(This is my story.) (Hi I'm new. http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt183006.html)
Why its hard for Muslims to realize the truth..
I was born into Islam. Why? Because my parents were born into it. Why? Because their parents were born into it. And so on. I’ve since apostatized. But why didn’t my parents and grandparents and the rest of my ancestors leave their religion so that I didn’t have to fall into the same trap? I used to think that its because I know things that they didn’t. So I asked my mom, “If you doubted Islam so much, why did you teach it to me?” She answered, “That’s what my father did.” I asked, “But your father was only a Muslim by name. Why didn’t he admit that his religion was absolute nonsense? And what about his father and grand father? Weren’t they educated also? Why didn’t they admit that it was nonsense?” She said, “Well they were afraid of the death penalty because that's what they did and still do to ex-Muslims.” I was speechless.
Then later I asked, “Why would your dad (as in my grandfather) want to raise you as a Muslim?” She answered, “Because he thought that in order to raise moral children, they must be taught morality from religion.” I said, “Yes and that is what you did with me and that's what I almost did to my girls. I went overseas to marry a Muslim because I rationalized that since I don’t know Islam very well, I can’t teach it to my kids and so I need a Muslim who really knows her religion to raise moral children. But this line of reasoning is fallacious because morality is very easy to teach. I’m doing very well teaching it to my girls and I’ve never mentioned any religious topics including God, Islam, Heaven, Angels, Hell, The Devil, Demons, fire, flesh-burning, or anything of the like. So why is it that we think that religion is necessary to teach ethics?”
Later I realized that its because we did not learn philosophy. Morality and ethics are simple topics when discussed in the context of philosophy. I was first exposed to philosophy at age 33 when I took on the task of homeschooling my girls. Whats interesting is that the formal study of philosophy was practiced centuries before the creation of Islam. It made its first gigantic strides in Ancient Greece by the likes of Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato about three millennia ago. So why is it that in this great Information Age, the vast majority of the population is ignorant of this all too important knowledge of morality and ethics, and more generally, philosophy? That is covered in my yet-unfinished book titled Education, Opportunity, and Happiness for All.
Many people would say, “But come on, its common sense that religion is nonsense, so why did you think it was moral?” Well I didn’t know that. I never studied ethics, morality, nor Islam. Islam was a fanciful story. Actually many of the so-called lessons that I knew to be Islamic, were in fact creations from good parents. They wanted to teach their children good morals so they said good things and claimed that it was from the Quran and/or Hadith so as to legitimize their lessons. After centuries of generations creating these new moral lessons, the religion has changed, at least as it is being propagated orally from generation to generation. Today, I would say that probably 90% of Muslims do not know what is actually written in the Quran and Hadith. They do not know that 60% of the Quran's passages are very evil.
Many people would say, “Well lets tell them so they can apostatize.” Well its not so easy. Their own biology is working against them. I’m referring to the animal part of our brains where the unconscious mind lies. The unconscious mind acts in weird ways. This is explained in the theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Cognitive Dissonance is the discomfort caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. Their unconscious does this by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Dissonance is also reduced by justifying, blaming, and denying. The phrase was coined by Leon Festinger in his 1956 book When Prophecy Fails, which chronicled the followers of a UFO cult as reality clashed with their fervent beliefs. It is one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology. A closely related term, cognitive disequilibrium, was coined by Jean Piaget to refer to the experience of a discrepancy between something new and something already known or believed. It is the unconscious part of the mind that is driving this behavior.
What does this mean for Muslims? Lets take a smaller portion of the Muslim population, those living in the West. Western Muslims know that their religion is perfect as this is what their parents taught them. Western Muslims also know that many of the doctrines in Islam are directly conflicting with the doctrines of their nations, i.e. democracy, freedom, equality for all, etc. This mental conflict causes an uncomfortable feeling and it is the unconscious that is producing the feeling, or rather experiencing the uncomfortableness. So the unconscious attempts to reduce the dissonance by rationalizing the discrepancies. For example, a relative of mine, a Western Muslim, learned at a young age that Allah says in his Quran that humans were put on this Earth. Then she earned a BS degree and learned the theory of evolution. But after learning this new information, she denied that humans and monkeys shared a common ancestor. Why did her mind deny the obvious? It is because her unconscious attempted to relieve the dissonance, the conflict, by denying the Western knowledge that she had learned. And since her conscious was unaware of the irrational tendencies of her unconscious, she could not reason her way to the correct answer, which is that Islam is wrong, at least regarding how humans came to populate the Earth.
Now what about me? I didn’t deny evolution. Instead, I denied that the details of the Quran should be taken literally. This remedied the conflict (evolution vs creation) in my mind and it does in most Muslims. Effectively, I was denying the very aspects of the reality of Islam itself. The idea was that the stories in the Quran were only metophorical and not to be taken literally. This is the epitome of Cognitive Dissonance. If I was to spend just a little bit of time continuing along this line of logic, that errors in the Quran can be seen as metaphoric rather than literal, then the entire house of cards would have fallen years ago. But for someone who has not yet learned that his unconscious acts so irrationally, he stops thinking and never reaches the inevitable conclusion that Islam itself is completely fake.
But I was already an ex-Muslim when I found out about Cognitive Dissonance. So how did I apostatize before that? Just like most ex-Muslims, I had a traumatic life-changing event. For me it was a psychotic episode that my Muslim ex-wife experienced. We had just separated, and the stress caused her to experience her very first psychotic episode. She was hearing voices, her own voices, but she didn’t know that they were in her head. She thought that she was possessed by a demon (Jinn). I was pushing her to the mental hospital while she kept seeing exorcist after exorcist. These Shaikhs kept telling her that they removed the demons and she kept denying it. She kept hearing the voices so of course the Shaikhs were wrong. She went months without seeing a doctor. This shook me to the core. I could not believe that she trusted Islam more than science. Why trust a religion over proven science?
When her family finally forced her into the hospital, I was finally able to sit down and reflect. I realized that before this event, I had already given up everything I knew about Islam, except for one thing: That Islam is the path to an easier life on Earth. The lessons in the Quran were to be used to lead a life void of troubles. This is how my unconscious rationalized the conflict. And finally, the last straw was broken. My traumatic life-changing event caused me to let go of this ridiculous idea that if one follows Islam, she will be lead to a good life. I saw my ex-wife spiral out of control because she was following her Islam, which was to seek out Shaikhs specially trained in exorcism following the rules laid out in the Quran and Hadith brought by Mohamed, the most influential liar in all of history, or maybe he was delusional as suggested by his epileptic symptoms. For eight months, before we had even separated, she was playing the Quran loudly in our house and I never knew why. She had known of her problem and she of course misdiagnosed the cause, and so she believed that demons had possessed her. She was playing specific recitations of the Quran that have been specifically chosen by Shaikhs to repel demons. She was praying to ask Allah to protect her by preventing the demons from entering her house and her veins. She was purchasing and reading books that supposedly explained in detail how to protect oneself from those demons as prescribed by Hadith. I was completely unaware of all of this until the day that my mom brought it to my attention and showed me the books she was reading and the notes she was writing in big bold letters that said things like, “Jinn get out! He’s never going to come inside.” I was in shambles. This is what caused me to leave Islam.
Last edited by rombomb2 on 15 Dec 2011, 2:49 am, edited 2 times in total.
10 Dec 2011, 11:58 am
