In previous post I compared the amount of cruelty in the Bible and Quran. The Bible had more than twice the number of violent verses (843 vs. 334), but the Quran was about twice as violent when size was taken into account (5.36 vs. 2.71%).
But what about the good stuff? How do they compare? Here's a summary:
| Number of good passages | |
| Bible | 260 |
| Quran | 67 |
So the Bible has nearly four times as many good verses as the Quran. But then it's about 5 times as big. Here's how it looks when size is taken into account.
| Good Stuff | Total verses | Percent | |
| Bible | 260 | 31102 | 0.84% |
| Quran | 67 | 6236 | 1.07% |
So when expressed as a percentage of verses, the Bible and the Quran are about equal. About 1% of the verses in each could be considered good.
At least I consider them good; you might disagree. Is Leviticus 19:18 ("Love thy neighbor as thyself.") good? I think so, but that's just my opinion. How about Quran 5:32 ("Whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind.")? I think that's good too. But each person must make up his or her own mind.
I'll try to delve into this a bit deeper in a future post.
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4 comments:
Greetings,
I really appreciated your statistical analysis, but believe that it could be more informative. The current numbers are a bit misleading because the styles and contents of the Qu'ran and Bible are not similar. The Qu'ran is primarily philosophical/theological, whereas the Bible is filled with a significant amount of philosophically uninteresting history. If you would be up for the task, running a statistical analysis on the "deep" verses alone might be much more insightful.
Hi
I honestly think that this is an interesting work you are doing. However, I believe you need to equipe yourself and do learn a lot to enable you to arrive into credible analyses and conclusions.
Otherwise you will fall into a kind of 'lost in translation' trap.
It might be easier to find works in English that interprete or translate Bible. Or to meet people who can recite Bible by heart either in English, French, etc. On contrary, Al Quran is only recited, memorized and publicly used only in its original language (Arabic). Its translation to other language remains nothing but an interpretation. There where we can immediately evaluate how 'reliable' is the translation. Often the translations reflect translators' level of knowledge, intelegence, hidden interests, etc..
One of the esiest examples I've found: In Quran 6:38, you put an ABSURDITY note for, 'animal are PEOPLE too'.
In fact, if you have the original version of Al Quran along with your english version, the only ABSURDITY to be noted is your translation of 'UMAMMUN' into 'PEOPLE'.
In my opinion, failing to put the arabic version of Al quran along with your English translation, wont make your site interesting enough to invite more intelectual and fair discussions. The moslems, even if many dont realize, infact preserving the originality of their holy book by using only its original language and use translation as secondary means with carefulness.
Cheers
Hmm....it seems that this article is far less provocative than the 'which is more cruel' article.
In the June 6 post, there was outrage and there were people left and right saying "you're interpreting it wrong", or "you've taken these passages out of context", etc.
Here, there's nothing.
The Bible and the Quaran are derived from the same source. The information that the author of this blog reveals his ignorance of religion as a whole.
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