Reddit comments from August 2025

I don't think YQ is important enough to warrant an analysis of a lecture given to a lay religious audience. He tends to have a cycle of making offhand ill advised comments targeted towards other audiences which become problematic for his religious followers. For us to now take his faith based self justification and scrutinize it is a bit strange.

While YQ specialized in traditional hadith sciences in Madina that was in the 90s. I am not confident he is really the bridge between secular academia and traditional hadith sciences that warrants all of this back and forth.

If YQ has something substantial to contribute I wish he would do so in writing so that it can be evaluated. I think serious researchers are going to ignore the periodic controversies he sparks.

Yes you're right. His master's thesis was on Jahm bin Safwan and his PhD was on ibn Taymiyyah. I'm not sure if he has any published work on hadith.

Can you specify exactly what the question is? Some traditionalists divided the Quran into "clear" and "unclear" verses but it seems like you're also asking about whether the Quran is easy to understand (which is a different issue).

Family law: who can and cannot be married. Inheritance law: shares for various family members. Who is zakah eligible. Lashing punishments. Religious rites around fasting or ritual purification. None of these seem vague.

I think it's important to distinguish between organized and syncretic religion. There's no reason for us to believe that pre-Islamic Arabs, especially Quraysh in the Hijaz, had an organized religion. So, even if the epigraphic evidence is exclusively monotheistic, there was no mechanism by which religion was formalized. There were definitely monotheistic, henotheistic, and polytheistic Qurayshis before Islam, let alone across the peninsula.

Jallad and Lindstedt discuss the predominance of the name Allah in the inscription record & what that means. Sinai mentions in "Allah in Pre-Quranic Poetry" that the Name Allah itself was a kind of common-ground with Jews and Christians to refer to the Abrahamic God, but that the pre-Islamic Arabs invocation of Allah primarily doesn't mean there weren't other deities. This was just the main one and the one they could use in cross cultural exchange.

Another thing I often don't see mentioned in these discussions is that the Quran also refutes proto-atheists on several occasions. (Here I am referring to verses rebuking those who denied an afterlife, or said there was no god at all, or said that life had no meaning)

When you have a syncretic religious climate and no means of standardizing belief, you will have a kaleidoscope of religious thinking. Strict monotheists (which the Islamuc tradition calls Hunafā), henotheists, outright polytheists, proto-atheists or soft Deists, Jews, and Christians.

Can you send me any info you have on this professor? This is the first I'm hearing about it.

I think there's an implicit distinction between what God Revealed as the Torah & Injīl and what the Torah & Injīl are perceived as currently in the Quranic milleu. The Quran describes God as Revealing the Torah & Injīl but then also…

I don't know how Jews & Christians reacted to this and would love to learn more. That being said I'm not understanding what's problematic here?

Person A: "I have the best law and I refuse to follow another law."

Person B: "I have a new better law."

Person A: "Can you judge for me? However, I reject that your law is better."

Person B: "If your law was better, you should just follow that. It seems that you don't actually believe your law is better. You don't even have grounds to argue unless you were to follow your own law instead of seeking my judgement, so before you debate the supremacy of law at least do that. (The implication is: then you should accept my law)"

The verses you cited seem to be this last point here.

There have been some academic theories that prophet Muhammad intended initially to have a multi-faith community of monotheist believers but I don't find that compelling.

Paper title?

The vast majority of stories OP is referring to happen after writing of Quran & hadith.

Muslims & nonMuslims alike today memorize volumes of information verbatim so long as they have written documentation to benefit from. Joshua Foer demonstrates this extensively in Moonwalking with Einstein. Furthermore there are living traditional scholars who have copious amounts of Islamic literature committed to memory.

The question is whether this is possible with a solely oral tradition. The vast majority of the stories OP is referring to happened after the Quran & hadith were written. In fact I don't know of any example in which it's claimed a scholar prior to the writing of hadith had committed so many hadith to memory.

