13 Dec 2015

Tricking People Into Thinking Bible Verses Are From the Koran

Religious 50 Comments

I’m sure this will provoke a discussion I end up regretting, but if you go watch the video at this link (I can’t seem to get just the YouTube video) you’ll see two Dutch guys reading verses from the Bible, but telling people they’re from the Koran. The people recoil from the violence and repression of women, etc.

So go ahead and discuss the lesson the guys wanted you to draw from it; I get that. But what’s interesting is that there is an INCREDIBLY misleading edit done in the video. Who can spot it?

50 Responses to “Tricking People Into Thinking Bible Verses Are From the Koran”

  1. Adam says:

    The link you’re looking for is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEnWw_lH4tQ

  2. Z says:

    I don’t know where the edit is, I’m guessing you’re hinting that something has been taken out of context. But having read most of both the Quran and the Old Testament, I came away with the opinion that the Quran was by far the more ‘humanistic’ of the two. Maybe I have to be a scholar to interpret them correctly, who knows, but that was my impression.

  3. Pierre says:

    Timothy 2:12 is misquoted then crossfades to something else entirely.

  4. Colombo says:

    Eugenics: even atheists are assholes and they don’t know it.

    It is easy to mislead people to make a point. But what is truly difficult is to make people mislead themselves, to have their “common sense” work against them, without adding or subtracting information, true or false. Just let the cultured make fools of themselves.

    Mark Dice’s videos:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndshbH3qZ6Y
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYhTFz_SGw0

  5. Harold says:

    There are loads of edits and cuts in the film. I do not know which one is the misleading one.

    I thought the Black guy had a good comment: “I always try not to be prejudiced myself, but apparently I already am. Its just something you do unconsciously.”

    We should recognise that we are all prejudiced and biased – it is impossible not to be and operate in the world. We should recognise this so we can try to counter it in our own behaviour.

  6. Pierre says:

    I think the video was a good idea, and it does its job rather well. I only watched it once, but the only possible editing problem I saw was that it doesn’t quote Tomothy 2:12 quite well, seemingly making it about “teaching” in general, and throws in an unrelated (if indeed completely outrageous anyway) quote from Deuteronomy 25:12. No big deal, but for some viewers it might make the Bible sound even more intolerant that it sometimes can be.

    • Harold says:

      This might relate to a previous point Bob made about translations. I presume they are using a Dutch bible, and the subtitles have been translated into English, so the subtitle will not match the English language bible version.

    • Bob Murphy says:

      Yep Pierre has it. I just disagree with the “no big deal” part of his answer.

      • Pierre says:

        I got the impression that at least the passersby had heard the verses separately and in full (the reactions from one of the women makes it clear enough, I think). Also,they might have done this particular bit of editing mostly in order no to be censored on the internet, since the verse in question is quite graphic… But it’s true that the end result is something that the Bible does not, and would not say anywhere to the best of my knowledge.

        • Bob Murphy says:

          Right Pierre, because the one woman says, “…she was just trying to help…” I think they read the full passages in context to the people. It’s just the video that is misleading.

      • Josiah says:

        I tend to agree with Pierre that it’s not a big deal.

        Suppose that they had used actual quotes from the Koran. I’m sure there would’ve been at least one where a muslim could say that they were taking the quote out of context and being misleading.

        • Bob Murphy says:

          Josiah do you understand exactly what the two quotes are?

          So like if the Koran in one spot says, “You shall cut off the hand of a thief” and in another part it says “If a woman interrupts a man, she shall be ostracized” and the video has it

          “If a woman interrupts a man you shall cut off her hand”

          you would just call that “taking a quote out of context”?

          • Josiah says:

            It’s a montage of different quotes, and it’s pretty clear it’s not all the same passage.

          • L says:

            So the video may incorrectly suggest the the bible says you should cut off the hand of a woman that assumes authority over a man. Granted.

