HMASQ

Chapter 42: more of the same tedious crap, for 53 lines. Here's how it starts:

(1) H. M.
(2) A. S. Q.

Both the first two lines are just random letters. Turns out there are nine chapters that have secret letters in front of their secret letters, so they all start with Ha Mim, then more letters.

You don't get actual words till the third line, and when you do get words, they suck. It's physically painful to keep reading the same things repeated over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

Verse 40 calls for an eye for an eye and says

41. “If one avenges himself after he has been wronged, there is no way of blaming him.”

so I guess we should all just quit bitching about the twin towers.

Sad, Really Really Sad.

Chapter 38 is called “Sad,” which it is, but the name comes from another of those typos they were too dumb to take out. This time it's the Arabic letter Saad. Another Miracle!! WHOOO-HOO!


The first time I read chapter 38 I thought 'this is totally incoherent.' I thought it might be translation problems. Then I looked everything up, reread it and studied it, and now that I understand it I know it is totally incoherent. It's a lot of bible stories, all reduced down to bare bones, and all the same: a prophet turns up → people don't believe him → god kills everybody. The exception is Solomon. God let him live, and I was all “What? Why aren't you killing him? You don't let people live!” I guess I'm finding the author's mood. When the hero not committing senseless genocide puzzles you, there is something very basically wrong. Counting the verses in this chapter and the next, they devote 4% to heaven, and 50% to damnation. And the stories don't have any logic.

Take David: Two guys ask him to settle an argument and he says “You've got a million sheep and you're taking the only one he's got. It's not fair.” So far so good. The next sentence David is down on his knees begging forgiveness. You see the nice smooth flow of logical narrative there? Or are you like me screaming at the monitor “BEGGING FORGIVENESS FOR WHAT, for God's sakes?

I admit I forgot the bible story about David. OK, I suck. All I remembered was he killed some big dude with a sling. So I reread the bible and remembered that David had some guy killed so he could get his wife Bathsheeba, and god was pissed and sent an angel, who told the sheep story--and then I got it. Sheep = women, the one ewe = Bathsheeba, David = murdering scumbag, NOW it makes sense!! If I hadn't read the Torah's version I never would have got it. So the moral is that without the Torah the koran is useless, but according to moslems all these other scriptures are corrupted and unreliable.

Same thing with the first verses. It gloats vaguely about some unidentified prophet “turning many gods into one” → people don't believe him → god kills everybody. Turns out there are hadith about this that explain it as a garbleation of Mo's meeting with the leaders of his tribe. Once again if all you read is the koran, you have no idea what it's about. It's like telling a punch line without the joke. Or how about Ishmael, Al-Yasa and Dhul-kiffle? Especially that last guy dull kiffle? History has exactly jack and shit to say about him except for two passing mentions in the koran; he “observes patience” (21:85), and he's “among the best” (v48), whoever he is.

So, bottom line, the single book we need to know how to life our lives is completely worthless without a lot of supplementary materials that either don't exist or have been corrupted. Just shoot me.

It's sort of a puzzle why, but twice in this chapter, v65 and 86-7, Mo says he's only a 'warner' and he's not asking any compensation for doing the lord's work. He insists on this in other places too that I'm too lazy to look up. My guess is it's to divorce himself from the priests in the Meccan Megachurch, who would have been milking the people for all they were worth—whereas Mo was poor and selfless, y'unnerstand. Hmf.

The Story of Q

No, not O, Q. You're thinking of something else. The title of chapter 50 is just “Q”, anyway the Arabic letter qaf . What's up with that, I wondered:

1. Qâf. [These letters are one of the miracles of the Qur'ân, and none but Allâh knows their meanings].

O shit, more secret letters! They set the bar pretty low for miracles, Hey look-- X – I've performed a miracle! I'm God's Messenger; send me your money by Paypal! Then I kept finding this explanation all over the web, word for word, so it must be important;

The Surah derives its name from the initial letter Qaf, thereby implying that it is the Surah which opens with the alphabetic letter Qaf.

WTF? Even after I looked up “imply” in the dictionary this doesn't make any sense. When I say this is stupid, I'm not implying it's stupid, I'm saying it's stupid. It's pathetic how these people are so hard up for miracles and meaning in their lives. They'd find real meanings and real implications if they looked in a book on astronomy, or biology—of course then they'd have to think. Never mind.

Ya gotta admit qaf makes pretty kickass boat, though.