Reliable oral transmission doesn't address what OP is discussing, which are the stories of certain hadith scholars memorizing tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of hadith.

https://www.academia.edu/41605092/From_Standing_Stones_to_Open_Mosques_in_the_Negev_Desert_The_Archaeology_of_Religious_Transformation_on_the_Fringes

Some of the conclusions of academia seem to be in line with Wahhabi theology, namely that Jahili Quraysh were henotheistic and not polytheistic. At a surface level, the neotraditional assertion of widespread polytheism in Quraysh seems debunked. I think this is partially why he describes himself as being "puritanical".

However my personal research indicates that this isn't entirely true. Quraysh had syncretic religion, consisting of polytheistic, henotheistic, monotheistic, and atheist strains. I don't think either strict Wahhabi or neo-traditionalist theologies are tenable vis-a-vis the definition of worship and monotheism in light of that.

I think it's also important to note that Wahhabism is indebted to Taymiyyanism which is very much a positive strand with a lot of philosophical assertions. I would argue as many as the Ghazali strain of Sunnism. However, both Taymiyyans and Ghazalians argue from the basis of certain axioms and not a purely skeptical or methodologically atheistic approach. So they tend to see the positive interpretative layers they're baking into their arguments.

I should have said proto-atheist. But I think a contrapuntal reading of certain Ayat clearly indicate the Quran engaged with some people that believed God didn't exist at all.

At-Tur 52:35 & 36

Or were they created by nothing, or were they the creators [of themselves]?

Or did they create the heavens and the earth? Rather, they are not certain.

At least by the compilation of hadith under the Umayyads there is a narration referring to a sahabi that seemed not to be convinced of the existence of a Creator until he heard these verses. Whether this goes back earlier than that I can not definitely say.

There were certainly some Dahrīs that were more hardline than I think both academia & the tradition give them credit for.

That's true but this subreddit does give certain airtime to well informed layman takes. There are several megaposts that are informational by nonacademics taken from academic works. That's basically what this channel is.

Surah al-Hashr 59:21-24,

If We had sent down this Qur’ān upon a mountain, you would have seen it humbled and splitting from fear of Allāh. And these examples We present to the people that perhaps they will give thought.

He is Allāh, other than whom there is no deity, Knower of the unseen and the witnessed. He is the Entirely Merciful, the Especially Merciful.

He is Allāh, other than whom there is no deity, the Sovereign, the Pure, the Perfection, the Grantor of Security, the Overseer, the Exalted in Might, the Compeller, the Superior. Exalted is Allāh above whatever they associate with Him.

He is Allāh, the Creator, the Producer, the Fashioner; to Him belong the best names. Whatever is in the heavens and earth is exalting Him. And He is the Exalted in Might, the Wise.

Wes Anderson vibes

The average German citizen didn't have livestreamed footage of the holocaust to laugh at. The culpability here is arguably worse

Thanks. Can you send me more info on this in the context of the holocaust?

There's a big difference between abstractly having awareness your government is doing something wrong and witnessing the crimes in 4K but still making it into a comedy.

Go back to the farm troll

Appreciated

There's a lot of posts which show Israeli Telegram groups with hundreds of thousands of people celebrating footage of massacres.

What he's describing is the diffusion of revolutionary energy through the illusion of process & moral masturbation. He called them "state sanctioned get-togethers" and that's what they are. It's a performance to stroke the ego of the protestors while tiring them out and making them feel accomplished while business carries on as usual.

How are you doing now that you know how bar the 3rd one is 😂

It's a lot of backstory.

Dal'Loran is a truly ethical businessman just from a racist/classist era. But he is an overall good person

Being a victim doesn't justify oppressing others. She kept a child from his dad for much of his childhood. She became a villain.

Refusing to take responsibility and intentionally not developing your own self awareness when you know something is clearly wrong is a moral failing. It doesn't have to be a circumstance of perfect malice to be wrong or even evil. Most…

This excuse can be extrapolated to gang members who kill people and deal drugs due to extreme childhood abuse and lack of resources.

Peacewalker was the last Metal Gear game where Kojima had full creative license before leaving Konami before he could properly finish 5. It was originally entitled MGSV: Peacewalker.

