Except I'm sure Ehrman would agree that the traditional idea is not that we have the original texts, but rather that that is modern fundamentalist view.

It is not known whether Muhammad was illiterate or not.

See:

Gerhard Boewering (2008) "Recent research on the construction of the Qur'an" in Gabriel Said-Reynolds (ed.), The Qur'an in Its Historical Context, Routledge: p. 70-87.

and:

Sebastian Guenther (2002), "Muhammad, the Illiterate Prophet: An Islamic Creed in the Qur'an and Qur'anic Exegesis" Journal of Qur'anic Studies. Volume 4, Issue 1, Page 1-26

Okay, genius, then give me the search for the actual string "alpha.beta".

And what's funny is that google lists * as the wildcard operator and does not even list . as an operator at all. https://support.google.com/web...

Doesn't work.

This is with verbatim turned on: https://www.google.ca/?gfe_rd=...

It's nearly the same with it off: https://www.google.ca/?gfe_rd=...

The advanced search fails similarly to using quotation marks:

https://www.google.ca/?gfe_rd=...

https://www.google.com/search?...

The last is done with the advanced search. Every result on the first 10 pages does not even contain the string for which I searched.

Every glass of milk I have every drank has contained transfat. How much more is this going to make milk cost? What will the taste difference be? Will "cow shares" no longer be allowed?

Scientists believe things all the time. How could you possibly say otherwise?

Here is a sampling peer-reviewed scientific papers where scientists state what they believe. All I did was search Google Scholar for "we believe".

"We believe that these carcinogens have in common a ring system sufficiently planar for a stacking interaction with DNA base pairs and a part of the molecule capable of being metabolized to a reactive group: these structural features are discussed in terms of the theory of frameshift mutagenesis." http://www.pnas.org/content/70...

"We believe these data thus demonstrate unambiguously that carboxyl groups are exposed at the ends of nanotube tips, and that these groups can be covalently modified to produce probes with very distinct chemical functionalities." http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

"We believe that the material which gives the X-ray diagrams is the salt, not the free acid." http://www.nature.com/physics/...

I really like that last one. Watson and Crick weren't scientists when they had that paper published?

For up-to-date knowledge of all the variants in the Bible, just for the Catholic letters it costs 98 euro, which is about 105 USD. It would cost many thousands of dollars for the whole Bible. That doesn't even come close to including all of the apocrypha and patristics and everything else!

There's never been a decent critical edition of the Quran made. Keith E. Small did a partial one for just the tiny text of 14:35 to 41. It costs 29.85 USD on Amazon. I'm not sure, but I'm estimating that that is only about 1/1000 of the text of the Quran. So, extrapolating, it would be 30,000 for an up-to-date knowledge of Quran variants. And again, that doesn't even come close to including all of the hadiths and sira and everything else!

The "major" religions do not fare well at all for cheaply understanding their "history" and myths either.

Sources:

http://www.scholarly-bibles.co...

http://www.amazon.com/Textual-...

She's also mentions Inspire Magazine.

Inspire used to be edited and mainly authored by Samir Khan Samir Khan was an American citizen, convicted of no crime; he was never even indicted. He was assassinated on orders of Barack Obama along with Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011.

So when these criminals like Feinstein talk about banning books, note they may also mean assassinating the authors.

Land of the Free, Home of the Brave.

What are you talking about? You said I never bothered to read the paper. I did. You simply used a scurrilous personal attack against me. It has nothing to do with who chose what.

None of the links you gave say that they are paid less for the same work. They are talking about women being paid less in toto.

Women's employment earnings are less than men. No one is denying this. That is totally different claim from the incredible one you originally made: That women are paid less for the very same work.

"And the paper did not say that it wasn't happening"

This is an incredible argument. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You need POSITIVE proof that women are paid less for the same work, not innuendo or faith. The Department of Labor, which has a duty to deal with these issues, did the most thorough investigation ever, and concluded that there was no evidence.

I have read the paper many times, thank you for trying to belittle me. I was objecting to your particular claim that women are paid less for the same work. Now you are raising completely different points about men and women doing DIFFERENT work. I don't deny that men and women do different work and that societal expectations about gender roles is the primary cause of this. I fully agree with that.

There were many claims that women were being paid less for the same work. The Department had a legal obligation to prevent this as a civil rights issue, so they tried to discover what exactly was happening. They could not determine that such a thing was happening. Of course, every economist was saying the same thing: Investors almost universally invest in the highest expected return. If women were doing the same work for less pay, investors would invest in firms that primarily or solely used women as workers, thus increasing demand, and pay, until an equilibrium is reached.

The final conclusion: "As a result, it is not possible now, and doubtless will never be possible, to determine reliably whether any portion of the observed gender wage gap is not attributable to factors that compensate women and men differently on socially acceptable bases, and hence can confidently be attributed to overt discrimination against women. In addition, at a practical level, the complex combnation of factors that collectively determine wages pad to different individuals makes the formulation of policy that will reliably redress ay overt discrimination that does exist a task that is, at least, daunting and, more likely, unachievable." (pg. 36)

The Department of Labor has not done an equivalent study since this 2009 one.

The Department of Labor commissioned a study on the gender pay gap. None could be determined to be caused by discrimination. They could not even conclude that there was any pay differential when all non-discriminatory factors were accounted for. "An Analysis of Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women"

"snakes"? To be honest, if they're not venomous, I'd like to go if you were there. But I doubt many would.

"If the shooting in Ferguson was captured on video there would have been no protests."

I would say that that is wishful thinking for Ferguson and other cases like it.

The different eyewitnesses reported seeing different things. And that's what with video evidence as well: People with a negative view of the police will interpret it one way, people with a negative view of the race/class/culture/dress/whatever of the perpetrator will interpret it another way. One person sees police brutality, another person sees justifiable use of force. What we perceive is theory-laden.

In many of the cases the video evidence will only harden people's points of views and make people more extreme because they will simply not understand how the other side can "ignore" the "truth" when it is right there on the video.

That's just deflection. Grayson still wrote about Depression Quest and Zoe Quinn with no disclosure of the conflict of interest. That's a lack of journalistic ethics. It would never be allowed for example at the New York Times or any other respectable newspaper. The article is still up, it's right here: http://tmi.kotaku.com/the-indi...

For comparison, let me quote to you from the New York Times Ethical Journalism handbook, which all journalists must follow in order to remain employed there:
"Clearly, romantic involvement with a news source would foster
an appearance of partiality. Therefore staff members who develop
close relationships with people who might figure in coverage they
provide, edit, package or supervise must disclose those relationships
to the standards editor, the associate managing editor for news
administration or the deputy editorial page editor." (p. 9)

Did Grayson do anything comparable? No. And why would he? Kotaku has no comparable ethical standards!