Andrew, I am not missing your point. The problem is that I basically said, “Two plus two equals four,” and you replied, “Yes, Andy, but you forget that Springfield is the capital of Illinois.” What you said was true but irrelevant to the points I was making, which were (a) that the Washington Post, while purporting to explain the verse in question, had opted not to quote it and then described it in a misleading fashion, and (b) that the best hope of empowering moderate Muslims is to deal honestly with the text as it is, not bleach out the hair-raising stuff. I never came close to suggesting either that only Islam has troublesome scriptures or that it did not matter what modern believers made of the scriptures, so your raising these issues was irrelevant to what I was getting at. But as long as you brought it up, I thought it was worth noting that no other religious tradition extant — regardless of what its scriptures say or what its believers take them to mean — is inspiring savagery on a global scale.

Your follow-up post, moreover, is not helping your argument (whoever you may be arguing with). First, Muslims do not believe, as you suggest, that the Koran sets forth the “writings of Mohammed.” They believe the utterances recorded in the Koran are the verbatim word of Allah. This underscores the challenge for reformers. Being eternal, infinite and transcendent, God’s views are not subject to change based on “1,400 years that have elapsed since they were transcribed”; however interesting that history may be to us, it’s a fair bet that God’s views do not change as we evolve. Even if they did, moreover, humans who presume to explain how God got it wrong — the unfortunate position reformers find themselves in as far as the faithful are concerned — have a tough row to hoe.

Second, I think you are missing the truly important lesson in your closing rumination about how times change and people’s beliefs evolve even though their scriptures remain the same. I cooked something on the stove this morning — I didn’t need to live in the dark and cold for generations, nor did I need to rub two sticks together. I relied on the learning of prior generations and peoples — some with no religious traditions, some with traditions different from mine, but all with experience from which I could draw. We don’t recreate the wheel with every new generation and belief system. The knowledge that caused the views and behavior of the Biblical believers you mention to evolve over time has been equally available to Muslims — who, after all, are also People of the Book. If your point is that we should give Islam a few thousand more years because Jews had that long to become what they are today, I’m not buying.