Sorry to hear your life is still crap, Naerys. At least you no longer have the ball and chain of Islam, though.
To IsLame and anyone else interested:
With Pazuzu's permission, here are our first couple of email conversations that finally convinced me to leave Islam. Just to clarify the situation: I approached Pazuzu with questions, knowing that he was an apostate. I did so as a last resort since I had recently become quite frustrated with Islam's lack of logic, and couldn't get any sound answers from Muslims. My general questions dealt with the authenticity of hadith and why I was supposed to base my life on anecdotes passed down over generations by a handful of Arab men. The only response I got from any Muslims, despite the belief I had strongly held that Islam had a logical answer for everything, was that I should "just have faith." By the time I reached the height of frustration with those answers, I turned to a self-proclaimed apostate that I found on an Islamic forum (Pazuzu), from whom I fully expected the typical exmuslim-ish "I hate Islam, Muslims should die" response (and which I was prepared to ignore and continue on as a Muslim) -- and, thankfully, he gave me exactly what I needed to finally jump that last hurdle of belief and free myself. Below, our first couple of exchanges that changed my life:
Me:
Hi,
I'm new to this forum and I noticed you are a former Muslim. I am a Muslim but having doubts about Islam. I've been looking for someone to have an intelligent conversation with about Islam, but it's not easy to find someone. Would you be willing to chat with me or just message back and forth?
Basically I would like to know how and why you left, but I hate answering those kinds of general questions myself, so more specifically, how deep into Islam were you and how strong was your belief before you left? And was there a certain turning point where you decided to leave? Do you believe in God?
For me, I do believe in God, and I actually converted because Islam teaches the same idea of God that I already believed in, i.e. true monotheism. But I allowed myself to get sucked in for over 5 years, and it's only the past year or 2 I've slowly been realizing that I got in way over my head. Now I'm at the point where my belief in God is the only thing keeping me from leaving Islam.
I don't know if you saw my post about the possible corruption of Islam. I guess I'm just trying to figure out exactly what I'm dealing with here. And although I know coming to a Muslim forum isn't going to get me anywhere because the Muslims have pat answers for everything, I just want to get as much feedback as I can.
Sorry if this is a long message. Please let me know if you'd be willing to chat about this with me, I would appreciate it.
Thanks
Pazuzu:
No probs. Anything for somebody reaching out for help. Sigh… I don’t know where to begin! :confused: I used to write a lot many many years ago, as a teenager and in my early 20s. After that stopped I’ve sort of lost my expressive ability, and tend to get caught up with ½–comments, desperately avoiding seeing things through to their conclusion. I don’t know.
At any rate, yes, I’ll try to give you a few thoughts. I have studied a lot over the preceding years, and for the last two years desperately sought to feel and act more Islamically. But… things simply didn’t feel right — and I’ve never felt the presence of god in my life. I’ll tell you what I believe, and this comes from a variety of sources (most of them Islamic, believe it or not), so please bear with me.
Muhammad could read and write. He started off as a fairly honest man, but one who like almost everyone else in his culture worshipped a lot of gods and sacrificed to them. An encounter with Zaid bin ‘Amr Nufail (a true monotheist) shook him to the core, and after that he never gave credence to other idols. He did, however, accept their existence, and only later did his vision grow to the point he believed wholly in the existence of one god alone.
He would repeatedly see unsettling dreams and visions long before his revelations, and these finally culminated in what he believed as some sort of divine revelation.
After the Makkan (read: Meccan) tribes grew exasperated with him and his followers they finally ‘boycotted’ him. They did not support or help him, and this led eventually to the death of both his uncle and his beloved wife Khadijah.
…and after that he ‘lost it’. That’s when, after the flight to Yathrib (later renamed Madinah, meaning ‘City’, the same root and word as ‘Midian’ in the Bible), he grew more and more overtly political and a harsh man. The peaceful passages in the Qur’ân refer to Makkan times when Muhammad wielded no power. Everything after that counts as argumentum ad baculum: an appeal to force.
