Is the reason so many religions originate in the Middle East because of the high temperatures and arid climate making...

Because they still are Islamic at core.
Just like how Mormonism is still Christian or Jehovah's Witness.

Middle East wasn't that warm in the antiquity. The Levant was pretty much like central Italy is today.

I want evidence of this.

No. The Quran was not standardized. It wasn't even considered since Mohammad never said to write it down. People memorized it, had various writings on different materials, etc.

Only when during a particular battle (where they lost a lot of the Quran reciters) did they hesitantly compile a Quran and even then there were many variants until Uthman got pissed at people teaching the Quran differently and gathered some people together to create a standardized Quran and ordered all others burned. Which pissed off several prominent Quran reciters who had followed Mohammad and said the standardized version added/kept stuf in that wasn't what Mohammad said.

So, the Quran we know today is a fairly recent invention.

Not arsed to get you one, sorry. It's late.

It was similar with the gospels wasn't it? Iirc they were written decades after the fact

>Hot dry climate
>Funny plants
>Gullible people

Religion hotspot

thanks for correcting me

>With the spread of Islam, different accents for the pronunciation of the Quran came into use until a standardized version (with notations for different accents) was completed under the third Caliph, Uthman Ibn ‘Affan, in the mid-seventh century A.D.

Is this correct then?

Yeah pretty much. After Christ everyone and their mother had different gospels until the canon was decided at Nicea (sp?).

What makes it harder on Islam is the fact that the Quran we have today is meant ti be the exact and perfectly preserved teachings much like the copy Allah keeps in heaven. But the various changes and even other Muslims who knew Mohammad and who Mohammad praised as teachers and reciters of his words disagreed with Uthman. So, there is a lot of evidence that the Quran is far from perfectly reserved, which undermines the entire faith. As opposed to Christians who can read gnostic gospels and scriptures, and some even disregard the council/trinity. For Islam it isn't quite that simple.

Lebanon and Syria have snow during the winter. Also Alawites and Druze consider themselves muslim, but the majority of Sunni think they're polytheist heritics. Whereas a Catholic would still consider a member of the orthodox church christian.

Close enough. But it changed even after that (albeit with diacritical marks and other minor changes, but ones which changed some key meanings of verses).

If you google "scriptural integrity of the Quran" there should be some good articles on it at Answering Islam or WikiIslam. And it is explained much better than I could, and they cite their sources as opposed to taking what I say at face value. It's an interesting read if ya wanna see the changes Islam went through early on.

Thinking about how often people attribute nature to something illogical, beyond comprehension, considering the bad shit they would have to go through to live to make some dry bread for survival, I think it is comprehensible how it would be for a person to initiate a thousands of year process just by looking at that river and not believing the odds were in his favor because he had cognition, resources, conscience and knowledge of the fact that food came out from a current for him to eat and drink and live from that, aside from wars for control over that area.

Making people in check, maintaining law and income for army gathering and keeping enemies far away and giving reason to all the strife was manageable with religion.

Every single culture was at least once religious or superstitious. Fuck off OP you are fucking retarded. This is the reason i stopped browsing Veeky Forums. I open it up for the first time in months and its this shit.

answering-islam.org/Quran/Text/

Here's a good overview of stuff. It is taken from a Christian perspective, so there may be some bias. But I have yet to find any. But it always seems like religious people are great at picking apart and breaking down every other faith but their own. And I find the people they cite and the conclusions drawn pretty fair. These textual variants are almost wholly from Muslim sources. Nobody really touches it these days because it opens up the whole "if the Quran is wrong about being perfectly preserved, the entire faith is undermined."

>but the majority of Sunni think they're polytheist heritics
It's funny how similar Protestants and Muslims are sometimes.

It's not that more religions come from the Middle East. It's just that they happened to become the most succeful in the current era. Not only that, but Christianity owes its success to Europeans more than anything else. Meaning only Islam is a disnincly large Mid East religion.

No you moron, it is literally the crossroads of many civilizations/peoples.

This post is nonsensical and sounds like a dumb revisionist argument made by the likes of that Evangelical guy who runs "AnsweringIslam". First, oral tradition was present not only in Arabia but in Europe and many places in the world. You don't need to have something written to pass it intact to the next generation, let one pass it within a generation to the same people around.

Second, there is no evidence of Uthman being angry at people for adding stuff that wasn't recited by the Islamic prophet.

And there is evidence that the Quran was written in the time of the prophet with the same script as it was after so the argument that the Quran was modified doesn't hold much water. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Quran_manuscript

Oh fuck, I didn't even see this post yet before the accusation. You literally did get this idiotic idea from that website.

There is no strong academic position on this nonsense. Anyway there is a evidence that the Quran has been unchanged.

This isn't really a question about whether or not other regions of the world have developed dozens of religious traditions themselves, but why did several major cultures not centered in the Middle East adopt and greatly expand upon them, even before or regardless of any political support for them in Italy or Iran.

