&gt; This is absurd and ignorant reasoning. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever, in my life, wondered what the &#x27;founder&#x27; of my religion would do. I highly doubt most people do, and I&#x27;d like to see some evidence - some research - showing that it influences more than a tiny fraction.<p>Well, Islam has an entire tradition called the &quot;Sunnah&quot;, which can be loosely described as the life and actions of Muhammed.  According to any school of Islam with which I am familiar, with the possible exception of certain Sufi sects, <i>all</i> Muslims are categorically instructed to follow the example of Muhammed as the first and foremost example of a &quot;correct&quot; Muslim.  In fact, according to Sunnis (one of the two main branches of Islam), the Sunnah are an &quot;official&quot; source of Islam, along with the Qu&#x27;ran.<p>Also, Evangelical Christians have a thing called W.W.J.D., or What Would Jesus Do.  If you&#x27;re in the US, you&#x27;ve undoubtably heard of it.  Many Christians wear pendants, bracelets, and put on bumper stickers with these initials.<p>So in short, order, those are two pieces of evidence I&#x27;d put forward of a religion&#x27;s adherents aspiring to do what their religion&#x27;s founder would do.  You may disagree with the parent&#x27;s conclusions (I&#x27;m not even sure I do, but since it&#x27;s been flagged I can&#x27;t re-read it to say), it&#x27;s decidedly not based in ignorance.<p>I can&#x27;t speak to your religion, but I can assure you that among very, very large numbers of Muslims and Christians, the life of their religion&#x27;s founder has a huge impact on how they go about life.  I have to wonder how many religious Muslims or Evangelical Christians you&#x27;ve known that this is even a question in your mind.<p>Also, I find it odd that you called someone&#x27;s reasoning &quot;ignorant&quot; who is clearly at least somewhat familiar with Islam and the Qu&#x27;ran, when you yourself admit to reading &quot;little&quot; of the Qu&#x27;ran.<p>PS: Since you were looking for good translations of the Qu&#x27;ran in your other comment in this thread, I highly recommend Ahmed Ali&#x27;s, Arberry is fairly painful and hard to read.  Also Muhammed Asad&#x27;s.  Although both are accused of being impartial translators, that&#x27;s mostly by the extremist or at least conservative wing of the religion and I doubt many people here care about that.