Anonymous asked:
believers take jinns and jinn stories very seriously in my experience. I'm sorry I wasn't clear, that was silly of me. I was hoping for a break down of points which might discredit the story. and maybe possible.. psychological explanations for what might have been going on with Zaheer's son assuming that this account isn't totally made up. and thank you very much for the links, I'm watching QualiaSoup video now.
Ahh well that should be much simpler. I too assume that people aren’t totally making up stories like this, I even have family members who have claimed to have seen angels, but the list of reasons of what’s wrong with this story is quite long as it includes many minor problems of inference. So I’m going to just focus on just the major errors.
Jinn don’t exist - This has to be the central focus for a story centered around jinn and as I pointed out before nothing can be made of fire. Of course I know a believer would say I’m presuming the conclusion as they have evidence. Well about that evidence…
The story almost certainly didn’t happen as described - I don’t just mean that jinn don’t exist, I mean Zaheer is very likely to have at least unintentionally revised the story. I don’t believe his son displayed mind reading powers for the same reason I don’t believe the myriad of other tales of mind reading I’ve heard. No one has ever produced such effects under controlled conditions but if it were possible it almost certainly would have happen by now. However so far we have zero examples of real psychic powers out of thousands of trials. Not only that but we have countless examples of people being fooled by cold reading techniques into believing someone has psychic powers, people fooling themselves by misremembering a story and outright lies about such powers in countless situations. It is overwhelmingly likely that some combination of those three are responsible for the details in this story and as latecomers to this story, as opposed to being there and recording the conversations, we have no access to the event and are missing crucial details.
What makes them sure it was a jinn? - Even ignoring the story is extremely unlikely to even have been experienced as told, why should I jump to accept that it was a jinn? Even if you accept the display of psychic powers by Zaheer’s son there’s no reason to then presume he was aided by some jinn. Besides when speaking of incorporeal beings like this, there’s essentially nothing that could be done to distinguish one bodiless being with magic who knows more than you from a different bodiless being with magic who knows more than you. In other words, no set of experiences could have justified the conclusion it was a jinn as opposed to a genuine deity who had a conflict with Islam or an invisible dragon psychic.
So the jinn was wrong, that makes it evil? - Putting aside that we have no reason to believe the story, and perhaps I only bring this up because I find the ensuing story hilarious, but it’s quite ironic for the jinn to be ruled evil because it was wrong about one topic. The presumption of course is that a good jinn wouldn’t lie about its powers nor be wrong. However the Qur’an is factually wrong about countless subjects and most comically about slapping the dead body of a murder victim with a piece of a sacrificed cow so that the dead body will come back to life and identify its killer. If being wrong about reality disqualifies you from being good then the Qur’an is disqualified as coming from a benevolent source dozens of times over.
Thanks again for the question.
