Nikashi said:
I think his quote was referring to the enlightenment of Christianity around when they decided to stop literally following the bible word for word, and stopped stoning people for adultery and burning people as witches (Salem aside). All that shit is still in the Bible, but it's entirely disregarded by the overwhelming vast majority of Christians.
The Muslim religion is still fairly fundamentalist in that respect, from my understanding, and there are a number of passages in the Qu'ran with violence similar to that in the Bible (Stone/kill non-believers, etc) which really shouldn't apply or be followed anymore in a modern society.
Boogie said:
Uh, no, I'd imagine Phlegm was referring to the actual Enlightenment.
Haha, I was a bit unclear. Yes, I was talking about the time period, but in my mind it was that time of blossoming of science and philosophy that lead to the moderate version of Christianity which is most popular these days (less so in the USA, but still...).
Nikashi said it very well.
Sadly, it will be much more difficult for Muslims to ignore the bad parts of the Quran than it was for Christians and the Bible.
First, because it's explicitely said in the Quran who wrote it and how it was written (the archangel Gabriel dictated it word for word to Mohammed), making it rather hard to claim that the bad verses are in the Quran because it was written by fallible humans.
Second, because the Bible makes it easy for Christians to say that Jesus negated... err I mean 'fulfilled' the old covenant, which is something that's just not possible with the Quran.
Third, because the current methodology (the principle of abrogation) used for resolving contradictions contained within Muslim scripture is that more recent verses take precedence over older verses; unfortunately, the peaceful parts of the Quran happen to be the older ones, so they are superseded by the violent, oppressive, more recent ones.