Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

The online comic Jesus and Mo did a series of strips featuring the characters Jesus and Mohammad, some of the recent ones playing on the presumed point that the historical existence of Jesus is uncertain.


(http://www.jesusandmo.net/2012/08/24/where/)

Apparently, it came to the author's attention that there are also people who doubt the existence of Muhammad.


(http://www.jesusandmo.net/2012/09/05/bruce/)

A quick and dirty test of a hypothesis is the sanity check: apply the same set of principles to other data and see if it is plausible. The downside, if you are committed to the hypothesis, is that you run the risk of accepting the insanity.

Like Jesus, Muhammad is the reputed founder of a religion. Like Jesus, Muhammad never left evidence of his existence except through the religious tradition that he reputedly founded. Yet, even most Jesus-mythicists take it for granted that Muhammad existed.

That is not an irrational presumption. It is grounded in a consistent pattern of personality cults: in all personality cults about a reputed human being, the personality actually existed. If Muhammad never existed, it would break that otherwise-universal pattern. If Jesus never existed, it would break that otherwise-universal pattern.

I believe that is the underlying reason why Jesus-mythicism comes off as preposterous to almost everyone including non-religious people, because everyone knows the pattern of personality cults. That reason is seldom fully conscious. Immanuel Velikovsky's proposition (that the Solar System's activity was responsible for all Biblical catastrophes) seems absurd on the face to most people, even to those people not trained in physics, though many of the arguments against it are rooted in physics. We all know the basic gist of Newtonian physics from everyday living.

Originally Posted by Steven Carr

[Paul and the others disputed table-fellowship.

I guess if you are eating dead people symbolically, you would mention that in disputes about what is acceptable to be eaten.

But Abe thinks there is nothing strange about seeing Jews eating symbolically the flesh of dead people and drinking their blood. I guess it depends upon which deli's you like to visit.

Originally Posted by Duvduv

Isn't it worth noting that not only is there no evidence of a trade city of Mecca....

Originally Posted by Huon

What are your sources ?

Originally Posted by Duvduv

This is discussed in many sources. It's not a secret. No known non-Islamic sources ever mention a place called Mecca in the Hijaz in those times either as a trade center all the way to Syria or anywhere else.

Hadiths are the source of WHEN the person named Muhammed lived, since the Quran itself says nothing about the period in which it was believed to have been transmitted to Muhammad.

This is why hadiths claim that Muhammad (Abu Qassim) is alternately found to have been a young man, not more than a youth, or a man between the ages of 60 to 65. The establishment of the fixed time for the existence of this person between 575 and 625 CE have no evidence at all aside from certain unverifiable hadiths.