fschmidt wrote

Hadiths are not from God.  But that doesn't make them worthless.  Hadiths are valuable historical documents that show how Muhammad applied Islamic principles to situations in his life.  Muslims claim that Muhammad was micromanaged by God, so his actions are like God's message in the Quran.  But this makes no sense.  If God wanted us to follow some detailed script, God could have made the Quran 1000 times larger and included it all there.  And to me, the idea that Muhammad needed to be micromanaged is actually insulting to Muhammad.  My view is that God picks prophets who are intelligent enough to understand and apply what God says, so that they don't need to be micromanaged.  And we can learn from the actions of the prophets by trying to understand what principles the prophets used to choose their actions.

So this is why I reject the idea of sharia.  Of course Muslims should use Islamic principles to guide their laws, but these laws are not part of religion.  And Muslims should not blindly copy Muhammad as described in hadiths, but should instead follow Muhammad's example of using intelligence to correctly apply Islamic principles to current circumstances.