Islam,

Actually, that's not in the Bible

4:27 PM S. H. 0 Comments

By John Blake, CNN

(CNN) – NFL legend Mike Ditka was giving a news conference one day after being fired as the coach of the Chicago Bears when he decided to quote the Bible.

“Scripture tells you that all things shall pass,” a choked-up Ditka said after leading his team to only five wins during the previous season. “This, too, shall pass.”

Ditka fumbled his biblical citation, though. The phrase “This, too, shall pass” doesn’t appear in the Bible. Ditka was quoting a phantom scripture that sounds like it belongs in the Bible, but look closer and it’s not there.

Ditka’s biblical blunder is as common as preachers delivering long-winded public prayers. The Bible may be the most revered book in America, but it’s also one of the most misquoted. Politicians, motivational speakers, coaches - all types of people - quote passages that actually have no place in the Bible, religious scholars say.

These phantom passages include:

“God helps those who help themselves.”

“Spare the rod, spoil the child.”

And there is this often-cited paraphrase: Satan tempted Eve to eat the forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden.

None of those passages appear in the Bible, and one is actually anti-biblical, scholars say.

But people rarely challenge them because biblical ignorance is so pervasive that it even reaches groups of people who should know better, says Steve Bouma-Prediger, a religion professor at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.

“In my college religion classes, I sometimes quote 2 Hesitations 4:3 (‘There are no internal combustion engines in heaven’),” Bouma-Prediger says. “I wait to see if anyone realizes that there is no such book in the Bible and therefore no such verse.

“Only a few catch on.”

Few catch on because they don’t want to - people prefer knowing biblical passages that reinforce their pre-existing beliefs, a Bible professor says.

“Most people who profess a deep love of the Bible have never actually read the book,” says Rabbi Rami Shapiro, who once had to persuade a student in his Bible class at Middle Tennessee State University that the saying “this dog won’t hunt” doesn’t appear in the Book of Proverbs.

“They have memorized parts of texts that they can string together to prove the biblical basis for whatever it is they believe in,” he says, “but they ignore the vast majority of the text."

Phantom biblical passages work in mysterious ways

Ignorance isn’t the only cause for phantom Bible verses. Confusion is another.

Some of the most popular faux verses are pithy paraphrases of biblical concepts or bits of folk wisdom.

Consider these two:

“God works in mysterious ways.”

“Cleanliness is next to Godliness.”

Both sound as if they are taken from the Bible, but they’re not. The first is a paraphrase of a 19th century hymn by the English poet William Cowper (“God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform).

The “cleanliness” passage was coined by John Wesley, the 18th century evangelist who founded Methodism, says Thomas Kidd, a history professor at Baylor University in Texas.

“No matter if John Wesley or someone else came up with a wise saying - if it sounds proverbish, people figure it must come from the Bible,” Kidd says.

Our fondness for the short and tweet-worthy may also explain our fondness for phantom biblical phrases. The pseudo-verses function like theological tweets: They’re pithy summarizations of biblical concepts.

Spare the rod, spoil the child” falls into that category. It’s a popular verse - and painful for many kids. Could some enterprising kid avoid the rod by pointing out to his mother that it's not in the Bible?

It’s doubtful. Her possible retort: The popular saying is a distillation of Proverbs 13:24: “The one who withholds [or spares] the rod is one who hates his son.”

Another saying that sounds Bible-worthy: “Pride goes before a fall.” But its approximation, Proverbs 16:18, is actually written: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”

There are some phantom biblical verses for which no excuse can be offered. The speaker goofed.

That’s what Bruce Wells, a theology professor, thinks happened to Ditka, the former NFL coach, when he strayed from the gridiron to biblical commentary during his 1993 press conference in Chicago.

Wells watched Ditka’s biblical blunder on local television when he lived in Chicago. After Ditka cited the mysterious passage, reporters scrambled unsuccessfully the next day to find the biblical source.