That was a float at the 2006 Asian Games. (Click the picture) Anyhow after the miracles are over, it starts.

v1. Qaf. I call to witness the glorious Koran.

If this is god saying "Look what I wrote", it's stoopid. If it's Mohammed trying to puff himself up, it makes sense, but you'd have to be a filthy infidel to say that. I'll say that. Next those crazy unbelievers, they say that coming back to life after you die is far-fetched. Word, homes! Mo's devastating counter-arguments are: the book says so; look at the earth and the sky and stuff; God made everything; I'll kick your ass like I did Noah and them other guys. Fuck, I'm convinced; OBVIOUSLY dead people come back to life. Having incinerated his opponent with the blazing clear light of logic, he goes on describing his resurrection day fantasy, repeats the same arguments some more, and in the last line says

50:45 ...it is not for you to compel them.

Mo? ... Jihadis? ....Hello? ... God's on the line here. ... Anyone? ... Ben Stein?

There are angels in this chapter too, for shits and giggles. You know the old cliché about an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other? He seriously says this.

(17)When the two (angels) who keep the account, one sitting on the right, one on the left, take it down,

(18) There is not a word he utters but an observer is ready

Rofl! It also says there is one in front and behind (13:11) and his very next revelation he's gonna say there is one over you (90:4). WTF? Is there two? One? Five? Whatever; just remember there is no confusion in the Quran. Good thing the angels are invisible or we'd be tripping over them all the time. I have trouble enough with my cats.

The Koran in Arabic

Since we were talking about translations in the last post, what's up with god only giving directions in Classical Arabic? Lots of muslims insist you can't understand it unless you read it in the original language. Here's Quran.org barking up that tree;

Arabic is the most efficient language in the world,...
Arabic is unique in its efficiency and accuracy.

If linguists have learned anything from studying language, it's that all languages are equal in efficiency and accuracy. That's Edward Sapir down there in the diagram, giving his smackdown of this old myth that some languages are more “primitive” than others.

We got our word barbarian from the Greeks, and it meant 'a person who doesn't speak Greek'. The history of language study has been a lot of trying to educate bigots like the people at Quran.org, who say

Any other language would have made it almost impossible to point out whose wishes are to be superseded, ...

in chapter 2 verse 228, which us primitive English speakers would grunt out as;

2:28 When a woman wants a divorce she has to wait three months, and if she's pregnant she's shit out of luck.

It's not impossible to tell, because saying who did what to whom is a defining characteristic of Human Language. But gee, maybe Arabic has some secret letters that explain how sending an abuse victim back to the guy who's going to beat her to death gives priority to the child's welfare. I doubt it, so change “bigots” to “misogynistic bigots,” and add “ignorant” too, for this;

Another possible reason for choosing Arabic is the fact that "He" and "She" do not necessarily imply natural gender.

That's actually true, but has exactly nothing to do with Arabic, or even with what the words mean. Sex exists in our bodies, gender exists in our brains, and Grammatical Gender exists in grammar books, to classify words by how they look or sound. It's from Latin genus, the same place we got genre, meaning 'kind', and there are a hell of a lot of different kinds of words. Having accidentally stumbled onto an actual fact, they immediately recover by showing just how fractally full of shit they are:

Thus, when God is referred to as "He," this does not imply gender at all. God be glorified; He is neither male, nor female. The usage of "He" to refer to God in the English language, for example, has contributed to a false image of God.

How the hell does it 'contibute to a false image' if it 'doesn't imply gender'? Either from dishonest or stupid, they switched the meaning of gender from the grammatical to the social construct. Feminists have pointed out for years that using 'he' to refer to god contributes to a false image of god as being male. In English, the obvious solution is to use the neuter form and call god “it.” But in Arabic you couldn't do that if you wanted to, because there is no neuter pronoun!

Arabic doesn't have a word for “it”. You have to call inanimate objects either 'he' or 'she', and you have to use 'she' even if there's a whole group of them. That doesn't stop them from being all 'neener neener neener our language has more words than your language':

For example, the word "they" in English does not tell you if "they" are males or females. In Arabic there is a "they" for the males, "hum," and a "they" for the females, "hunna."

A linguist would say Arabic has two 3rd person pronouns. Then they'd make a chart to show all of Arabic's 12 personal pronouns. English has 14. American Sign Language has 38! The stupid continues...

There is even a "they" for two males, "humaa," and a "they" for two females, "haataan.” This feature

does not exist in any other language in the world.

