The video argues that Muhammad’s message is best explained as a human product shaped by earlier religious traditions and historical circumstances, not divine revelation. It presents internal textual and historical considerations to support that conclusion.
I'll give a brief historiographical critique of controversial claims presented in the polemical video on early Islam. The disputed narratives are evaluated using methods of source criticism, transmission analysis, and historical contextualization.
archive.org/details/encycl…

Here is a thread on what the vast majority of critical biblical scholars and historians agree on regarding slavery in the Bible, stated carefully and without polemics.🧵 Slavery in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament)

The Hebrew Bible presupposes the existence of slavery as a normal institution of the ancient Near East. It doesn’t abolish slavery, and it does regulate it.

D.D., let’s go claim by claim, because precision matters. What you’re presenting looks rhetorically forceful, but it collapses under scrutiny once the data and logic are actually examined.🧵

https://twitter.com/DivinelyDesined/status/1958552532621652330

You triumphantly seize on alignment gaps as though they disprove common ancestry. But in comparative genomics, unalignable regions (repetitive DNA, structural rearrangements, transposon insertions) are expected.

This creationist claimed that humans and chimpanzees are not evolutionarily related. Here's a rebuttal of his anti-evolution claims on human–chimpanzee relatedness.🧵

https://twitter.com/DivinelyDesined/status/1958151277160038867

He cites purported genetic dissimilarity, mutation-rate constraints (“waiting time” problems), Y-chromosome divergence, and the origin of new genes as evidence against human–chimp common ancestry. He asserts that any genomic similarity could just as well indicate a...

The claim that orphan genes contradict evolution rests on a misunderstanding of biology and on a theologically flawed assumption about how God creates. Orphan genes, defined as genes without recognizable homologues in other lineages, aren't evidence of special creation.🧵

https://twitter.com/DivinelyDesined/status/1956710680071221743

They are best understood as products of limited detection and ongoing innovation. As new genomes are sequenced and analytical methods improve, many supposed orphans are reclassified. For example, genes once thought unique to yeast have later been shown to have faint homology...

Bridges’ critique of Darwinian, neo-Darwinian, and post-Darwinian paradigms relies on selective framing, mischaracterization of scientific concepts, and speculative alternatives that lack evidential grounding. 🧵
His “mosaic with 85% missing” metaphor for the fossil record trades on the rarity of fossilization but ignores how evolutionary history is reconstructed through consilient and independent lines of evidence.

Many scholars believe that there was some influence from Iranian religion; it seems to have been an interaction of Persian influence (in possibly Hellenized form) and internal eschatological development.

🧵⬇️

@RobertK22245756 @DoulosChristou7 @perseus1977 @Bellerophon77

https://twitter.com/theosib2/status/1594038468287483905

Jon D. Levenson in Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel (Yale, 2008) says that Zoroastrian theology "has obvious and striking connections with Jewish apocalyptic in general"...

“Mythology” and “religion” are actually two completely different things.

What is mythology?

Mythology is the body of traditional stories and tales associated with a particular culture that have been passed down from generation to generation and have profound cultural and/or... ...religious significance to the members of that culture. Myths can sometimes be religious in nature, but they can also be important to other aspects of the culture. Ultimately, “myth” is a genre of folklore.

[Thread]
The New World Translation (NWT) is an English translation of the Bible published by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. It is the version of the Bible most often used by Jehovah’s Witnesses. It is known for including a large number of passages that are translated quite differently from how those passages are normally translated. The NWT is especially controversial for its unusual translation of the Gospel of John 1:1.

There is literally zero scholarly validity to the approach of "undesigned coincidences". It is apologetics and just a version of harmonization that's driven by an interpretive approach that prefers "let's maintain the Bible's inerrancy" over ... ..."what does it look like to read these texts and historicize them accurately?" as a consideration for assessing interpretive options. Of note, McGrew's apologetics books do exemplify the importance of the prestige of the academic as a way of establishing legitimacy among ...

Not Surprising News: Tablet thought to have guarded tombs after Jesus’s death may not be what it seems (Science Magazine)
sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/t… tl;dr -

Technically speaking, ophanim/cherubim/seraphim aren’t angels (malakhim). Malakhim (“messengers”) are always depicted in anthropomorphic terms afaik, those other guys are divine beasts and mystical chariot wheels that often attend or uphold the throne.
books.google.com/books?id=kE2k3… Cherubim seem to be related to Mesopotamian chimeric beasts like lamassu, seraphim are winged serpents that may relate to Bronze Age serpent cults, and malakhim correspond to the fourth and lowest tier of deity at Ugarit, the messenger deities.

Israel Finkelstein & Thomas Römer wrote a pair of interesting articles on the subject of narratives in the Torah/Pentateuch (HeBAI 2014; ZAW 2014).
sci-hub.tw/10.1628/219222…
academia.edu/28570571/I._Fi…
theologie.uzh.ch/dam/jcr:b79ce6…
academia.edu/22081309/Finke… I'll summarize their reconstruction of how the narratives came together. First of all, there were actually three origin stories: Abraham, Jacob, and the exodus (i.e. Moses).

@MikeWingerii In Encyclopedia for Wars, authors Charles Phillips & Alan Axelrod document the history of recorded warfare. 1763 wars are listed of which 123 have been classified to primarily involve a religious cause, accounting for less than 7% of wars and less than 2% of war deaths. @MikeWingerii In ‘War Audit’, Greg Austin (a research Fellow in the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford) along with his colleagues Todd Kranock and Thom Oommen put together a list of 73 major wars that occurred in the last 3,500 years up to the 20th century.