I would love to see a Portable Ops & Peacewalker remake combo.

Then the team should do Metal Gear 1 & 2.

How would a fine or imprisonment be more humane than lashing or amputation? Nearly all modern governments use fines and imprisonment instead of lashing or amputation. In the United States we have the largest carceral population in the entire world where inmates routinely, on a daily basis, experience injustices during their sentences that far exceed being lashed. That's in addition to simply being removed from society. Additionally, the biggest thieves and robber barons get away from any kind of punishment by paying fines.

How do these other replacements for the ones explictly mentioned in the text result in greater safety for society or justice for criminals/victims? Where is the data that is so overwhelming that it would precipitate our consideration of revising them?

There have been millions of scholars in the past. There were also Malikis who suggested only the genitalia constitute hard awrah so technically bikinis would be halal in public. That's called a shadh view.

Something being out of place is a really bad reason to rewrite the direct purport of the Revelation and 1400 years of scholarship. Why would the people involved in making laws care about it being "out of place?" Shouldn't they care about what's correct according to Sacred Law and also is best for the people?

My question is very clear. Why should we change punishments that we know work and are explicitly in the text for punishments we know don't work and are explicitly not in the text? When the majority of scholars think it's unacceptable to do so?

Ibn Hazm and imam Ahmad allowed a man to view a woman he was interested in marrying nude before the marriage. There are a lot of shadh views in Islamic history. That's why there's a body of scholarship authenticating what is normative.

That's not what I am asking. I am asking you to justify this view.

If the default view is the traditional hudud punishment, what is the justification to have a revisionist view?

Why would anyone think it's a good idea to change hudud that work to modern punishments that lead to much more suffering?

What a unique usage of the word tumescent

You just described the ethereum virtual machine

The key assumption here is that human behavior is neccesarily and totally determined by neurological processes which boil down to either deterministic or random physical/chemical processes. This assumption is unproven and doesn't account for the hard problem of consciousness or qualia. It's taking as axiomatic that human will can definitely be understood as a consequence of the body. Once we question whether all human decisions are a direct result of neurological processes and the evidence for that, all of this falls apart.

There's so many logical and cognitive fallacies in this comment it's hard to know where to begin but the most concerning part is that you seem to have some awareness this is a non-argument but you just want us to go with it because it feels intuitive to you

That was neither an inductive nor an empirical argument and if your science is based off of pure fallacious speculation that's a problem

1. Seem
2. Probably
3. If
4. Correlate

You're appealing to lack of knowledge and evidence in a case where overwhelming evidence would be required and where empirical evidence may be wholly insufficient. You're dealing with not even sampling bias but just no evidence whatsoever and then claiming that overrides all of the philosophy/science around the philosophy of the mind, the hard problem of consciousness, dualism, idealism, etc. It's like I'm not even in a philosophy sub this is just typical Redditors horrible understanding of science, logic, and cognition.

You're in the wrong sub mate. The natural sciences can never trump philosophy. Please read anything on the philosophy of science

If that's the case your undergraduate philosophy department did you a major disservice. Science is incapable of commenting on the major three categories of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and ontology. It's also incapable of…

You realize efficacy =/= truth? And if modern science leads to the death of our entire species because the planet is uninhabitable and we cannot reproduce that's obviously worse than smallpox?

If truth is concordant with reality how do you define: 1. Truth and 2. Reality using science?

If you don't even know what truth and reality are then I can claim that astrology arrives at truth and reality. This is just as veracious as your claim science arrives at truth and reality without defining them. An astrologer becomes as serious as a PhD scientist.

Without justify your definition I can come up with my own definition that has just as much weight. This is extremely lazy thinking and is basically conceding the point that it doesn't matter at all. In which case this conversation is pointless.

Analytic philosophy is not that far off from Python

I'm a former solutions architect now in legaltech. A lot of the law is going to be automated in the next 5 years using AI. It's not as bad as SWE but it could likely be worse.

