"Telling" the Truth; Updating Islam. I had two email exchanges with my friend Joe in Belleville (a northern suburb of my city, Newark USA) that I think warrant wider readership.
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The first concerns discerning truth from lies. How do we tell when people are lying? In a notorious recent incident, a man claims to have gotten stuck on a toilet seat in a Home Depot that someone supposedly smeared with glue. I immediately disbelieved it. It shouted "Fraud", an attempt to wring big bucks from a rich corporation with a phony incident that almost certainly could not have happened. (a) How many people sit down on a public toilet seat without first looking to see if there is anything on it, especially in a men's room, where someone's bad aim could have wetted it? (b) If you sit down on something wet and sticky, don't you get up immediately, before glue could set? (c) Krazy Glue could stick instantly, but only if it were freshly applied. It dries very quickly, so if a prankster spread it on a toilet seat and left the area, it would in all likelihood have dried completely before the next person could sit on it. So I do not believe this tale.
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Besides, how is the Home Depot responsible for some malicious prank it did not know about, did not approve of beforehand or afterward, and had no reason to be on guard against?
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The accuser was given a polygraph "lie-detector" test, which he is said to have passed. Joe sent me a link to the story about that test, but the text of the story is too vague to know exactly what was asked.

A man who sued Home Depot Inc. claiming that a prank left him glued to a restroom toilet seat has passed a lie detector test with questions about allegations that he made previous[ly] a similar claim in another town, a newspaper reported.

Did the test ask whether he himself applied the glue? or only if he had ever made a similar claim in another town? Not clear. In any case, as I told Joe:

I still don't believe it. I don't know exactly what questions were asked, and also don't know the competence of the polygraph operator. We have four technologies now to check truth: polygraph, voice-stress analyzer, and two 'truth serums', sodium pentathol and scopolomine, plus hypnosis which I would not regard as a technology but only as a psychiatric technique. Tho all produce questionable results in isolation, I suspect that if you used all four technologies you might narrow doubt down to a very low level. Add in hypnosis, which some people claim is fraud and suggestibility rather than science, and you might narrow that down even further. But we really do need a foolproof lie detector. A woman attorney I once temped for said that if when you lied you peed orange she would trust a lie detector. I don't see that that would work — one would have to pee after every question — but maybe we can develop a high-accuracy mechanism. So important is truth, especially in, for instance, statements used to persuade people to go to war, that creating a reliable lie detector should be very high on science's priorities. It isn't, tho, is it?

In a different email, Joe alerted me to courageous behavior by a Danish newspaper editor, who has bucked a growing trend in Europe to self-censor out anything that Moslems might object to, in fear of demonstrations, fatwas, and even assassination. He published cartoons showing the likeness of Muhammed, founder of Islam, and thus outraged some Moslem sentiment, since Islam forbids the depiction in graphic arts of God, the Prophet, or of anyone else that might be worshipped as an idol. Some Moslems have interpreted the prohibition very widely to forbid the depiction even of ordinary people or animals. As the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website says:

Although the often cited opposition in Islam to the depiction of human and animal forms holds true for religious art and architecture, in the secular sphere, such representations have flourished in nearly all Islamic cultures.

The Islamic resistance to the representation of living beings ultimately stems from the belief that the creation of living forms is unique to God, and it is for this reason that the role of images and image makers has been controversial [note: not settled]. The strongest statements on the subject of figural depiction are made in the Hadith (Traditions of the Prophet), where painters are challenged to "breathe life" into their creations [which only God can do] and threatened with punishment on the Day of Judgment. The Qur’an is less specific but condemns idolatry and uses the Arabic term musawwir ("maker of forms," or artist) as an epithet for God. * * * As for manuscript illustration, miniature paintings were integral parts of these works of art as visual aids to the text, therefore no restrictions were imposed.

In the modern world, television and film have forced re-evaluation of objections to the depiction of people and animals. But there are always some nuts who insist on the most extreme version of everything.
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The Christian Science Monitor article that Joe referred me contains these passages:

When Flemming Rose heard last month that Danish cartoonists were too afraid of Muslim militants to illustrate a new children's biography of Islam's Prophet Muhammad [compare the mention of illustrated manuscripts in Islamic tradition above], he decided to put his nation's famous tolerance to the test. * * * "This issue goes back to Salman Rushdie. It's about freedom of speech and Islam," says an unrepentant Rose, who feels a culture of fear and self-censorship has taken hold across Europe since Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered for criticizing traditional Islam's treatment of women.

After reading the article, I sent Joe this email.

