Back when I was a Muslim, in my final stage right before stumbling on this place, which was the final catalyst for me turning Atheist, I had decided to disregard Sharia and even direct Qranic law in every point in which it conflicted with my consciousness. My reasoning was that either God would understand that due to the social and intellectual progress since the times of Muhammad and would accept my behaviour as obeying the spirit of the Law rather than the dead letter, OR that he was more similar to that Jehovah prick than I thought, which meant I didn’t care if such a despicable being would want to punish me eternally for this.
Of course, there isn’t anything heroic about that. It would just have meant disobeying Him in fairly standard ways that are already practiced by most alledged Muslims, such as not flaying adulterers, not cutting thieves’ hands, not forcing your wife to be an eternal minor under male tutelage, and so on. Except I had though about it and deliberately decided to violate God and the Prophet’s commands, unlike what other people did, which was merely Not Thinking About It.
Then I read Religion’s Claim To Be Non Disprovable among other things and thought: “If I’m going to favour my own principles AND empirical evidence OVER Word Of God, I might as well give up on religion entirely and save myslef much guilt and fear.”
“If I’m going to favour my own principles AND empirical evidence OVER Word Of God, I might as well give up on religion entirely and save myslef much guilt and fear.”
Drop the ‘empirical evidence’ bit and this is basically how I decided to leave Christianity: Some bits of advice in the bible are obviously wrong, and if I’m going to be using my own judgment to determine which of the questionable bits are right and which are wrong, I might as well just use my own judgment in general.
I suspect that this kind of reasoning might be more palatable to religious folks than the more common proofs that religion is wrong on matters of fact.
That argument is applicable only to Protestants, though. As a Catholic, you have no business interpreting the Bible yourself. (And the same holds for the Orthodox too.)
The Bible might in fact contain a number of blatant scientific errors. That would be far more difficult to pull off with Muslims, since the Qran is far less error ridden (being incredibly ellyptic helps) and may in fact contain remarks that have turned out to be confirmed by Science, or so do most Muslims believe.
That and, well, God being alledgely omnipotent means he could have created the Universe five minutes ago, so the most you can say is that believing in Him and his Books is useless at best and misleading at worst.
So it’s a year-old comment that finally gets me to say something here.
This is how I felt too—I was raised Christian—specifically Quaker, a branch of Christianity with a nonviolent bent and the belief that God could speak to anyone at anytime, not just to prophets.
Eventually I somehow formed the impression that God, if He were as kind and all-loving as I was told, would surely judge nonbelievers and believers in other faiths based on their actions. I don’t know how heretical this would be—it may have helped that our Quaker meeting was and is a rather laid-back place that seems willing to accept atheism and progressive things—I once prepared to give a speech on why gay marriage should be allowed only to find everyone there was cool with it.
When I started to move towards agnosticism, I had the same thought: A kind god, if he really exists, as unlikely as any particular god seems, will understand and judge me by my actions. A cruel judgemental god might send me to hell, but I consider such a hypothetical figure’s decisions not worth respecting, and within the probability-space of that god’s existance, there is the chance that hell, run by a devil who rebelled against such a god, is full of cool people and not so bad. And if hell in such a world is eternal torture… well, then we live in a crapsack world and are powerless to do anything about it (looking back at these thoughts now, I wonder if life extension could be seen as giving the finger to a judgemental but non-interventionist god—if you would have us go to hell, then we’re staying here!). I rated the probability of that rather low, though.
Since then, my expected probability for any kind of god relatable to by humans has only dropped until I consider it more appropriate to say I am an atheist than an agnostic.
In retrospect, and given our belief franework at the time, that was pretty reckless. Suppose a Yahwé style God with a Muslim-style Hell (the Gospel doesn’t develop the concept as much) was the actual God, and that we had incontrovertible evidence of it. Wouldn’t humans forgive each other for obeying his cruel instructions, if it will save suffering for everyone involved in the long run?
Then again, htat hypothesis kind of screws with everything, since Belief and Faith are a prime part of classic!God’s evaluation system.
The most likely explanation in retrospect is that on some level we already knew our worldview was worth crap, but were too afraid of the unknown that an actually Atheist viewpoint seemed to offer. Did you get it, that feeling of complete wasteland and desolation, that loneliness and cold, when you were having your first true battles with Doubt? Or did it feel different for you?
We (cultural Muslim, I am still quite fond of Muhammad and Islamic cultural heritage) basically treat the OT and NT as very rough outlines of what happened canonically, because we believe priests have been distorting everything to fit their current interests. It’s tainted evidence, so to speak. So, while Allah (lit. “The [One] God”) and Jehovah may be the same person, they do not share the same personality. Allah is characterized much more of a “stric, but fair God”, and far less of a monster than Jehovah. He is also much more aloof, distant, and inhuman, almost an abstract concept rather than a “person”. I refer you to wikipedia if you are really interesting to learn more: I have found there articles that were enlightening even to me, and there is much there that the average fundamentalist muslim is not aware of.
Sorry if I am being redundant, I just can’t shake the feeling that my writing might have been a bit ambiguous in the original post: I must insist that all the corporeal punishing and the woman patronising are in fact NOT practiced by most Muslims, and the numbers of those who DO practice it are steadily diminishing as we speak. It’s just that people refuse to think about it. I, on the other hand, was determined to be a true, honest Muslim, regardless of convenience or social convention, as well as a good man, and that truly tore my heart apart.
