The passage from belief to freethinking and enlightenment
has its stages. The first stage is shock and then it is denial. If one can
overcome the denial one goes through confusion, guilt, dismay, anger and finally
enlightenment. The majority of the Muslims are trapped in denial. They are
unable and unwilling to admit that Quran is a hoax. They desperately try to
explain the unexplainable, find miracles in it and are not abashed to bend all
the rules of logic to prove that Quran is right. Each time they are exposed to a
shocking statement in Quran or shocking act performed by Muhammad they retreat
in denial. Denial is a safe place. This is the comfort zone. In denial they are
not going to be hurt, every thing is okay; everything is fine.
Truth is extremely painful especially if one has been
accustomed to lies all his life. It is like telling someone that his father is a
murderer, a rapist or a criminal. This might be the truth yet the child who
adulates his father cannot take it. The shock would be so great that the first
thing he will do is to deny it. He will call you a liar and he will hate you for
hurting him. He will curse you, hold you as his enemy and he may even discharge
his anger at you by physically attacking you.
This is the stage of denial. It is a self defense
mechanism. If pain is too big, denial will take that pain away. If a mother is
informed that her child has died in an accident, the first thing she would do is
to deny. People who have lost a loved one often believe that this is all a bad
dream and when they wake up everything will be okay. But unfortunately facts are
stubborn and they will not go away. One can live in denial for a while but s/he
must accept the truth sooner or later.
Muslims are cocooned in lies. Because speaking against
Islam is a crime punishable by death, no one dares to tell the truth. Those who
do, do not go far; they are silenced very soon. So how would you know the truth
if all you hear are lies? On one hand the Quran claims to be a miracle and
challenges everyone to produce a Surah like it, on the other hand it instructs
its followers to kill anyone who dares to criticize it. In such an atmosphere of
insincerity and deceit, truth will never be known.
However, for the first time, the Internet has changed the
balance of power. Now the brutal force of the guns, bombs, prisons and death
squads are helpless and pen is almighty. For the first time Muslims cannot stop
the truth by killing its messenger. Now a great number of them are coming in
contact with the truth and they feel helpless. They want to silence this voice
but they cannot. They want to kill the messenger but they cannot. They try to
ban the sites exposing their cherished beliefs, sometimes they succeed
momentarily but most of the times they don't. (Tripod was forced to shut down
this site now I have it hosted in three places and receive over 3000 visitors
per day). So the old way of killing the apostates, burning their books and
silencing them by terror does not work. Also they cannot stop people from
reading. So a great number of Muslims who never knew the truth about Islam are
becoming shocked after they learn the truth for the first time. This shock is
tremendously painful. The only mechanism and the natural way to deal with it is
denial.
Denial takes away the pain. Denial is soothing. Denial is
bliss. But denial is hiding ones head in the sand. One cannot stay in denial
forever. Sooner or later we have to face the truth and deal with it.
A great majority of Muslims live in denial. Those who don't
are the fundamentalists who are so brainwashed that they actually think that
killing is good, bombing is holy, stoning is divine mandate, beating wives is
prescribed by God, hating the unbelievers is what God has told them to do, and
terrorism will take them to Paradise. Apart form this group that unfortunately
constitutes the majority of ignorant masses (see Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran,
Saudi Arabia, etc) those Muslims who have come in contact with the humanistic
values of civilized world and like it, either know nothing of the ugly truth of
Islam or they deny it.
I do not think this group of Muslims will ever see the
truth if they are kept cocooned in lies. All they have heard so far is the lie
that Islam is good and if only Muslims practiced the true Islam the world would
be a paradise; that it is all the fault of the Muslims. This is a lie. Most
Muslims are extremely good people. They are kind, generous, caring, hospitable,
wonderful human beings. What is wrong is Islam. Those Muslims who do bad things
are those who follow Islam. Islam rears the criminal instinct of the people. The
more a person is Islamist, the more bloodthirsty, hate mongering, zombie s/he
becomes.
Quran tells Muslims to kill the disbelievers wherever they
find them (Q. 2:191),
to murder them and treat them harshly (Q. 9:123),
slay them (Q. 9:
5) and fight with them, (Q. 8:
65). The teachings of
Quran are inhumane and barbaric.
What we have to do is to jolt the Muslims to reality. We
have to tell them the truth, expose them to all the facts about Islam, and tell
them about the absurdities of Quran and the inhumanities of its author so
harshly that something shocks them. There is no easy way. The followers of
Muhammad must see the naked truth and they must be shocked. We cannot keep sugar
coating the truth. The truth is bitter and it must be swallowed. Only then the
process of enlightenment starts.