I have written a piece on another forum where I believe that muslims DO commit idolatory by worshipping Muhammad, in actions if not words themselves. I’ll link it for you, if you like:
http://debatingchristianity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7220&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0I post as Pazuzu bin Hanbi on there.
I simply realised, in my life, that Judaism was constructed from pagan practices that heaped upon each other to the point that they turned it into a whole other religion. Christianity too made no sense with its bizarre version of incarnation that boggled seemingly even the believers’ minds (trinity, anyone?). So why not Islâm? Why does this religion remain from a critical eye?
Well it doesn’t. Even the Qur’ân admits parts of the Hajj came from pagan practices. As you said, muslims have a pat answer for everything and they would say that people perverted the true practice of Hajj and Muhammad ‘cleansed’ it. And that’s the problem. Having an answer for everything usually means a non–answer. And therein, for me, lies the problem with religion: it cannot admit ignorance, unlike science.
Would it shock or horrify you if I linked you to a comic about Muhammad? It shows drawings of him in a visually attractive and appealing for children style. But none of them show him up to much good. But every single one of them display events from Sahih Ahadith: Authentic Traditions that all muslims must agree as fact or else they go beyond the pale of Islâm. That really represents the killer because it shows the pagan practices and sheer irrationality of Islâm.
To be honest, I believe each religion a living, breathing response to events happening at that very time. Once you codify it in a written form, though, you freeze it and make it static. People’s interpretations may change, but the words and their original references never do.
I can’t ask you to stop believing in God (no Dawkins, I!) but why do you need a system of postures and irrational actions to show your worship of God? Why does God demand worship and obeisance anyway? Surely the right thing to do is a free worship of the heart by upholding your commitments to God and keeping them pure through your actions? By doing what you can for humanity and the world around you, living as good a life as possible for you, your friends and family, your community, all of humanity?
I suppose thinking like that led me away from religion. For if we act in such a way what need have we of God when we already strive for right action?
Has this helped at all???
Me:
Hi,
Yes, it really helped, thanks a lot! I read your post about worshiping Mohammed, that was interesting. Where did you get the information about Mohammed's history that you told me? About his meeting Zaid bin ‘Amr Nufail and where he went from there.
And yes please send me the comics, that's not something that would shock me. Actually I've always felt Muslims' reactions to that kind of thing are a bit extreme. You know, I never saw the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, and I tried to search for them because I wanted to see what all the hype was about, but I couldn't find them. You don't happen to know where I could find them, do you? lol.
As for my belief in God... well, I understand your point of view. Before I found Islam that's how I felt, why do I need organized religion when I already believe in God? Anyway, that's a long story, but basically I sort of accepted Islam mainly because it teaches what I already believed about God. And I'm only just now delving into it and finding stuff I don't agree with. But I'm reluctant to apostate because of the "what if"... if this really is the God I believed in, what if some parts of it are true? Of course there's the possibility I've been brainwashed, and the fear tactic of hell and whatnot can be effective.
Of course there are many more things going through my head all the time... it's hard to describe everything. I really appreciate you taking the time to reply. I saw you mentioned about joining some exmuslim forums, but you didn't like them for various reasons. Have you found any good places yet that you can recommend?
Thanks so much, and please do get back to me about the sources. Even if you can just tell me authors or titles that would help.
Thanks
Pazuzu:
Haha, like I said: a lot of different sources, so I don’t know if I could take apart the pieces! I’ll try though. Some of the sîrah itself (the biography of Muhammad) relates the episode of a teenaged Muhammad meeting with Zaid.
The problem I have is that a lot of the sources which I later accept in terms of authenticity and accuracy comes from polemical Christian sources, and they have a HUGE downer on Islâm as well as their own agenda to push (as though disproving the divinity of Islâm would automatically make Christianity any more believable, what a logical fallacy!) — so you should take them with a healthy dose of open–mindedness and skepticism. In fact, I would avoid such sources simply because I disliked the people putting them forward. But logic teaches us that the person putting forward the argument doesn’t impact on the veracity of the arguments, no matter what sort of vested interest they might have.
