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I’m an atheist can you throw a new interview with me?

Islam has been more successful in adhering itself to Arab culture and blurring the line between the two but they are in fact two entities. the religion does not define the people, it cannot as belief is a state of mind and not part of our human identity as such.

I am greatly heartened to read of Arab rationalists frankly disputing religious dogma in an environment where silent obedience is by far the safest personal choice. the courage it takes to speak against a force that is essentially a social control mechanism from within is inspiring to all.

I just want to say hi

I just want to say hi

I am sick of the debate of atheism vs. creationism to the stomach, and yet I keep discovering how much this problem defines my entire life.

If you stood on the roof of my grand father’s house, you would have been able to see the Ka’aba. But that was before the introduction of massive hotels in downtown Makkah. Anyway the whole neighborhood has been demolished for a few years now.

How did I become an atheist? A smart-assed believer usually nods comprehendingly at this point, “it is all the oppression you have been subjected to, isn’t it? Well, believe it or not, but there is a better side to Religion”. I usually wish I had the chance to punch a smart-assed believer right in the teeth. Of course an ignorant Believer wouldn’t say much, so as to maintain the civilized atmosphere between us, because otherwise we he would revert to a “LET’S KILL THE INFEDIL” mentality.

I think I became an atheist when I was 17 years old. It did not happen abruptly, but over the course of a few uneventful months. It was probably something like the coming of age of grey cells in my brain that sparked the general realization that everything I had been taught was a neatly edited pile of poop.

When I first discovered the euphoric joy of rejecting grossly ridiculous lies, I couldn’t contain myself. I had heated arguments with a couple of friends whose only intellectual blessing was that they found themselves with me at that time. Those were simple arguments, despite sometimes ending in a fight. I have a pretty name for these type of arguments: “The First Layer of Rejecting a Taught Religion”.

Which brings us to a concept which I have every right to claim ownership to: A person who is raised as a Muslim, and who is in the process of discovering the fallacy of Islam, usually goes through three stages, or layers, of thought. These layers are not strictly exclusive, they easily over-lap, but such distinction merely refers to the scope of the concepts that have a predominant influence on that person. Moreover, a person could easily stop at one of the stages, without ever breaking new ground, much in the same way as those billions of people who don’t ever get into that process in the first place.

In the first layer, I was enraged by the moral inconsistency of Islam. God is loving and merciful, yet he is going to send the large majority of human kind straight to an unimaginable eternity in Hell. Al-foto7at al Islamiyah? What terrible crimes! hundreds of thousands of people killed, hundreds of thousands of women enslaved, and all is celebrated as one of God’s greatest favors to humanity. Mohammed was the summit of human morality, yet he condoned, and even practiced, pedophilic behavior, owning slaves, genocide, to name a few feats which are considered crimes by today’s standards, but amounted to little more that running errands at that time. Generally speaking, the first layer is characterized by arguments which point to the internal inconsistencies of Islam, as well as the striking similarity with other cultures, which hints at the mediocrity principle.

The second layer is the most interesting. An exposure of other models of thought: Atheism, Agnosticism, Sophism, Modern Science etc, causes the subject -for which I am unfortunately the only sample- to discover the distinction in scope between the different problems which are addressed by religion as being one and the same issue. These problems include determinism and free will, creation of life on earth, human origin, origin and nature of the universe, the concept of time, causality and atemporal contingency, and other mind boggling dilemmas, which were formerly so conveniently kept locked in the same cell by the Islamic principle of God. First, an explosion of thoughts occurs, philosophy and physics provide a flora for these thoughts to feed on. Sky is the limit as the subject relives the thoughts which were explored by hundreds of thinkers throughout history but kept away from him by Islam. Driven by the invisible belief that the universe is solvable, the former prisoner roams feverishly, delighted by the magnificence of the new world, by its size and colorful diversity, by his own freedom of thought.
Eventually, the phase of exploration is finished. The map is drawn. It turns out that the new world is just another big prison. Faced with the same dilemmas that led to the invention of God in the first place, he starts to question his thoughts. At this point the distinction between the Religious God and the Philosophical God is concrete. In my own experience, I had a problem at this stage communicating with atheists at the first stage. For example, they would always confuse the word “GOD” which I meant in the sense of “that which exists outside the universe” with the Religious God which they have just escaped from. I think many people here also have the same confusion. They use arguments that are used against Islam, i.e. first layer arguments, to argue against the existence of the philosophical God. Two completely different animals, mind you.

The end of the second layer is characterized by the acknowledgement that some problems are unsolvable.

The thirds layer comes. In it, a realization is reached that creationism = atheism, in the exact sense of equality. Either the creationist is an atheist and the atheist is a creationist or neither is either. For me, the acid test to tell whether someone has reached this level or not is the previous phrase. He who understands it has been in the same dark corridors that I have roamed, he has seen the same faint traces of logic as it escapes from hill to valley, and back to hill. Logic, which should never contradict itself, has a tremendous tendency to so, if pursued into the abyss, into the singularity and out of the universe, and even if it then returns back into its celebrated domain, the duality of its essence leaves us dazzled. To say that logic contradicts logic is to say that logic is perfectly sound. Because to say, is to tip the balance towards a state of existence, much like the fact that to carry out an experiment, is collapse the wave function in quantum mechanics.

Moreover, life is too short and precious to waste on these paradoxes. If someone really wants to reach a truth, he should study theoretical physics and join the research lab, as all other means of searching for the truth are bound to run into a huge enigma that lies in the center of human’s collective knowledge, like a giant gaping hole around which our entire civilization grew.

No more arguing is done at this stage. I would not argue with a Muslim if he begged for it. Ironically, some Muslims, who have not even poked their teachings-filled heads through the first layer, perceive this as a weakness of atheism, not knowing that the only reason I call myself atheist is to communicate to them a general idea of my attitude towards religions. What am I, then? An agnostic? Maybe.

But I like to call myself a Free Thinker. I am 26 years old, and with a little luck, I would have another 50 years of thinking freely . That, of course, if I don’t pop my head into a “Fourth Layer of Rejecting a Taught Religion”.

I really believe that this work is as important as that of Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr, and could be equally liberating for Arab societies!

Great to see this flower blooming in the desert

PS. Is it hard getting things done when you have to pray so often?