But because every person’s sensitivity is different, what
shocks one person may not shock the other. Even as a man I was shocked when I
read Muhammad instructed his followers to beat their wives and called women
“deficient in intelligence”. Yet I have found many Muslim women who have no
difficulty accepting these derogatory statements uttered by their prophet. Not
that they agree that they are deficient in intelligence or that they believe
that the majority of the inhabitants of the hell are women, or that they deserve
to be scourged if they disobey their husband, just because the Prophet said so.
But they simply block out that information. They read it but it doesn’t sink.
They are in denial. The denial acts as a shield that covers them, that protects
them, that saves them from facing the pain of shock and disillusionment. Once
that shield is up, nothing can bring it down. It is no use to simply repeat the
same things over and over. At this point they must be attacked from other
directions. We have to bombard them with other stupid and shocking teachings of
Quran. They may have a weak spot for one of them and one of those stupid
teachings may shock them. That is all they need: a good shock. Shocks are
painful, but sometimes they can be lifesavers. Shocks are used by doctors to
bring back to life a dead patient.
Last year I met a lady on the net (Yahoo clubs) who called
herself Khadija in Niqab. She had a web site with her picture completely covered
in black veil and her story of how she had become a Muslim. She was very active
and she used to tell everyone not to come to the Society For Islamic Humanist
club (SFIH) where I used to post my writings. But when she read the story of Safiyah,
she was shocked. She asked explanation from other Muslims who could not answer
her. Then the door was open, she joined SFIH with another ID: “Liberty” and
kept asking questions. Finally she passed through the other stages between blind
faith to enlightenment very quickly and wrote a thank you letter to me for
opening her eyes and withdrew from the Yahoo Islamic clubs altogether.
That is what we have to do. Our job is to expose Islam,
write the truth about Muhammad’s unholy life, his shameful words, his stupid
assertions and bombard the Muslims with the facts. These people read what you
write, they become angry with you, curse you, insult you and tell you that after
reading your articles their faith in Islam is strengthened. But that is when you
know that you have sown the seed of doubt in their mind. They say all this to
you because they are shocked. Now they have entered the stage of denial. The
seed of doubt is planted and it will wait for the first chance to germinate. In
some people it takes years, but given the change it will eventually germinate.
Doubt is the greatest gift we can give to each other. It is
the gift of enlightenment. Doubt will set us free, will advance knowledge, will
unravel the mysteries of this universe, but faith will keep us ignorant.
One of hurdles we have to overcome is the hurdle of
tradition and false values imposed on us by thousands of years of religious
upbringing. The world still values faith and considers doubt something evil.
People talk of men of faith with respect and disdain men of little faith. We are
screwed up in our values. The word faith means belief without evidence but
gullibility also means belief without evidence. Therefore faithfulness is not a
glory. It means being gullible, credulous, naïf, susceptible, easy to fleece.
How can one be proud of such qualities?
Doubt on the other hand means the reverse of the above. It
means being capable to think independently, being capable to question, to be
skeptic. We owe our science and our modern civilization to men and women who
doubted, not those who believed. Those who doubted were the pioneers, they were
the leaders of thought, they were philosophers, inventors, and discoverers, but
those who believed lived and died as followers, gave little or no contribution
to the advancement of science and human understanding.
Those who read my articles and are hurt by what they
discover in Quran are lucky. They have me to blame. They can hate me, curse me
and direct all their angers towards me. But when I read the Quran and learned
about its content, I could not blame anyone. So after going through the stages
of shock and denial, I was confused and started to blame myself. I hated myself
for thinking, for doubting and for finding faults with what I regarded to be the
words of God.
Just like all the other Muslims I was exposed to many lies,
absurdities and inhumanities inherent in Islam but had accepted all that. I was
brought as a religious person. I believed in whatever I was told and had faith.
These lies were given to me in small doses and since my childhood. I was never
given an alternative to compare. It is like vaccination. I was immune to the
truth. But when I started to read the Quran seriously from cover to cover and
understood what this book had to say. I felt nauseated. Like it was all those
lies coming to me at once. I knew all these lies and had accepted them. It was
as if my rational thinking was numbed. I had become insensitive to the
absurdities of Quran. When I found something that did not make sense I
automatically overlooked and said one has to look at the “big picture”. The
big picture however was nowhere to be found except in my own mind. I had made a
picture of Islam in my mind that was perfect. So all those absurdities did not
bother me because I did not pay attention to them. But when I read the whole
Quran I discovered a different picture very much distinct from the picture I had
made of it in my mind. The new picture of Islam emerging from the pages of the
Quran was a violent, intolerant, irrational, arrogant picture that was a far cry
from my mental picture that depicted Islam as a religion of peace, equality and
tolerance.