            Actually in Deuteronomy 25:11 and 25:12, it says you should cut off the hand of a woman that tries to stop an assailant from attacking her husband by grabbing his crotch.

            So what’s the big deal? If they put Deuteronomy 25:12 in full context in the video, at least to me it would seem about equally ridiculous/immoral.

            • Craw says:

              You guys are too tough on Bob Murphy. It’s obviously unreasonable to cut off a woman’s hand for bossing her husband. But this video gives the unfair impression the bible endorses this, by conflating two perfectly reasonable things, one of which is cutting off her hand for accidentally touching some assailant’s privates. The video makes the bible look harsh. That’s unfair, like with the presidential quotations. “A day that will live infamy” and “tear down this wall” are perfectly sensible things, but “tear down this day of infamy” is just unfair parody.
              Stop picking on god!

  7. Gijl says:

    I don’t see the problem. Christians have the Old and New Testament to support them whenever they’re feeling violent or peaceful toward others depending on the day. Likewise Muslims claim the Koran has its War and Peace verses to justify their beliefs depending on they feel on the day.

    • Maurizio says:

      Aren’t those books supposed to be written by God? If so, shouldn’t God able to write in a way that cannot misunderstood to that extent?

      • Jim says:

        Doesn’t this question just amount to “If I were God I wouldn’t have done it that way.”

        • Craw says:

          No. We aren’t even discussing god. We are discussing some people’s opinions about god. You can’t hide behind god’s imagined perfection.

          • Jim says:

            Come on. Do I really need to point out that Maurizio’s original postulate was a hypothetical? Context, context, context.

            As a mental exercise go head and imagine your response as one to virtually any other comment here. You could post it with almost no changes and it would be just as pointless a diatribe. Yes Craw, we know you’re an atheist. And we cower.

        • Maurizio says:

          Suppose you write a moral treatise and it becomes a best-seller. But some of your fans happen to become serial killers, saying they find justification in your book. And you say “it is a book of peace, they are reading it wrong”. Ok, so you are telling me you tried to be as clear as possible, and yet those people could read your words and totally reverse their meaning? But then you must be a lousy writer. And everyone would agree that you are a lousy writer. There is a limit to how much you can bend words. If your words can be read so bad, clearly you can’t write. However when it comes to God, few would say he is a lousy writer. Isn’t this a double standard?

          • Jim says:

            Heh. Nothing I could say would top Josiah’s response below.

            But I take your point now – I read too much into it originally. Thanks.

      • Josiah says:

        Aren’t those books supposed to be written by God? If so, shouldn’t God able to write in a way that cannot misunderstood to that extent?

        Uh, have you met people?

      • Z says:

        That’s an interesting question, but a religious person might also say that the books should be interpreted through one’s conscience, which they believe god has also created. So their argument might be that there is no reason to take one tool of god, the revelation, on it’s own. Rather, use all the tools that god has given you, such as the book, logic, the conscience, etc.

  8. Jim says:

    Ho hum. Once again atheists that read the Bible like southern cloistered fundies; dropping ALL pertinent contexts including comparative literature, historical, redemptive, grammatical, and especially covenantal.

    There’s a reason this type of thing only has the ‘red meat’ affect of riling up people that already “know” what they know and has virtually no affect on those Christians that actually understand their theology and history (rare as they may be these days).

    Given the narrative that informs the producers of the video, one wonders how western civilization, steeped in a history of Biblical Judeo/Christian thought, could have developed a sense of justice completely disparate from every other society in history, that’s been uncritically accepted as a basic presupposition by those producers and is being used in service to refute the very basis of that sense of justice.

    As should be obvious from the history of the last 100 years, true mass murder and injustice requires progressive atheism.

    • Major.Freedom says:

      Jim, you do realize that a gigantic number of atheists today grew up in Christian and Catholic households in which they were subjected to the very “southern cloister fundie” interpretations of the Bible that you decry but are still at root based on actually oppressive and violent passages?