So, with that in mind, please note that the following link contains pro–Christian propaganda, but the story of Muhammad they take from Islamic sources, like his ‘biography’:
http://www.hopeshineministry.com/Muhammad%20and%20Idolatry.pdf(Adobe Acrobat file)
I don’t accept the stuff about Islâm mirroring Sabean practice in that PDF, by the way, but only because I haven’t done enough research into that so I can’t give it credence either way.
I can’t find the Danish cartoons anywhere. I saw them after the furore and the one of ‘Muhammad’ with a bomb in his turban did annoy me, but most of them made me shrug. Others made me think: “Muhammad wouldn’t have sported a long moustache like that. That’s a Jewish thing.” One I even laughed out loud at: Muhammad screaming for suicide bombers to stop — they’d run out of virgins in Heaven!
As for the Hadîth–based comics:
http://islamcomicbook.com/It takes a little while to load since they embedded the 6+ MB pdf file on the page itself, and have a link to a very hi–res version that weighs in around 100MB. I d/led that one…
Look at pages like 13–15, for example, each ridiculously–illustrated story documented by authentic ahadîth that you can look up in the online Sahih Bukhâri yourself!
Fear of Hell? Cosmicdancer (also an apostate) created a thread about that. He has subsequently suffered a banning and can’t post until the mods lift it. You can view the thread and its accompanying video here:
http://www.ummah.com/forum/showthread.php?t=157522#post2387095I have to quote George Bernard Shaw on this topic, as I do on a lot of Islâmic forums, especially those who like to use him as an example of a kaffir who supported Islâm:
“Mahomet… died a conqueror, and therefore escaped being made the chief attraction in an Arabian Chamber of Horrors, [but] he found it impossible to control his Arabs without enticing and intimidating them by promises of a delightful life for the faithful and threats of an eternity of disgusting torment for the wicked after their bodily death.”
The above comes from his “Preface to The Black Girl in Search of God”.
I shall also link you to a very detailed post I wrote about the literacy of Muhammad. Firstly, he started life as a businessman, and met Jews and Christians through this work. He gained a reputation as a scrupulously honest person who never gave short shrift. Passages in the Qur’ân speak of not deceiving people over weights and measurements. Do you think that Muhammad did all that and yet couldn’t write a receipt for his customers?
http://debatingchristianity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7227#155434What if god is real? Do you really think such a god would punish you for all eternity for a finite amount of ‘sins’ in this life? Can you square that with the Islâmic concept of an all–merciful and utterly just Allâh? Look at the nature of Hell in the Qur’ân: “There are 146 parts of the Koran that refer to Hell. Only 4% of the people in Islamic Hell are there for moral reasons, such as murder, theft or greed. In 96% of the cases the person is in Hell because they did not agree with Mohammed. This is a political charge. In short, Islamic Hell is primarily a political prison.” (taken from this site:
http://www.politicalislam.com/dualityAndPoliticalIslam)
And a last one just to get you really thinking about Hell:
http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/infinitepunishment.htmlThat site itself, ebon musings, is a godsend
for atheism. Take this quiz, for instance (just a fun one, you don’t take it as such), found on the site. It really made me think more so than a load of ‘rational facts’ laid bare:
http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/guestessays/religion101.htmlThat last reply is what finally did it. The information about Mohammed's history made me very curious and I did some research about it. It didn't take long for it to become clear that Mohammed was far from a divinely inspired prophet, and after that everything else crumbled. Although I thought I wanted to retain my belief in god, that went away shortly thereafter -- I just couldn't justify it. And from there I moved on to an excruciating 4 months of pretending to be Muslim while I waited until I could leave Kuwait and come home safely: what a relief!
Hope you found that helpful, IsLame!
Topic: 2-Year Anniversary of Apostasy