Back when I was a Muslim, in my final stage right before stumbling on this place, which was the final catalyst for me turning Atheist, I had decided to disregard Sharia and even direct Qranic law in every point in which it conflicted with my consciousness. My reasoning was that either God would understand that due to the social and intellectual progress since the times of Muhammad and would accept my behaviour as obeying the spirit of the Law rather than the dead letter, OR that he was more similar to that Jehovah prick than I thought, which meant I didn’t care if such a despicable being would want to punish me eternally for this.
Of course, there isn’t anything heroic about that. It would just have meant disobeying Him in fairly standard ways that are already practiced by most alledged Muslims, such as not flaying adulterers, not cutting thieves’ hands, not forcing your wife to be an eternal minor under male tutelage, and so on. Except I had though about it and deliberately decided to violate God and the Prophet’s commands, unlike what other people did, which was merely Not Thinking About It.
Then I read Religion’s Claim To Be Non Disprovable among other things and thought: “If I’m going to favour my own principles AND empirical evidence OVER Word Of God, I might as well give up on religion entirely and save myslef much guilt and fear.”
Drop the ‘empirical evidence’ bit and this is basically how I decided to leave Christianity: Some bits of advice in the bible are obviously wrong, and if I’m going to be using my own judgment to determine which of the questionable bits are right and which are wrong, I might as well just use my own judgment in general.
I suspect that this kind of reasoning might be more palatable to religious folks than the more common proofs that religion is wrong on matters of fact.
That argument is applicable only to Protestants, though. As a Catholic, you have no business interpreting the Bible yourself. (And the same holds for the Orthodox too.)
The Bible might in fact contain a number of blatant scientific errors. That would be far more difficult to pull off with Muslims, since the Qran is far less error ridden (being incredibly ellyptic helps) and may in fact contain remarks that have turned out to be confirmed by Science, or so do most Muslims believe.
That and, well, God being alledgely omnipotent means he could have created the Universe five minutes ago, so the most you can say is that believing in Him and his Books is useless at best and misleading at worst.
So it’s a year-old comment that finally gets me to say something here.
This is how I felt too—I was raised Christian—specifically Quaker, a branch of Christianity with a nonviolent bent and the belief that God could speak to anyone at anytime, not just to prophets.
Eventually I somehow formed the impression that God, if He were as kind and all-loving as I was told, would surely judge nonbelievers and believers in other faiths based on their actions. I don’t know how heretical this would be—it may have helped that our Quaker meeting was and is a rather laid-back place that seems willing to accept atheism and progressive things—I once prepared to give a speech on why gay marriage should be allowed only to find everyone there was cool with it.
When I started to move towards agnosticism, I had the same thought: A kind god, if he really exists, as unlikely as any particular god seems, will understand and judge me by my actions. A cruel judgemental god might send me to hell, but I consider such a hypothetical figure’s decisions not worth respecting, and within the probability-space of that god’s existance, there is the chance that hell, run by a devil who rebelled against such a god, is full of cool people and not so bad. And if hell in such a world is eternal torture… well, then we live in a crapsack world and are powerless to do anything about it (looking back at these thoughts now, I wonder if life extension could be seen as giving the finger to a judgemental but non-interventionist god—if you would have us go to hell, then we’re staying here!). I rated the probability of that rather low, though.
Since then, my expected probability for any kind of god relatable to by humans has only dropped until I consider it more appropriate to say I am an atheist than an agnostic.
In retrospect, and given our belief franework at the time, that was pretty reckless. Suppose a Yahwé style God with a Muslim-style Hell (the Gospel doesn’t develop the concept as much) was the actual God, and that we had incontrovertible evidence of it. Wouldn’t humans forgive each other for obeying his cruel instructions, if it will save suffering for everyone involved in the long run?
Then again, htat hypothesis kind of screws with everything, since Belief and Faith are a prime part of classic!God’s evaluation system.
The most likely explanation in retrospect is that on some level we already knew our worldview was worth crap, but were too afraid of the unknown that an actually Atheist viewpoint seemed to offer. Did you get it, that feeling of complete wasteland and desolation, that loneliness and cold, when you were having your first true battles with Doubt? Or did it feel different for you?
Just curious—I was under the impression that Muslims considered their god to be the same entity as the Christian/Jewish god. Is that not the case?
We (cultural Muslim, I am still quite fond of Muhammad and Islamic cultural heritage) basically treat the OT and NT as very rough outlines of what happened canonically, because we believe priests have been distorting everything to fit their current interests. It’s tainted evidence, so to speak. So, while Allah (lit. “The [One] God”) and Jehovah may be the same person, they do not share the same personality. Allah is characterized much more of a “stric, but fair God”, and far less of a monster than Jehovah. He is also much more aloof, distant, and inhuman, almost an abstract concept rather than a “person”. I refer you to wikipedia if you are really interesting to learn more: I have found there articles that were enlightening even to me, and there is much there that the average fundamentalist muslim is not aware of.
Sorry if I am being redundant, I just can’t shake the feeling that my writing might have been a bit ambiguous in the original post: I must insist that all the corporeal punishing and the woman patronising are in fact NOT practiced by most Muslims, and the numbers of those who DO practice it are steadily diminishing as we speak. It’s just that people refuse to think about it. I, on the other hand, was determined to be a true, honest Muslim, regardless of convenience or social convention, as well as a good man, and that truly tore my heart apart.