My first reaction, of course was denial. That was the
easiest thing to do. I had to deny, in order to keep my sanity. But for how long
I could keep denying when it was there in black and white in front of me? I
started to read the Quran in Arabic and used an English translation for the
words that I did not understand. I went back and forth from Arabic to English
reading over and over each verse until I was sure that I understood the Arabic.
I realized many translations in English are not entirely reliable. The poor
translators had tried very hard to hide the inhumanity and the violence of Quran
by twisting the words and adding their own words sometimes in parenthesis. When
you read the Quran in Arabic and understand it, it is shocking.
I went through a period of depression. It was as if my
whole world had fallen apart. I felt like someone who feels like the floor on
which he was standing is no longer there and is falling to a bottomless pit. If
I say that was like being in hell I am not exaggerating. I was confused and I
did not know where to turn. My faith was shaken and my world had crumbled. I
could no longer deny what I was reading. But I could not accept the possibility
that this was all a huge lie. “How could it be?” I kept asking myself. How
could it be that so many people died for this religion for nothing? How could it
be that so many people have not seen the truth and I see it? How could it be
that great seers and saints like Moulana Jalaleddin Rumi did not see that
Muhammad was an impostor and that Quran is a hoax and I see it? It was then that
I entered into another stage and that was guilt.
The guilt lasted for many months. I hated myself for having
these thoughts. I felt God is testing my faith. I felt ashamed. I spoke with
learned people that I trusted, people who were not only knowledgeable but also
were wise and spiritual. I heard very little that could quench the burning fire
that I had within me. Some of these learned men told me not to read the Quran
for a wile, pray and read only books that strengthen my faith. I did that, but
it did not help. The thoughts about the absurd, sometimes-ruthless
sometimes-ridiculous verses of Quran kept throbbing in my head. Each time I
looked at my bookshelf and saw that book, I felt pain. I took the Quran and hid
it behind the other books. I thought if I do not think about it for a while my
thoughts will go away and I will regain my faith once again. But they didn’t
go away. I denied as much as I could, until I could no more. I was shocked and
it was painful. Then I went through the stage of confusion and bewilderment
pleading for help and no one could help. Now I was in a deep sense of guilt,
ashamed of my thoughts and hating myself for having such thoughts. This sense of
guilt was accompanied by a profound sense of loss and depression. Naturally I am
a positive thinker. I see the good side of everything. I always think tomorrow
is going to be better. I usually am not depressed. But this feeling of loss was
overbearing. I still recall that weight on my heart. I thought God has forsaken
me and I did not know why. I did not remember hurting anyone ever. I had gone
out of my way to help anyone who had crossed my way and asked me for help. I had
many people who hugged me and thanked me, sometimes with tears in their eyes
because I helped them to put their lives back on track, start a new business or
save their marriage. I stopped eating meat because I did not want to destroy a
life just to satisfy my taste buds, although the smell and the taste of a good
stake drives me crazy. So, why did God want to punish me in this way? Why was He
not answering my prayers? Why had He abandoned me to myself and to these
thoughts for which I could find no answers?
This period of guilt lasted too long. One day I decided
enough is enough. I told myself that it is not my fault. I am not going to carry
this guilt forever for thinking about things that make no sense to me. If God
gave me a brain, it is because he wants me to use it. If what I perceive as
right and wrong is completely twisted, then it is not my fault. He tells me
killing is bad and I know it is bad because I do not like to be killed, then why
had his messenger killed so many innocent people and asked others to kill people
who disbelieve? If rape is bad and I know that it is bad because I do not want
it to happen to people I love, why Allah's prophet raped his captives of war? If
imposition of religion is bad and I know that it is bad because I would not like
another person to force a religion that I don’t want down my throat, then why
did the Prophet eulogized the Jihad and exhorted his followers to kill the
unbelievers, take their booty and sell their women and children as spoils of
war? If God tells me something is good and I know that it is good because it
feels good to me then why His prophet does the reverse of that thing?
