God has a strange sense of planning.
First, he throws us down here with no memory of him and no observable evidence he truly exists. Then he sends people “prophets” to tell people about him. (Because he wanted us to hear it secondhand from someone else and believe them rather than directly communicating to us right?) He supposedly sent down prophets but really it’s just a later self-proclaimed prophet saying so. He could have sent them to cultures that had invented writing so we’d know those prophets really existed from first-hand accounts. Instead, he sent them to either illiterate civilizations, and the literate ones he destroyed all evidence of — apparently. Except for Egypt. But apparently the Egyptians decided Moses and the Jews weren’t even worth mentioning 🤔
And then he sends us a book, but only one copy to one man who sometimes forgets (by Allah’s will). Allah also cancels out some of his verses.
“We do not abrogate a verse or cause it to be forgotten except that We bring forth [one] better than it or similar to it. Do you not know that Allah is over all things competent?” (Quran 2:106)
And then the cherry on top is he leaves the compilation for after the death of his beloved prophet. His final prophet dies with no details on compiling the book and no succession plan. Does this sound like the final message that’s so important to God?
The book doesn’t seem to contain anything amazing. Everything in it is pretty much what we would expect from a human being. Mishmashes of local mythology from here and there. Nothing he couldn’t have known in the time and place he was in. Worse than that, the descriptions contained within seem to be of a flawed understanding of the world — sky held up without pillars, sun and moon in orbit connected to night and day. Humans created from a clot of blood with no mention of the female egg or sperm.
Then we are expected to trust that his friends put it together properly without error and in the right order. And then the one who compiled the book destroyed all the other versions?
Delivery method?
Flawed from the get-go. Huge chunks of Earth not covered. Many individuals didn’t receive the message. Many nations never heard of Islam or any God. But “they will be excused” right? How is this fair? Why make a test that’s already flawed from the beginning and then say “oh I’ll fix that later.” If God’s purpose is truly to test us, why does this world not reflect a fair testing ground? Everyone should receive the message on equal terms and choose.
The chance of you being a believer depends pretty much on where you are born. Born into the right family — well your chances are high you would be a believer. As well, depending on the time period and place you are born you are more likely to believe these fairy tales or instead be challenged by facts as science advances.
Born somewhere in China or Asia? Well, slim chance you’ll believe in “Allah”, you’d have to overcome your family values and traditions and pick on a foreign sounding God that probably wouldn’t make much sense to you.
Our brains themselves are fallible to deception and illusion. We easily can be tricked into believing something that isn’t true. People don’t believe based on evidence, they go by what feels right, or what they think might be true, and so on.
How about the fact that most humans seem to get the wrong answer? No matter what religion is true, 80% of us did NOT worship the correct God since only one of them can be true. We did not live our lives according to what God wanted, and unless “we didn’t get the message”, we are all going to hell.
Why would God want to make a test where he had control over all the variables and he fails most the subjects? That seems unjustifiable… doesn’t it?
Then for people who believe, he literally wants us to be terrified of the day of judgement. The Quran talks about babies being aborted, little girls whose hair will turn white, prophets who will be self-absorbed and will ignore their followers. Thousands of years of waiting under a hot sun and no water.
The best people are the ones who believe these stories and have the most khushoo and taqwa of God. Every spare second of their life they constantly evaluate “Is this the right thing to do? Will God be pleased with me if I do this?”
The gatekeepers for this are the scholars, the ones who memorize dogma and invent rules on how to understand the religion. Rules such as when to prioritize hadith over Quran, Quran over hadith, how to deal with contradictions, how to deal with abrogations, and other such inconsistencies that appear everywhere. So we become dependent on these guys to tell us everything from whether we can pee standing to whether it’s okay to have a study circle of Quran every night in our house to whether it’s okay to interpret the book yourself, whether it’s all right to adopt a child, whether it’s okay to donate blood when you are alive or organs when you die, whether swallowing spit invalidates your fast, and so on..
It’s a terrible trap to get into, where everything in your life is controlled and shaped by this system. Freedom comes from realizing that if there’s a God, he didn’t send any revelation.
Live your life and make the most of each moment because it’s probably the only one you have.
Image source Pixabay
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