They should have consulted Wells, who is now director of the ancient studies program at Saint Joseph’s University in Pennsylvania. Wells says Ditka’s error probably came from a peculiar feature of the King James Bible.

“My hunch on the Ditka quote is that it comes from a quirk of the King James translation,” Wells says. “Ancient Hebrew had a particular way of saying things like, ‘and the next thing that happened was…’ The King James translators of the Old Testament consistently rendered this as ‘and it came to pass.’ ’’

When phantom Bible passages turn dangerous

People may get verses wrong, but they also mangle plenty of well-known biblical stories as well.

Two examples: The scripture never says a whale swallowed Jonah, the Old Testament prophet, nor did any New Testament passages say that three wise men visited baby Jesus, scholars say.

Those details may seem minor, but scholars say one popular phantom Bible story stands above the rest: The Genesis story about the fall of humanity.

Most people know the popular version - Satan in the guise of a serpent tempts Eve to pick the forbidden apple from the Tree of Life. It’s been downhill ever since.

But the story in the book of Genesis never places Satan in the Garden of Eden.

“Genesis mentions nothing but a serpent,” says Kevin Dunn, chair of the department of religion at Tufts University in Massachusetts.

“Not only does the text not mention Satan, the very idea of Satan as a devilish tempter postdates the composition of the Garden of Eden story by at least 500 years,” Dunn says.

Getting biblical scriptures and stories wrong may not seem significant, but it can become dangerous, one scholar says.

Most people have heard this one: “God helps those that help themselves.” It’s another phantom scripture that appears nowhere in the Bible, but many people think it does. It's actually attributed to Benjamin Franklin, one of the nation's founding fathers.

The passage is popular in part because it is a reflection of cherished American values: individual liberty and self-reliance, says Sidnie White Crawford, a religious studies scholar at the University of Nebraska.

Yet that passage contradicts the biblical definition of goodness: defining one’s worth by what one does for others, like the poor and the outcast, Crawford says.

Crawford cites a scripture from Leviticus that tells people that when they harvest the land, they should leave some “for the poor and the alien” (Leviticus 19:9-10), and another passage from Deuteronomy that declares that people should not be “tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor.”

“We often infect the Bible with our own values and morals, not asking what the Bible’s values and morals really are,” Crawford says.

Where do these phantom passages come from?

It’s easy to blame the spread of phantom biblical passages on pervasive biblical illiteracy. But the causes are varied and go back centuries.

Some of the guilty parties are anonymous, lost to history. They are artists and storytellers who over the years embellished biblical stories and passages with their own twists.

If, say, you were an anonymous artist painting the Garden of Eden during the Renaissance, why not portray the serpent as the devil to give some punch to your creation? And if you’re a preacher telling a story about Jonah, doesn’t it just sound better to say that Jonah was swallowed by a whale, not a “great fish”?

Others blame the spread of phantom Bible passages on King James, or more specifically the declining popularity of the King James translation of the Bible.

That translation, which marks 400 years of existence this year, had a near monopoly on the Bible market as recently as 50 years ago, says Douglas Jacobsen, a professor of church history and theology at Messiah College in Pennsylvania.

“If you quoted the Bible and got it wrong then, people were more likely to notice because there was only one text,” he says. “Today, so many different translations are used that almost no one can tell for sure if something supposedly from the Bible is being quoted accurately or not.”

Others blame the spread of phantom biblical verses on Martin Luther, the German monk who ignited the Protestant Reformation, the massive “protest” against the excesses of the Roman Catholic Church that led to the formation of Protestant church denominations.

“It is a great Protestant tradition for anyone - milkmaid, cobbler, or innkeeper - to be able to pick up the Bible and read for herself. No need for a highly trained scholar or cleric to walk a lay person through the text,” says Craig Hazen, director of the Christian Apologetics program at Biola University in Southern California.

But often the milkmaid, the cobbler - and the NFL coach - start creating biblical passages without the guidance of biblical experts, he says.

“You can see this manifest today in living room Bible studies across North America where lovely Christian people, with no training whatsoever, drink decaf, eat brownies and ask each other, ‘What does this text mean to you?’’’ Hazen says.