It was then that I felt liberated from guilt and entered
the next stage, which is dismay, disillusionment and cynicism. I felt sorry for
all the religious people and especially for all the Muslims for still believing
in these foolish teachings. I felt sorry for all those who lost their lives in
the name of these false doctrines. I felt sorry for all the women in virtually
all the Islamic countries that suffer all sorts of abuses and are so subdued
that do not even know that they are being abused.
Then I became angry. Angry because I believed in those lies
for so many years. Angry because I wasted so many years of my life chasing a
wild goose. I was angry at my culture for it had betrayed me. I was angry at my
parents for teaching me a lie. I was angry at my self for not thinking before,
for believing in lies, for trusting an impostor and I was angry at God for
letting me down, for not intervening and stopping the lies that were being
disseminated in His name.
By then I knew that Muhammad was no messenger of God but a
charlatan, a demagogue whose only intention was to beguile people and satisfy
his own narcissistic ambitions. I knew that all those childish stories of a hell
with scorching fire and a heaven with rivers of wine, honey and milk full of
orgies were the figments of a sick, wild, insecure and bullying mind of a man in
desperate need to dominate, destroy and affirm his own authority.
But I could not be angry with my parents; for they did
their best and taught me what they thought was the best. I could not be angry
with my community, society, and culture; because they too were just as
misinformed as my parents and myself. When I looked carefully I saw that
everyone is a victim. There are one billion victims who in turn have become
victimizers. How I could blame the Muslims if they do not know what Islam stands
for and honestly, though erroneously, believe that it is a religion of peace?
What about Muhammad? Should I be angry with him for lying,
deceiving and misleading people? How could I be angry with a dead corpse?
Muhammad was a sick man who was not in control. He grew as an orphan, changed
five foster parents before he reached the age of eight. As soon as he came to be
attached to someone, he was snatched and was given to another person. This must
have been hard on him and was detrimental to his emotional health. As a child,
deprived of love and a sense of belonging, he grew with deep feelings of fear
and lack of self-confidence. He tried to make up for it by becoming a narcissist.
A narcissist is a person who has not received enough love in his childhood, who
is incapable to love, but instead craves attention, respect and recognition. He
sees his own worth in the way others view him. Without that recognition he is
nobody. He is manipulative and a pathetic liar.
Narcissists have grandiose dreams. They want to conquer to
world and dominate every body. Only in these megalomaniac reveries they find
their narcissistic supply. Allah for Muhammad was just an alter ego. He could
wield control over everyone's life and death by telling them this is what God
has ordained.
Muhammad was a man with profound emotional scars. He was a
victim in his own right. He was desperate for recognition and respect. He is
responsible but like an addict he needed his narcissistic supply and he was not
in control.
I could not criticize or blame the ignorant Arabs of the
7th century for not being able to discern that Muhammad was sick and not a
prophet, that his outlandish promises, his impressive dreams of conquering and
subduing the great nations when he was just a pauper and the head of a group of
bandits, were caused by his pathological emotional complications and not due to
a divine power. How could I blame those stupid Arabs for falling prey to a man
like Muhammad when only in the last century, millions of Germans fell prey to
the charisma of another narcissist who also like Muhammad gave them big promises
of total domination, who was as ruthless as him, as manipulative as him and as
ambitious as him?
When I looked with care, I saw there is not a single person
I could find guilty to be angry with. I realized we are all victims and
victimizers at the same time. The only culprit is ignorance. it is our ignorance
that makes us believe in charlatans and their lies. It is because of ignorance
that we let these impostors inseminate hate in us in the name of false deities,
ideologies or religions. It is our ignorance that does not allow us to see our
oneness and hinders us from understanding that we are members of one body of
humanity related to each other and interdependent with each other.
It was then that my anger gave way to a profound feeling of
empathy, compassion and love. I made a promise to myself to fight this ignorance
that divides the human race. We paid dearly for our disunity. The disunity in
the human race is caused by ignorance and the ignorance is the result of false
beliefs and pernicious ideologies often concocted by emotionally unhealthy
individuals for self-serving purposes.
Ideologies separate us. Religions cause disunity, hate and
antagonism. Humanity needs no ideology nor does it need any religion. As members
of the human race, we need no ideology, cause or religion to be united, but to
be disunited, fight and kill each other we need to have an ideology, a cause or
a religion.
Synthesis:
The process of going from faith to enlightenment is an
arduous and painful process. Faith is the state of being confirmed in ignorance.
You will continue to stay in that state of blissful oblivion until you are
shocked and forced out of it. The natural and first reaction to shock is denial.
