Which of these Holy Books are divinely inspired?

[polonius]

Most of the world's major religions have holy books. Each are considered to be inspired by the members of certain religions.

Which do you think are divinely inspired and which are not?

And how do you know?

[JehovahsWitness]

[Replying to post 18 by Justin108]

So far at the most we have The Quran, I hazard a guess that not many of the other so called "holy books" make direct claim to containing the thoughts of God.

I'll stand corrected if someone provides a reference for me.

Jw

Why does it matter?

Well the OP asked

Which do you think are divinely inspired and which are not?

And how do you know?

As I said earlier, the first and simplest critera seems to me to check if the book CLAIMS to be of divine origin. If the book itself doesn't make the claim, and presents itself as for example the thoughts of a pious individual such as Buddah, then why should the reader consider it to be more if the author(s) himself didn't?

So it seems the very first step would be to find out if the book makes such a claim. My point is there probably are not that many books that make such a claim, there are plenty of "holy books" but many of them only claim to be instructions on godly living, stories of the gods, instructions for the pious, theological thoughts etc but not many claim to be of divine origin.

[Clownboat]

[Replying to post 18 by Justin108]

So far at the most we have The Quran, I hazard a guess that not many of the other so called "holy books" make direct claim to containing the thoughts of God.

I'll stand corrected if someone provides a reference for me.

Jw

Why does it matter?

Well the OP asked

Which do you think are divinely inspired and which are not?

And how do you know?

As I said earlier, the first and simplest critera seems to me to check if the book CLAIMS to be of divine origin. If the book itself doesn't make the claim, and presents itself as for example the thoughts of a pious individual such as Buddah, then why should the reader consider it to be more if the author(s) himself didn't?

So it seems the very first step would be to find out if the book makes such a claim. My point is there probably are not that many books that make such a claim, there are plenty of "holy books" but many of them only claim to be instructions on godly living, stories of the gods, instructions for the pious, theological thoughts etc but not many claim to be of divine origin.

And my point was that it shouldn't matter what the author or book claims. And why? Well, because of the part you left out:
"For example, if you were inventing a religion, would you not claim that god was behind at least it or its holy book?"

As far as only some holy books claiming only to be instructions on godly living... We could assume some authors were just more honest then others. Why we would assume that there was a god behind any holy book is lost on me. Unless of course the book seems to be beyond human imagination. So far, I have not read such a book though.

[marco]

My understanding is that very few "holy books" outside of the bible, explicitly state they contain the throughts of God. I'm not even sure the the Quran does. But I will stand corrected if it does. I know The Quran does claim Mohammed is a prophet of God, does he say he is speaking God's throughts or his own?

In the Koran it is Allah who speaks, and he refers to his Prophet. The work is not, like the Bible, the inspired word of God but the word of God - or at least among Muslims. Consequently the Koran itself is regarded with utmost reverence.

Muhammad heard the word of God in a cave and since he was himself illiterate it is understood that his later dictation of what he had heard must have been God's unadulterated word.

If one accepts this, then the Koran is pre-eminent among Holy Books.

[OnceConvinced]

As I said earlier, the first and simplest critera seems to me to check if the book CLAIMS to be of divine origin.

I claim that the posts I make on this website are of divine origin.

Does that claim make you any more willing to accept what I say on this website? If not why not?

[marco]

As I said earlier, the first and simplest critera seems to me to check if the book CLAIMS to be of divine origin.

I claim that the posts I make on this website are of divine origin.

The avatar speaks for itself. I certainly believe that this is true.

And how on earth does one move beyond this simple belief when it comes to accepting the text of some holy book? Does the Holy Spirit whisper different things to different faith groups?

[Justin108]

As I said earlier, the first and simplest critera seems to me to check if the book CLAIMS to be of divine origin.

A claim has has no effect on the probability of something being divinely inspired. Anyone can make a claim. Literally anyone can claim something is divinely inspired. If a religious text implies divine inspiration or outright claims divine inspiration is an arbitrary difference.

If the book itself doesn't make the claim, and presents itself as for example the thoughts of a pious individual such as Buddah, then why should the reader consider it to be more if the author(s) himself didn't?

