Have any atheists actually read the Quran before debating with Muslims?

My answer to Have any atheists actually read the Quran before debating with Muslims?

Answer by Vishu Menon:

I have not only read the Quran, but keep reading it again and again for verification and confirmation as I write about religions. I keep the Quran at the highest point among books as requested by the person who first gifted a Quran to me. I do not know Arabic, but when I find that two translations of the same verse appear to differ, I check a third version. So I keep three English translations of the same scripture – two written by eminent Islamic scholars and one by an admiring Westerner who had taught Arabic.

Yet, the more I read Quran, I find it boastfully childish in its concepts, ignorant even thorugh prior to origin, Arabia had some of the best scientists and thinkers of its time, sinister in its warnings, piratical in much of its contents and axioms, derisive of females despite its occasional suggestion of equality, interventional in every aspect of human life including sex life and toilet habits, cloying in its promise of a heaven for the obedient and irredeemably vindictive in its promise of punishment till infinity without an understanding of infinity, and filled with suggestions generally unacceptable to a civilized modern mind. However, I’d hasten to add that Quran is a remarkable improvement on the cruel narrative of the Old Testament, and is somewhat more logical. Quran appreciates the need to give proofs for its assertions (even though the assertions are by God himself). However, proof of God’s miracles such as ‘the sky raised without a single pillar’ are not likely to impress the leader who knows that the sky is no firmament, but an optical illusion. Ships floating in the sea might appear a miracle to a desert dweller, not to one who lives by the sea and knows the law of flotation.

Whatever nobility exists in Quran was destroyed by those who claimed to have heard the views of the Prophet on matter of sex and other pleasures of heaven. Thus elaborations on the paradise such as this makes the book a laughing stock to those who were not brainwashed from childhood:

"Each time we sleep with a Houri we find her virgin. Besides, the penis of the Elected never softens. The erection is eternal; the sensation that you feel each time you make love is utterly delicious and out of this world and were you to experience it in this world you would faint. Each chosen one [i.e. Muslim] will marry seventy [sic]houris, besides the women he married on earth, and all will have appetizing vaginas."

(Al-Itqan fi Ulum al-Qur'an, p. 351).

Such inducements might have an effect on sex-starved peasants who are forced to fight for the cause of the religion, but I am surprised that they are unabashedly made available on records.

You asked me about Quran. On the personal friend, I find Muslims, apart from those who have accepted the ‘fundamentals’ of violence contained in the Quran, thorough ladies and gentlemen to the core, very companionable, compassionate and intelligent except when it comes to men’s ideas how ladies need to conduct themselves. This has more to do with the ancient Arabic culture rather than Quran, but somehow Muslims appear to have adapted the primitive culture as well as the religion.

Have any atheists actually read the Quran before debating with Muslims?