idol-worshippers on that account. Then what value a discredited Bucaille? Warm regards Plato "This view of time contrasts sharply with other religious perspectives on the age of the universe. In the Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. 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