What God Really Meant

A visitor on behalf of the Muslims Against Sharia blog said

With the help of our readers we went through the Koran and removed every verse that we believe did not come from Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate.

Did you!? How nice! Various parties in so-called Christendom have performed similar feats of cherry-picking, some explicit and some covert. Thomas Jefferson famously took scissors to the New Testament and removed the parts he didn't like, resulting in what is called The Jefferson Bible. Confident declarations about what god really meant and how it departs from the text are a common preoccupation of religious believers. And who can blame them when god's alleged texts are batshit-crazy in so many cases?

Supposing, for the briefest of moments, that god exists, and that he left his very special instructions by revealing them to a human scribbler, or series of human scribblers; and further supposing the human scribblers got some of it wrong: I think if someone had a really solid purchase on god's preferred edits, and had good ways to authenticate the edits, it would already be a fait accompli. In fact, I think the alleged holy texts we have today represent exactly this -- they are the end result of a winnowing process by which various parties have produced a text and presented it as god's real revelation.

More commonly, claims of this kind -- "Dude! Seriously! Let me tell you what god really meant!" -- are as common as fruit flies in a genetics lab and half as precious. Such claims are almost always unverifiable, not to speak of unverified. What is asserted without evidence can be, and usually is, dismissed without evidence. (Note: wishful thinking does not count as evidence.)

Of course, in principle, it's always possible that amazing new evidence will emerge about the provenance and nature of the world's holy texts. Maybe an archaeological dig will turn something up, or a new text will be carried up from the dusty cellar of an ancient reliquary. Such are the highest dramas in philology, I gather.

Sigh. I would need a reason to care about god before caring about what he/she/it really meant, and that would need to start with a showing that god actually exists. Until and unless that happens, any effort to re-scramble, pare down, augment, re-word, or otherwise edit the alleged revelations will continue to strike most of the world, believers and unbelievers alike, as unconvincing, futile, and dull.

As for the real Koran and the real Bible: as far as I'm concerned, picking the corn kernels out of a turd still leaves you with a piece of shit.

If it's any consolation, I'm totally against Sharia too.