      “Given the narrative that informs the producers of the video, one wonders how western civilization, steeped in a history of Biblical Judeo/Christian thought, could have developed a sense of justice completely disparate from every other society in history,”

      Are you seriously “wondering” though or are you convinced? If you want to wonder about what I am already convinced about, ask yourself and wonder why after almost 1800 years of Christianity did suddenly a country appear with radically different ethics than not only the rest of the world, but the rest of the world’s predominantly Christian and Catholic nations? Do you think that maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t religion but a point of departure away from it whereby the world’s western philosophers, after having rediscovered Aristotle, viewed the world as including natural laws that are able to be studied and learned without requiring a God factor in any of the scientific methods or equations, and be brought to bear before man’s benefit?

      “As should be obvious from the history of the last 100 years, true mass murder and injustice requires progressive atheism.”

      True made murder? As opposed to what, incidental and fake mass murder? It is vain to believe that murder requires either religion or atheism. The statistics do not prove any causal relation between either religion and murder or atheism and murder. There have been made murders conducted by both theists and atheists. To scrape the bottom of the barrel and claim things like “Yeah well atheists (or theists) killed more people, so the blame is on theism (or atheism) is an easy trap to fall into, but is at base a disgusting, irresponsible flippancy that betrays respect for those killed by psychopaths who were motivated by either religion or atheism.

      I always see defenses of the evil passages in the Bible in the form of general appeals to complexity, context, history, and so on, as if doing so will ever justify the condoning of murder for victimless “crimes”.

      It is naive and silly to pretend that Christianity has only motivated people to do good and never do evil. It is naive because a thymological study of history proves otherwise, and it is silly because the Bible literally condones murder for victimless crimes.

      Your choice in using the term “true mass murder” is disturbing.

      • Jim says:

        @Major.Freedom & @E. Harding,

        Please pardon my throwaway line at the end of my comment and the certainly poor choice of wording. You read too much into it. The point should have been obvious; that atheism is responsible for more deaths in the last 100 years than all religious persecutions combined in all history. That’s NOT an attempt to justify religious persecution.

        That said, including Hitler as religious violence is simply wrong. He persecuted the Jews as a race, not for theological reasons (though he managed to convince anti-semetic Catholics). His ideas were firmly rooted in his love of Nietzsche (I’ll even grant, for sake of argument, that he misused Nietzsche) and obviously German nationalism and socialism. Also, you neglected the violence in the French Revolution, hardly anachronistically influenced by Marx and Engles.

        On the history of Western thought, of course I’m not really wondering. Aristotle was recovered by Aquinas in the 10th century and Locke was a committed Christian so this can hardly be dated to the 19th century. I don’t believe you can argue that the Reformation doesn’t figure prominently in the move to a more liberal views and even today most (but not all) Christian Libertarians that I know are also Calvinists. There’s a reason for this.

        Platonic “justice” doesn’t suffice for liberal views. The contrary should be obvious from the conclusions in “The Republic” which supports the aforementioned atheistic violence being communal and elitist.

        While this is certainly simplistic: English empiricism as enlightenment philosophy supporting a mechanistic analogy/model of the universe was the primary backdrop to understand the tendency toward 18th century Deism but this can hardly be the basis for any sense of “justice” that pervades modern thought. Although I will credit Hume with shedding the greatest light on the so-called “Fact/Value dichotomy” which actually makes atheistic (materialist) prescriptive ethics (and therefore any enlightenment warrant for “justice”) an oxymoron.

        No, modern liberal “justice” is the legacy of “value” afforded an individual, which is a result of the Judeo/Christian influence on western thought (e.g. “natural rights”). As just one example, the entirety of the New Testament can be viewed as a diatribe against Jewish tribalism and a defence of the value of non-Jewish humanity in that the vast majority of it is an argument for why the Jews ought to consider believing gentiles now joined to God in covenant; a concept that was previously reserved for Israel as a nation.