When man cannot cope with his inability to prove the truth of his mental crutches:

Empiricism cannot lead to objective truth but neither can math. I think that's where the disconnect and confusion arises from. There's no need to render mathematical proofs as empirical. That actually doesn't make them any stronger because our senses are just as faulty as our thinking processes. I think empirical and mathematical evidence are at an equal level of truth but they are distinct (and ultimately insufficient at arriving at absolute truth).

Why does this comic skip 900 years of philosophy

Where did it go?

Is that why the employment rates for compsci grads are so bad now?

Up

Why does logic having an origin point mean that we can't apply logic to something that doesn't have an origin point? Logic is just a human reasoning system. We can reason about things that are beyond our ability to fully contain in such a system. That's kind of the purpose of logic, as an insulated self referencing system we can use to make accurate inferences about things outside of that system.

This is almost like saying since science can't prove logic is true then all logic is unprovable.

I think with positive logical assertions there are a host of problems the skeptics can present and I even think logical nihilists have a point. That being said I have not seen any serious philosopher who went down the radical skepticism route except that they ended up taking a faith based approach with the exception of the early Pyrrhonists. Even Bertrand Russell resorted to empiricism. You either take a Hegelian approach that the noumenon is unknowable and a waste of time, a radical skeptical approach (solipsism, nihilism, makes much more sense than Hegel), or you develop some kind of a God figure (even if it's a Platonian form).

Cries in Aristophones

Determinate negation sounds like Mutazilite theology

Her father prefers the innie.

This was at the height of uncritical feminism so media reflected public sentiment. All women were unquestionable. In fact Rose, Jenny, Mary Jane, these were all sympathetic characters at the time. No one batted an eye because that was the zeitgeist.

I don't think this is entirely true. In America capitalism is closely intertwined with the development of Calvanism & secularism. There was definitely significant ideological development of capitalism in the Americas in a way that Europe never caught up to. The American church was then reimposed internationally to varying degrees.

It's more than a cultural difference. It has to do with the historical development of the ideas underpinning capitalism and the unique confluence of those ideas coupled with the abundant natural resources of the new world. If the thesis of capitalism is that free markets lead to the best outcomes because an invisible hand (in the words of Adam Smith) guides the markets better than human intervention ever could, then you need a validated experiment to do that.

That was not possible in Europe because there were no vast swathes of unexploited natural resources to be taken. When European colonizers conquered the Americas and massacred the natives, there were several competing economic & governmental models that were suggested. Socialism was experimented with.

The Protestant movement, Calvanism, then secularism, plus capitalism in a "new" land with abundant resources is what created modern global hegemonic techno-capitalism.

It's not just because Europeans are more chill.

If I can get an older 701 I can give up my 401. Otherwise not

Phillip & Elizabeth are analogous to the CIA not the FBI.

Show didn't do as much of a good job drawing that moral equivalence because it was so focused on Stan rather than what the CIA was doing.

I am questioning your false equivalence of Stan's role in the cold war with Directorate S. Stan was a domestic law enforcement officer, not an international espionage agent. Stan may be better compared to Oleg. The roles Phillip & Elizabeth play were not depicted on the American side in the show.

Islam already has societal safeguards for women. Additionally, YQ fails to distinguish between something haram tadayyunan versus hukman. If a man wants to divorce his wife of 20 years for a younger one, it may be allowed legally (hukman) but still oppression (tadayunan). He might still face consequences in the Akhirah for that.

We should all know the famous story of the tabi'i who wanted to divorce his wife because he no longer loved her and Umar b. Al-Khattab advised him against that.

There doesn't need to be a rethinking. The solutions are already there but YQ is just not well acquainted enough with knowledge.

What women are marrying men who they know cannot support their lifestyle? Is that really the level of introspection you've given to the roles of men & women in the gender war?

I really hated Dougie. I get that the idea is Cooper's inability to let go and move on is what ends up dooming him, and Dougie's empty brained zen approach puts him at peace with the universe. I get it. But watching Dougie is so painful.

She also emphasized to Alex that he not speak about his parents to another "human." As if non-humans were an option to her.