>But it always seems like religious people are great at picking apart and breaking down every other faith but their own. And I find the people they cite and the conclusions drawn pretty fair

Nah they're just morons like you. Heck this is one example of their stupidity.
This is what the page has as evidence that the Quran was changed : answering-islam.org/Quran/Text/2.238.html
>Yahya related to me from Malik from Zayd ibn Aslam from al-Qaqa ibn Hakim that Abu Yunus, the mawla of A'isha, umm al-muminin said, "A'isha ordered me to write out a Qur'an for her. She said, 'When you reach this ayat, let me know, "Guard the prayers carefully and the middle prayer and stand obedient to Allah."' When I reached it I told her, and she dictated to me, 'Guard the prayers carefully and the middle prayer and the asr prayer and stand obedient to Allah.' A'isha said, 'I heard it from the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace.'"

The header says the hadith claims a chapter in the Quran is not complete yet there is nothing in this hadith that mentions that at all. Instead what Aisha is doing (what is know to people in Islamic world, students and scholars alike and virtually any Muslim) is that Aisha was doing tafseer (i.e explaining what the verse meant).

The guy that run the website claimed that Muslims worships the Prophet Mohammed because he was too dumb to realize that the word for Salah in Arabic has 2 meaning (prayer and blessing, as in asking God to bless X).
The problem is that they're throwing a bunch of stuff that looks "legit" (as in it came from actual islamic sources) but to make it seem like they have a good argument. It's kinda like when you see some people on the internet talk about random facts they picked up to further an argument, even when they don't have a good understanding of the topic or how those facts relate to the argument. There are plenty of those of people on Veeky Forums.

To further illustrate an "AnsweringIslam" argument like the salah one and other idiotic ones usually made by Christian apologist who comment about things far above them:

>Oh Muslims go to Masjid Al-Haram? Muslims are so stupid they go to a place that is FORBIDDEN! HAHAH.
>Look everyone! Here's this article full of irrelevant hadiths and verses showing that Islam contradicts: It claims the mosque is forbidden

Of course anyone would know after some simple query that haram means both forbidden and holy (for a sanctuary) but they are written differently for example.

There's plenty of idiotic arguments like the one that the Quran was originally a copy of a Syriac text, even though there is no evidence of such Syriac text.

>Which pissed off several prominent Quran reciters who had followed Mohammad and said the standardized version added/kept stuf in that wasn't what Mohammad said.
Who got pissed? Name any and quote them verbatim.

>But the various changes and even other Muslims who knew Mohammad and who Mohammad praised as teachers and reciters of his words disagreed with Uthman

The changes would have been pronunciation. The text remains the same. Today plenty of Muslims pronounce it differently but accept that it's the same text, in fact it is.

A comparison is more like an accent except in Arabic, the accents is very technical and schoarly. Since Arabia prized poetry a lot, recitations favored every aspect of oral tradition, from the content of the verses themselves to how those verses are pronounced and son on... Again, the differences are mainly pronunciation whose equivalent in other languages is more like an accent.

And yes different pronunciations can be written down in Classical Arabic. And even then there are a wide variety of pronunciations that can be derived from a written pronunciation. Your assessment is very superficial. You claim there are changes but yet you're not educated in what those changes are. You don't know the language, yet you're making claims about a classical text.

There are plenty of ways of reciting the Quran: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quran_reading

>The changes would have been pronunciation.
That is not what they're talking about.

>muhHAMmad
>can't eat ham
>always mad

can't make this shit up

amount of religions that survived. Islam purged and destroyed so much history as ISIS does today.

The only religions in the Middle East by the 7th century were various Christian sects, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and an unclear form of Arab paganism or Jewish-Christianity, and all of them except for the paganism has survived into modern times.

These threads are all so fucking bad what is wrong with you people.

>It's the fucking cradle of civilization
>We only know about these obscure ass religions because they were the ones that were recorded and passed down through the ages.
>Christianity and Islam were just the best memes of all.

>because of the high temperatures and arid climate making people more prone to hallucinations which they interpret as prophecies?

lol m8 this is so retarded actually believe in god is easier

Yes. And Europe was so cold people hallucinated Odin n shit

Hello OP, summing up every atheistic theory and putting it to work in a bigger more complex system ends in errors, this is so because the theories are wrong, thank me later :^)

Buddhism existed there too before the muslims destroyed it.

>africa has more, pagan europe
yeah, tell me how many of those have been relevant for the last 2000 years

also as said, Zoroastrianism for example was pretty important for some 2000 years

No. Buddhism may have reached Egypt in some minor fashion way back when, but by the 7th century there was no trace of it in the Fertile Crescent. You're probably thinking of Buddhism in Central Asia, which the Sassanids had already reduced and pushed back all the way to Afghanistan.

Also, there's probably more Buddhists in the Middle East now than there ever have been.