He's talking about a dual pronoun, like in Hawaiian, Lithuanian, Slovene, Old English ... in fact here is a list of languages with dual pronouns. ASL not only has singular, plural, and dual, it has a form for three people, and one for four, for five, and all the way up to nine. And if he means specifically gender-marked, Yimas has dual forms with at least nine genders, in Lardil the dual depends on what generation the person belongs to, and all those ASL pronouns are grammatically marked for the person's actual physical location, so there might be an infinite number of them. 'Any other language' my arse.

But wait! Not only is Arabic better cause it has more words, it's better because it uses less words!!!

The word "Qaalataa" of 28:23, for example, translates into four English words: "the two women said." Such is the efficiency of the Arabic language.

Do these people TRY to be illogical? Now the best language is one that uses the fewest words! That would be Polysynthetic languages, like Aleut. They can say “I am looking for something suitable to use as a fishing line” in one word: a!wlisautiss?arsiniarpunga.

You think that word's too long? Look at the first word in the Arabic version of 2:228; Waalmutallaqatuyatarabbasna. That's just as long, eleven syllables. Maybe we should count syllables? ASL is polysynthetic, and in one syllable it can say “The person hesitantly walked, in a bent-over posture, upwards toward the right rear flank of the small animal” ! How's that for efficient? Since I didn't see any Eskimoes around, I had someone translate 2:228 into ASL for comparison.

	words	syllables
Arabic	33	140
English	81	105
ASL	33	39

It looks like if god wanted the most efficient language he would have Signed. Really, it looks like this whole issue is a crock of shit, there is nothing special about Classical Arabic, and you might as well read the koran in translation. If you have to read it at all.

Secret Letters

OMFG, the first word of the chapter is NUN! Flashback to Catholic school, with Sister Cruella Dominatrix and her ruler. Once panic subsides, I see that this is not even a word, it's "one of the 'abbreviated letters' prefixed in some verses of the Qur'ân. Only Allâh knows its meaning". Oh, for Christ's sakes; "the inerrant and perfect Word of God [15:9] has random letters scattered through it and nobody knows what they mean! They're called Muqatta'at, and turn up in front of 29 of the chapters. Nobody has the faintest idea why. I tried to make a snarky comment on this, but my ridiculous-ometer just won't go that far.

Word is that none of these secret letters form a meaningful word, but NUN, that starts Surah 68 the Pen, is an exception. It is a real word, meaning either ‘fish' or ‘pen'. So you'll find people explaining it in the first line:

(1) NUN. By the pen and what the (angels) write. To mean:

(a) NuN is meaningless ,
(b) Nun, meaning ‘pen' gives the chapter its name
(c) Nun, meaning ‘fish' refers to verse 48 which mentions Jonah,...or...
(d) since it also can mean ‘inkstand', we get

(1) By the inkstand and the pen and that which they write!

"inerrant and perfect Word" Pffft! Here's another inerrant and perfect word that I like: Bullshit!

Attack of the Clot

Everyone seems to agree that Mohamed's first vision was surah 96, The Clot. It's not a 1950's horror flick, it's the koran's genesis story; God created man from a clot? Well, in Arabic it sounds better, al-alaq, a clump of blood or some such, a 'biomass' which is better'n the Bible's crummy old lump of clay. But blood from what? There were no people yet, so it couldn't have been human blood, it could only be some sort of common ancestor. Ha! Take that creationists! I bet it was monkey blood. LOL!

Doesn't much matter really, since in other places he creates man from dust (3:59), fermented clay (15:26) semen (16:4) or a soul (4:1) and in (22:5) he goes wild and covers all the bases; "We first created you from dust, then from a sperm, then from a clot of blood, then from a half-formed lump of flesh," How did that work? Create, destroy, recreate? Infallible God just couldn't get it right the first time, Hmm?

You'd expect, with a catchy title like "The Clot: it's alive!" this chapter would have more to say about clots, or clottiness, or clotting. You'd be wrong. With a lack of logic that's already routine, this one single line,

2. Created man from an embryo;

is the only mention of any clottitude, and this is typical. If a word appears once in the whole chapter, that's enough to be a name for the whole thing. Wouldn't it be helpful if all books followed god's Mad Libs method?

Fundamentals of Psychology
Chapter 1. Of
Chapter 2. Were
Chapter 3. Single
Chapter 4. Are
Chapter 5. Association
Chapter 6. The

Chapter 7--batshit, Chapter 8--crazy. This guy god has a pretty fancy resume, but if personnel sends him up, keep him away from the copy desk at all costs. Have him sweep floors or something.