Abdullah Sameer YQ

 Yasir Qadhi

Leaving Islam brings up questions we do not have an answer to, yes, indeed it does, but being agnostic is the most authentic and honest position we can take. This means we admit that we really don't know, and we may never know the answer to everything we can imagine. Life is not the false dichotomy that you make it to be, between belief and disbelief, between a meaningful existence with god, and a meaningless one without god. There are many other positions one can take, including to believe in god but no inspired religion. To believe that we can create our own meaning.

Einstein said this best in his letter he wrote. In one he writes, "I'm not an atheist, and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations."

In another to Eric Gutking he wrote, "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this."

He did not call himself an atheist but did not believe in a personal god, i.e. a god who sent revelations to man. He wished to remain humble to the possibility, yet he was just as amazed by the wonder of the universe. So surely you can see you've made you've committed the fallacy of the undistributed middle. You've made a false dichotomy that doesn't exist. You've strawmanned our position as atheists.

Yasir Qadhi, as a thought experiment, if you found out God did not exist, would you stop loving your daughter? Would you stop kissing your wife? Would you stop enjoying chai with a cookie dipped in it? Would you say "okay, no god, I will just stop getting out of bed now?" Or would you still be driven by the passion for knowledge that you are known by? Would you be driven to keep learning, to keep improving yourself, to improve our lot that us humans are born into? Because that is what drives many of us, god or no god, to build the world, to make it a better place, to improve it for those who are lesser off and to stand up against inequality and injustice wherever we see it.

There are spiritual practices that one can involve oneself in such as mindfulness meditation that are not predicated on any false dogma. For those who have lost God but are seeking spirituality meditation has it is proven meditation improves people's wellbeing and health.

As for exmuslims being the most traumatized individuals you have met, this is also true for ex-mormons and ex-cult members. Realize that Islam puts high expectations and affects just about everything in an individuals life. During the process of leaving a religion, one may suffer from losing all their points of reference - friends, losing their parents acceptance and love, family members rejecting them or shunning them, or even boycotting them for their new religious positions. This can be extremely painful, especially if you were Muslim your whole life and everyone around you is intolerant of your newly found positions. Or if you have to hide your true beliefs for fear of being ostracized and condemned by others, much as you are doing here. When the Muslim community becomes more tolerant, once dissent becomes normalized, this will change.

There's a reason for your doubts. Because Islam does not jive with reality. It is much more parsimonious to believe there is no God, or at least no God that is involved with humanity. What we see in the world is that God does not seem to answer duas. Dua is answered at the same probability as chance. We see that there is no good answer to the problem of suffering. We see that animals and humans do not seem designed rather they seem evolved. You find the most strange and disturbing things in nature from baby seals who are raped by larger males to bedbugs who have to pierce the abdomens of their female counterparts to insemininate them.

The Quran itself is the biggest proof that there is no god that sent revelation, because if there was a god, it would have been the god of Islam. Yet the Quran suffers from immense flaws in its description of the world, from holding up the sky without pillars, to incorrect descriptions of embryology, to insinuations of a geocentric universe, to describing magic and evil eye as real.

If God exists, why did he suddenly go silent? Why did he go dark in the era of technology and writing, yet he was intimately involved with humanity in the era of supersitition. Why is it that he is now silent, now hidden, now completely uninvolved?

I really had a better impression of you, and the best hopes for you, that you will one day realize that Islam is indeed false, and that you can regardless enjoy life the way it's meant to be enjoyed. Not as a prison, but as a free man.

In conclusion, Yasir Qadhi I sincerely wish you the best. I urge you to continue gaining knowledge and studying. I am confident you will see your way through Islam.

Abdullah Sameer