        All that said, while I firmly believe that you cannot be a consistent atheist and libertarian (kinda the reverse of what Ayn Rand would say; that you can be a consistent theist and Objectivist), I’m glad for inconsistencies 🙂 and in a world where we agree not to use force against each other, we can have these more important conversations without the fear that we will be precluded from living the life we chose.

        • Jim says:

          “kinda the reverse of what Ayn Rand would say; that you can be a consistent theist and Objectivist”

          Obviously the “can” should have been “can’t.”

        • Jim says:

          Oh. And this:

          “The point should have been obvious; that atheism is responsible for more deaths in the last 100 years than all religious persecutions combined in all history.”

          was just a poke at what you wrote. I should have made that more clear.

        • E. Harding says:

          Yeah, Hitler’s violence wasn’t religious in nature, but it wasn’t due to progressive atheism, either.

          And you nowhere specified that you were referring to “true mass murder” only during the past century.

          • Jim says:

            All right. Like I said. It was an ill conceived throw away line. I’ll retract it as a witless quip.

      • Jim says:

        A couple more things: “I always see defenses of the evil passages in the Bible in the form of general appeals to complexity, context, history, and so on, as if doing so will ever justify the condoning of murder for victimless “crimes”.”

        First, I make no such general appeals. We can discuss the specifics if you want. First we need to ask questions like “what type of literature is Deut.? What do other examples of this literature at the time tell us about how it should be interpreted? Who was it written to (and who was it NOT written to)?” And you must abandon the presupposition that God doesn’t exist because any understanding or justification needs to presuppose that he does. In other words, you cannot criticize the consistency of a position without assuming its axioms, even if hypothetically.

        That said, I’m not sure how, from where you’re standing (given you’re a materialist), you could justify (in the sense of providing a rational warrant) any condemnation of any violence.

        “It is naive and silly to pretend that Christianity has only motivated people to do good and never do evil.”

        Such a thing was never stated nor implied be me. People can find motivation for violence in anything.

    • E. Harding says:

      “Given the narrative that informs the producers of the video, one wonders how western civilization, steeped in a history of Biblical Judeo/Christian thought, could have developed a sense of justice completely disparate from every other society in history, that’s been uncritically accepted as a basic presupposition by those producers and is being used in service to refute the very basis of that sense of justice.”

      -Western civilization and its concept of justice started centuries before the dead Jew on a stick.

      And the 30 years’ war was what? And the Holocaust was what? Not true mass murder? Do only famines attributable to gov’t stupidity count as true mass murder? How about the Irish and Bengali ones?

      The Khmer Rouge was an anomaly, though having origins in earlier Maoist doctrine (which was based on Stalinist doctrine, which was based on Leninist doctrine, which was based on the ideas of Engels and Marx).

    • Craw says:

      “As should be obvious from the history of the last 100 years, true mass murder and injustice requires progressive atheism.”

      Tai Peng Rebellion
      Thirty Years War
      Moghul invasions

      • Jim says:

        Thanks Craw,

        Of course, I’m not sure what the point is. I didn’t say people can’t use religion to justify violence or that religion ensures peace and I’m sure I don’t need to point out that none of those happened in the last 100 years, and I’m sympathetic to Major.Freedom’s point that playing a numbers game (one that you haven’t done anything to overturn the result of) is, if not disingenuous, can be a red-herring … but thanks anyway.

        • E. Harding says:

          “As should be obvious from the history of the last 100 years, true mass murder and injustice requires progressive atheism.”

          -So you admit you were totally wrong here, right?

          • Jim says:

            Yes. Like I said. Poorly worded jab. Mass murder doesn’t require progressive atheism. Empirically it seems it just helps quite a bit.

  9. Kevin Erdmann says:

    I think they have done a public service here, just by starting a conversation about this.