If a book does make the claim that it was divinely inspired, is that enough to consider it divinely inspired? If this perspective were true, would you have suddenly believed in Buddha if he had made the claim that he was a messenger of god or some other divine entity? If every holy text were to have a "ps. this came from God", would all world religions be equally credible to you?

[JehovahsWitness]

As I said earlier, the first and simplest critera seems to me to check if the book CLAIMS to be of divine origin.

I claim that the posts I make on this website are of divine origin. Does that claim make you any more willing to accept what I say on this website? If not why not?

I am not saying that the claim itself makes it true, but that a claim seem a reasonable place to START an investigation to find a book of Divine origin. This seems logical and reasonable to me.

To illustrate if one were trying to identify the Queen of England instead of cross examining all 3.5 billion women, the vast majority of which do NOT make any such claim, we FIRST select the women that CLAIM to be the queen of England. Let's say there were 100 women that made that claim - then the investigation would proceed of those 100 women.

In a similar way, if one is investigating which of the holy books are of Divine origin, it seems reasonable and logical to proceed by first selecting those books that explicitly make the claim.

Of course one can presume that the Divine Book is of divine origin without making the claim of being such, but in that case one could legitimately ask why, if God exists and (presumably) authored a book for mankind, he would neglect to, at the very least include this fact within its pages. That God would chose to neglect to mention the divine origins of the book, opting rather to leave those in search of it to have to search all "holy books" (books dealing with God and religion) the number of which could no doubt count in the thousands if not the hundreds of thousands, is dubious if we are to presume God is a god of both love and logic.

In short the purpose of a book of divine origin would presumably to put mankind in communication with God, for that one then to author such a book and not ensure that it's origins were clearly contained in the book is like someone telling you to "call you" but not providing you with the number; being deliberately obscure leaves one to question the authenticity of the offer.

Still even if this latter option were a reality, it STILL seems logical to begin one's search, on the premise that the claim itself exists and only widen the net after the legitimacy of those that do claim to be of divine origin has been rejected upon further examination.

JW

[JehovahsWitness]

"if you were inventing a religion, would you not claim that god was behind [...] its holy book?"

Yes, you would think so. The rarity of such a claim is in itself telling.

Humans as a group, seem to be unendingly religious yet very few books in existence make the specific claim to contain the words of Almighty God himself. You would think (given humans penchant for religion) that there would be millions of such books, its easy enough to write, and I think the OP was probably written on the presumption that at the very least all the holy books contain this claim. But the opposite is in fact the case, the claim is extremely rare.

While it is easy (and not uncommon) for people to say "God spoke to me and I'm speaking to you", its another thing to produce a written volume that can be examined and cross examined over the course of history, under the microscope of human discovery, science and logic. I don't have an answer for why there are so few books that make this claim. As a theist I suspect that, given that nothing would delight Satan more than have hundreds of thousands of Holy books all claiming to contain the words of the Almighty (thus rendering the search for the truth harder) that this may well be evidence of divine intervention. Others may disagree, that's just a personal view.

In any case, I'm only here to see if other posters can provide evidence there are (outside of the Quran) such claims in any of the so called holy books.

[Justin108]

[Replying to post 27 by JehovahsWitness]

Are you implying that it's impossible for a text that does not explicitly claim to come from God to have a divine origin? That's the approach you seem to be taking. "Let's start by disregarding all texts that do not claim to be divinely inspired as they clearly aren't". If there is a god, he is clearly secretive, so surely it's possible for him to have discreetly inspired holy texts

[JehovahsWitness]

[Replying to post 27 by JehovahsWitness]

Are you implying that it's impossible for a text that does not explicitly claim to come from God to have a divine origin? That's the approach you seem to be taking. "Let's start by disregarding all texts that do not claim to be divinely inspired as they clearly aren't". If there is a god, he is clearly secretive, so surely it's possible for him to have discreetly inspired holy texts

I think I pretty much covered all the angles of my thought here in post 27. Is there a statement therein that leads you to ask me this question? (please feel free to re-read the second paragraph that starts with the words "Of course... through to the end of the post (total 3 paragraphs)")