Denial acts like a shield. It buffers the pain and protects you from the agony
of going out of your comfort zone. The comfort zone is where we feel at ease,
where we find everything familiar, where we don't have to take new challengers
or face the unknown. But growth doesn't take place in comfort zones. In order to
go forward and to evolve we need to get out of our comfort zones. We won't get
out of our comfort zones unless we are shocked. It is also natural to buffer the
pain of the shock by denial. At this moment we need another shock, and we may
decide to shield ourselves again with another denial. The more a person is
exposed to facts and the more he is shocked, the more he tries to protect
himself by denial. But denial does not eliminate the facts. It just shields us
momentarily. Facts are very stubborn and they will not go away. When we are
exposed to all the facts, at one moment we will find ourselves unable to keep
denying. That is when one of those facts will hit us and we are shocked.
Suddenly we will find ourselves unable to keep our defenses up and all the
denials come down. We can no longer can keep hiding our head in the sand
pretending that everything is okay. The first shock will have a domino effect
and we find ourselves being hit from all directions by facts that up until now
we kept at bay by denying them. Suddenly all those absurdities that we had
accepted and even defended, do not seem logical anymore and we won't be able to
accept them.
It is then that we are driven into the painful stage of
confusion. The old beliefs seem unreasonable, foolish and unacceptable yet we
have nothing to cling to. This stage, I believe, is the most dreadful stage in
the passage from faith to enlightenment. In this stage we have lost our faith
but we have found no enlightenment yet. We are basically standing in nowhere. We
experience a free fall. We ask for help but all we get is the rehashing of some
nonsense cliché. It seems that those who try to help us have no clue of what
they are talking about, yet they are so convinced about it. They believe in what
they don't know. The arguments that they present are not logical at all. They
expect us to believe without questioning. They bring the example of the faith of
others. But the intensity of the faith of other people does not prove the truth
of what they believe in.
This confusion eventually gives way to guilt. You feel
guilty for thinking. You feel guilty for doubting, for questioning, for not
understanding. You think it is your fault if the absurdities mentioned in your
holy books make no sense to you. You think that God has abandoned you or that he
is testing your faith. In this stage you are torn apart between your emotions
and your intellect. Emotions are not rational but they are extremely powerful.
You want to go back, you desperately want to believe but you simply can't. You
have committed the sin of thinking. You have eaten the forbidden fruit from the
tree of knowledge. You have angered your imaginary god. You are cast out of the
paradise of ignorance. Now you find yourself naked, ashamed, overtaken by guilt
and with no way to return.
Thereupon you enter the stage of anger. One day you decide
that it is not your fault at all if all the mumbo jumbo taught to you in the
name of the religion and truth make no sense. You decide to rebel. If the
religions are stupid, it is not your fault. If they make no sense, then why
should you feel guilty? If they are from God certainly they should be logical
and reasonable. If they are not reasonable, then perhaps they are not from God.
Perhaps they are false doctrines. The fact that a billion people believe in
something does not make that thing true. How many of those billion people
actually sat down and questioned their beliefs? How many of them can answer your
questions? How many of them are allowed to question without fearing persecution?
Maybe all of them are in denial. There was a time that everyone thought that the
Earth was flat. Did this unanimous consensus make any difference in the shape of
the Earth? In this stage you become angry at yourself, and at everything else.
You realize how much you lost of your precious life believing in so many lies.
That is when you enter the next stage, which is dismay.
In this stage you are over taken by sadness. You ponder
upon time lost. You think of so many people who believed in this nonsense and
foolishly sacrificed everything for it including their lives. How many millions
of lives were sacrificed at the altar of these false religions? How many people
voluntarily faced death and in the case of Islam how many people took the lives
of other innocent people with completely clear consciences. The pages of history
are written with the blood of people who were killed in the name of Yahweh,
Allah or other gods. All for nothing! All for a lie!
But then you realize that you are the lucky one for having
made it this far and that there are billions of others who are still trying to
shield themselves with denials and not venture out of their comfort zone. There
are billions of believers who are cocooned in lies and desperately try to stay
there. At this stage, when you are completely free from faith, guilt and anger,
you are ready for understanding the ultimate truth and unraveling the mysteries
of life. You are ready to be enlightened. The enlightenment comes when you
realize that the truth is in love and in our relationship with our fellow human
beings and not in a religion or a cult.
Truth is a pathless land.
Ali Sina
25 June 2001