    I am so happy to have been alerted to Deuteronomy 25:12 because of this video. I can’t tell you how many times that has come up, and it’s good to have a definitive ruling on it for when it comes up again.

    https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%2025&version=NIV

  10. Craw says:

    A similar exercise described. https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/kristof-osculates-all-faiths-avers-that-theyre-all-equally-wonderful/

    Coyne really, really, really hates all religion but is honest enough to state the real reason why these exercises are disingenuous. “Christianity has largely divested itself of its bad scripture over the ages by ignoring it. Islam, however, hasn’t done the same de-fanging: while the vast bulk of Muslims aren’t inspired to violence by the malevolence of the Qur’an, the majority in all Muslim countries read the Qur’an as literal truth.”

    • E. Harding says:

      I love Coyne’s site.

      • Craw says:

        He has some really good stuff on evolution. He is sometimes very honest about the repressive Left. But he is an ideologue whose blog is a strictly policed echo chamber. I saw him ban a poster for making too many posts — the post that lead to the ban was an answer to a direct question from Coyne!
        The site may be great. The man is a turd.

        • E. Harding says:

          Oh, come on. That’s nothing compared to the typical SJW blog. He at least has ground rules that are sensibly enforced.

          • Craw says:

            No, they are NOT “sensibly enforced”. On that very same thread there were members of the echo chorus posting more; they were neither named nor banned. Coyne has banned his critics for mild criticism while his choristers accuse others of dishonesty or having “blood on your hands” for their views.

            I admit he’d ban anyone who called people fags .
            Anyway, anyone who cares can read it for a while and see.

  11. Bob Murphy says:

    Guys, in Deuteronomy (in the Old Testament) it says that if two men are in a fight, and the wife of one intervenes and grabs the other guy’s genitals, that you are to cut her hand off.

    Then Paul in the New Testament says he doesn’t permit a woman to teach. It doesn’t say how he enforces this.

    Now do you see how misleading the video is?

    It would be like me saying, “Hey listen to these weird quotes from US presidents! For example ‘Mr. Gorbachev tear down this day of infamy!'”

    • anoninamble snowman says:

      “Guys, in Deuteronomy (in the Old Testament) it says that if two men are in a fight, and the wife of one intervenes and grabs the other guy’s genitals, that you are to cut her hand off.”

      I love that, in a world defined by horrifying infant mortality, mass starvation, genocide, and human suffering on a scale unimaginable in even Roman-era civilization, this stuff and the ridiculously detailed Hebrew dress code was what occupied the time of bronze-age scribes.

      The rest of the video is lazy even by Youtube standards. Everyone knows that the Hebrew Bible is really old and contains advocacy of slavery, genocide, war-bride rape, and even racism. Shockingly, ancients who lost half their children to disease and who spent generations variously starving, enslaved, or otherwise suffering and miserable didn’t have a terribly high capacity for compassion for outgroups or criminals.

    • Gil says:

      I don’t see the comparison. Rather it sounds the way a lot of Christians are distancing themselves from Muslims these days – by claiming the Old Testament has replaced the New Testament and that Old Testament was for a different time era with a different context. This is pretty claiming the Old Testament is now part of the Apocrypha as it has little meaning to Christians.

  12. Harold says:

    I think people are missing the main point. This is not criticism of Christianity or condemnation of Islam, it is exposing prejudice in the listener. If they think it is from the Koran they condemn, when told it is from the Bible they explain.

    • Craw says:

      Partly true. It is an attempt to downplay the horrors of the Koran with a tu quoque argument. Follow the link I provided to Coyne’s site for a good explanation of this.

      • Harold says:

        Kristof’s article is not the same as the you tube video, although they do cover similar ground.

        I guess we all take whatever message we want. I view Islam and Christianity as pretty much mistaken views of the world, so I don’t see much to be gained by justifying one over the other. So I focus on something else that tells us something interesting about ourselves.

        Looking back at the video, it is clearly comparing Islam and Christianity – they say Islam is viewed as having no place in the modern world, so what about Christianity? It looks rather like they are indeed trying to make the point that Christianity also has no place in the modern world, or possibly that Islam does have a place.

        Still, my point is a valid and important one.

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