Islam has got to modernize and allow people full freedom of speech and conscience, or the world will have to exterminate it. Whether Islam CAN modernize is perhaps the single most important question this century will resolve. Because if it can't, there may have to be a worldwide war of extermination of the retrograde forces that keep Islam barbarous and violent against minorities and the remainder of the world. Whether that means that a kernel of Islamic beliefs and practices will remain or all traces of the religion will have to be stamped out thru thorogoing suppression, no one can yet say.
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The problem is that the Koran is disorganized and so poetic that it can be interpreted in myriad incompatible ways. German researchers have concluded that it was so long between the time Muhammed said whatever it is he said and it was written down (Muhammed was himself illiterate) that a lot of nonsense got into the written form. It's like the child's game where you have a ring of children in a room. You whisper something a sentence or two long into the first child's ear and tell him/her to whisper the same thing to the next kid, and so on around the room. By the time the last kid says what s/he heard, it is almost never remotely like what was first spoken. [See also this blog's entry of July 24, 2005 for other possible sources of confusion in the text of the Koran.]
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So confused is the message we got, say the Germans, that about every fifth line of the Koran makes no sense whatsoever. It's like the old SNL character Emily Litella, whose hearing was bad, and who would say things like "What's all this about muffins?" (muppets). Wikipedia has a list:
>>Other misunderstood topics [than the 'Deaf Penalty'] included Soviet Jewelry, Endangered Feces, Making Puerto Rico a Steak, Presidential Erections, Pouring Money into Canker Research, the Eagle Rights Amendment, Busting School Children, Natural Racehorses, and Sax and Violins on Television.<<
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Here, we can see what Emily meant. We can't even begin to guess what Muhammed really said, however, because (a) we don't speak Arabic — and nor do most Moslems, (b) even current speakers of Arabic don't know the medieval Arabic that Muhammed spoke, (c) conventional Arabic does not employ letters for vowels, (d) you'd have to know the political context of the times to see how a word might be used, and, the original problem, (e) there are similar words one might confuse a given word with, and once you make one substitution, you may have to make another to make the substituted word make sense.
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As regards (c), Arabic does have markings (dots and such) to indicate vowels (and note, there is no O in Arabic) but they are not generally used in everyday writing. So they write, say, NT, and everyone is supposed to know from context which of the various vowels goes between those consonants. In English, even knocking out the letter O, and disregarding spelling but heeding only sound, you would have to choose among nat, Nate, net, neat, (k)nit, (k)night, nut, newt. There is the further fillip that if one just wrote a character wrong or read it wrong — in English, it was supposed to be MT, but was misread as NT and then transmitted down thru history other than as MT (which could be read as mat, mate, met, meet, mitt, mite/might, mutt, moot). You see the problem.
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Once something has been handed down as "holy" or "divine", the "inspired word of God's Prophet", no matter how crazy the new version may on its surface seem, people will struggle to make sense of what is really just nonsense, not what Muhammed said at all. Imams (priests) will take the phrase "natural racehorses", which should have been "natural resources" or even "national resources", and contrive some explanation: "The Prophet was making a comparison between the healthy foals of a man's herd of horses and the lands and waters of the Earth that we all share." At least in that example you can make some sense out of nonsense. But what if it had caused people to move in an entirely different direction? "The Prophet tells us that the race goes only to the swift, and the foal that is born with 3 legs or 2 heads is unnatural and cannot compete, so must be cut out of the herd. Its defect must be excised from the gene pool, lest future generations be contaminated and more and more deformities creep into and subvert the race, each generation wandering farther and farther from God's plan. As a deformed foal must be put to death, so too must the terminally ill, the retarded, the deformed among us be mercifully euthanized." That's a drastically different message, isn't it? But you could get there from "natural racehorses".
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Alas, we can't just say, "Never mind" and move on, because the nonsense passages of the Koran are not to be questioned. No effort can be made to try to figure out what was really intended, because in questioning whether the text is erroneous, you would, to the closed mind of the True Believer, be questioning the teaching. So even if "national resources" occurs 9 times and "natural racehorses" occurs only once, in a discussion of a similar matter, you are required to believe that Muhammed did in fact say, and mean, "natural racehorses", and try to make sense of that.
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At end, however, there is no making sense out of scriptures. For instance, within 2 pages of the Jews' Old Testament the Bible actually does say that Adam was the only man and Eve the only woman, but when Cain was sent away from his family, which should have been the only family of people on Earth, into the land of Nod, he married a woman of Nod. Huh?? How did Nod come to have women? people of any kind?
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Religion, he is nuts.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,063.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:06 PM