Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Original Klingon


I've heard this said about the Koran many times before. All manner of adjectives are used, things like, "poetic", "perfect", "divine" and "beautiful". When it's pointed out to the apologist that most of it is nonsense they retreat into the rather transparent "you need to read it in the original Arabic" as if no one in the world is capable of translating Arabic. I'm always incredulous when people attempt to argue that the creator of the universe is only capable of communicating the most important message to human-kind there has ever been in a single obscure regional dialect, I guess he's not heard of the Rosetta-stone?

I've actually read some of the more well known bits of this holy-book (in English) and I must confess I simply don't get it; looks to me like it's just another assemblage of medieval mythology that's a mishmash of good bit's, incomprehensible bits, wrong bits, right bits and some down-right barbaric bits. Nothing that a 7th century resident of the Middle-East couldn't have plagiarized from pretty much anything that came before it (like the old-testament) or simply invented with a knowledge of how our universe works that was prevalent at that time. Nothing new, different or indeed interesting other than a vague insight into the often insane workings of an ancient culture. I guess it's like Shakespeare, you can't really appreciate it until you've heard it in the original Klingon.

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