“Not only do they get the interpretation wrong, but very often end up quoting verses that really aren’t there.”
Islam

King Fahd Glorious Qur'an Printing Complex in al-Madinah al-Munawwarah

10:07 PM S. H. 0 Comments

If you have read the last post then you know that my husband was performing umrah in Saudi Arabia, well he is back now al-hamdullillah and we have been having very interesting conversations about the whole History of Islam, but one of the things that I didn't know and really amused me was to know that there is a huge complex in Saudi Arabia(In Medinah): King Fahd Glorious Qur'an Printing Complex in al-Madinah al-Munawwarah with a production capacity that has reached more than ten million copies of different publications a year for every single shift. The number of publications produced by the Complex so far has exceeded 160 different publications, including complete Mushafs and part translations, recordings, books of Sunnah and of the Prophet’s Biography and others.

The Complex started distributing its productions since 1405 AH. This is carried out for Muslims within the Kingdom and all other parts of the world. And the distributed quantity has got to tens of millions. It is build on 2,500 square meters, and every year 1 crore copies will be printed in 50 languages, out of which 95% is distributed around the world for free and only 5% will be sold on cost at the complex sales counter.



It has a staff of 1700 people out of which 800 people are examiners;
each copy of Quran printed in complex is examined by 3 examiners
one after the other before it comes out of the complex.


Annual Gift of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques for the Pilgrims

In lines with the instructions of King Fahd Bin Abdel Aziz, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, the Complex offers each pilgrim a copy of the Mushaf on his way back home after completing Hajj rituals.

the translations of the meanings of the Holy Qur’an produced by the Complex into different languages, are classified in 50 translations:

24 Asian languages.

12 European languages.

14 African languages.

***My husband chose the Spanish version as a gift for me, now I have my "Interpretation of the meaning of the holy qur'an and the "Translation of the Qur'an in Spanish"***


The Complex's Unique Multi-Stage Control System

Control on the production of the Complex is considered the main method to ensure its correctness. King Fahd Complex is distinguished for its control system which is not found in any other institution in the world; it includes text control, quality control and a final control.

1. Text Control:

The text is verified by a committee specialized in the Quranic fields of study, including Tajweed, methods of recitation, calligraphy and punctuation. It is the committee that gives the command for printing after adjusting every part of the Mushaf and making sure of the correctness of the text in all the stages starting from preparation till finishing the complete edition.

2. The Quality Control:

This committee is responsible for checking any possible mistakes during the entire stages of production including printing, assembling, sewing, and bookbinding, and also for correcting these mistakes on time.

3. The Final Control:

In addition to the constant control made by the text control committee, to ensure the correctness of the printed Quranic text, as well as the field and quality control in all work stages, there is a complete facility for the final control, which consists of more than 600 workers and starts its work after the process of bookbinding ends to achieve more accuracy and verify the compliance of the productions to the defined technical specifications. The Complex is distinguished with this kind of control in comparison with other major world publishing foundations. In all the stages, the Complex uses the best material for preparing, montage, printing and bookbinding. It also uses computers in its different tasks.




If you want to know more about it click here, they also have interesting sections to memorize qur'an and translations of the qur'an in other languages .
2011/Fashion,

Swarovsky Bridal Henna

9:31 PM S. H. 0 Comments

yep you are reading good, isn't it really Wanderfull, I mean Swarovsky in your henna designs, wow!
well if you are lucky to live in NYC then you can have one of this beautiful designs


© Akiyo Henna


© Akiyo Henna



Akiyo Henna Inc offers a beautiful, exotic, temporary body art in the traditions of India, Morocco, North Africa, and the Middle East with the twist of contemporary design aesthetics from her fashion textile background.
Akiyo is a very talented and professional henna artist who has been practicing the art of henna for the past 10 years in the NYC Tristate area.

They use 100% natural fresh ingredients to insure your safety and the darkest stain.