Even this English source clearly states that this quote from Muhammed is hearsay and not reliable. How is this any different than a Muslim taking some obscure supposed quote of Jesus' from an apocryphal gospel and then parroting all over the Muslim world that "this" is what Christians believe? Take the story about the boy Jesus cursing children that he didn't like - we have a source for that, but its about as reliable from the Christian perspective as that wikipedia entry seems to be claiming is the reliability of the quote about the 72 "houri." But real, actual Western Christians would mostly be quite offended if they found out that Muslims believe that they believe that Jesus actually cursed children!

Perhaps there are Christians who take that Jesus cursing children story literally, Catholics I suppose...so my question is, do we have evidence that extreme sects of Islam actually take the 72 virgins / "houri" literally?

Whisper-down-the-lane effect creates HUGE problems for people trying to understand what other people really believe. The same words can mean different things to different members of even the same religion, or even the same subsect. Christians are supposed to believe in hell, for example, and yet when I was a Christian and had only Christian acquaintances, it seemed that the percentage of people that REALLY believed in hell as a place of eternal, fiery torture, was quite small. Many believe in annihilation, many believe in purgatory-then-heaven or some such similar process, but anything to avoid the simple, plainly stated (if you accept the English translations as accurate, which I personally don't, but that's a whole nother issue) horrors of literal hell.

(IMO, paraphrased) Absurd Belief about Afterlife, Christian Edition: Everyone who doesn't go through a certain ritual will be tortured forever

(IMO, paraphrased) Absurd Belief About Afterlife, Muslim Edition: Everyone who goes through a certain ritual will get 72 virgins.

We have far more documentation for the Christian Edition within the official Christian religious text than we do for the Muslim Edition, making the Christian one far more central to the belief system, and yet relatively few people believe in that. So applying the same principles to Muslims, it would seem likely that VERY few actual Muslims believe in this absurdity.

Originally posted by buddhasystem
And don't forget the 80,000 servants. What's up with this grotesque picture of decadent lifestyle based on slavery?

You know I thought about this and I finally came up with an answer, maybe.

I think we agreed it's nearly impossible for a man to keep even one wife happy, let alone 72. So what does it take?

Maybe 1000 servants for each wife might be enough to keep them happy? So that could explain why you need 72,000 of those servants!

And you'd still have a few leftover for yourself!

And maybe if you aren't good enough to get 80,000 servants, the penalty you pay is that you have to BE one of those 80,000 servants for someone else in the afterlife.

Is that about the ratio of camels that can pass through the eye of a needle, about 1 in 80,000?

Don't take me too seriously, my guesses at answers are probably just as made up as the original promise of 80,000 servants.