I was born into Islam. Why? Because my parents were born into it. Why? Because their parents were born into it. And so on.

And, 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: it’s because that 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 her back, “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 grandfather? Weren’t they educated also? Why didn’t they know that it was nonsense?

She said, “Well they were afraid of the death penalty because that's what how Muslim societies dealt with ex-Muslims and still do.” I was speechless.

Later on I asked, “Why would your dad (my grandfather) want to raise you as a Muslim?”

She answered, “Because he thought that in order to raise children with good moral values, they must be taught morality from religion.”

I said, “Yes; 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 reasoned that since I don’t know Islam very well, I can’t teach it to my kids. So, I need a Muslim wife, who knows her religion well in order to raise moral children.”

But this line of reasoning is fallacious, because for teaching morality to children, we need not go to religion or supposedly divine scriptures. I’m doing very well in raising my daughters with good moral values, and I never needed to mention 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 on I realized that we thought religion were the sole source of morality, because we never learn or studied philosophy. Morality and ethics are simple topics when discussed in the context of philosophy. I was first exposed to philosophy at the age of 33 when I took on the task of home-schooling my daughters. What’s 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 two-and-a-half millennia ago. So, why is it that even in this great Information Age, the vast majority of the population are still ignorant of this all-too-important source of morality and ethics, and more generally, philosophy? That is covered in my yet-to-be-finished book, titled Education, Opportunity, and Happiness.

Many people would say: “Come on, it’s commonsense that religion is nonsense, so why did you think it was moral?”

Well, I didn’t know that. I never studied my religion deeply. Islam was a fanciful story. Actually many of the so-called lessons and values that I knew to be Islamic were, in fact, accumulations from ages of human experience that were passed on to children by their parents. Parents wanted to teach their children good morals; so they said good things, and claimed that they were from the Quran and/or Hadith so as to legitimize, give weight to, those lessons. Since real Islam’s journey under Muhammad in the 7th century, moral thoughts have changed or new moral paradigms have evolved over the centuries. As a result, moral values of Islamic societies have also quietly changed, so has changed Islam – at least as it is being propagated orally from generation to generation. Today, 90% of Muslims do not know what is actually written in the Quran and Hadith.

Many people would say, “Well, let’s just tell them and they will apostatize.”

Well, it’s not so easy. Their own biology is working against them. I’m referring to a part of our brain, where lies the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind acts in weird ways. This is explained in the theory of cognitive dissonance. According to this theory, cognitive dissonance is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. They do 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.[1]

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 mind that drives this behavior.

What does this mean for Muslims? Let’s take a smaller portion of the Muslim population, namely those living in the West. Western Muslims learn 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 adopted nations, namely democracy, freedom, etc. This mental conflict causes an uncomfortable feeling, and it is the unconscious mind that produces this feeling, or rather experiencing this discomfort. So, the unconscious mind attempts to reduce the dissonance by rationalizing the discrepancies.

For example, a relative of mine, a Western Muslim, learned at the 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 even after studying evolution, she denied that humans and monkeys shared a common ancestor.

Why did her mind deny the obvious? It is because, her unconscious mind attempted to relieve the dissonance, the conflict, between her deeply ingrained childhood teachings, which is conflicting with her newly-learned scientific knowledge of evolution. And since her conscious mind is unaware of the irrational tendencies of her unconscious mind, she could not reason her way to the correct answer, which is that Islam could be wrong, at least in regard to 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 vis-à-vis Evolution vs. Creationism in my mind, and that is how it works for most Muslims. But such reasoning leads to new kind of cognitive dissonance in our mind. In my effort to validate Evolution, I was, effectively, denying the very aspect of the reality of Islam itself. The idea was that errors in the Quran were actually just symbols 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 symbolic rather than literal, then the entire house of cards falls. But someone, who is unaware that her unconscious mind acts so irrationally, stops thinking further at some point, and never reaches the inevitable conclusion that Islam itself is fake.

But for me, 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 experience. 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 were hers. 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 have removed the demon, but she kept denying it. She kept hearing the voices; so they were, of course, wrong. She went months without seeing a doctor. This shook me to the core. I could not believe that she trusted Islam more than medicine. 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 know about Islam, except for one thing: That Islam is the path to an easier life on Earth. The lessons of the Quran were to be used to lead a life devoid of troubles. This is how my unconscious rationalized the conflict.

And finally, the last straw was broken. This traumatic life-changing experience, finally, caused me to let go of this ridiculous idea that if one follows Islam, he/she will be led 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 Muhammad, who was, as I now realize, the most influential liar in history.

For eight months before our eventual separation, she was reciting the Quran loudly in our house, and I never knew why. She had known of her problem, and she, of course, misdiagnosed the cause. She believed that Jinn, an Islamic creature, had possessed her. She was playing specific recitations of the Quran that have been specifically chosen by Shaikhs to repel the Jinn. She was praying to Allah to protect her from the Jinn – from entering her house and her veins. She was purchasing and reading books that supposedly explained in detail how to protect oneself from Jinns 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.


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#cite_note-2;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#cite_note-3

Comments powered by CComment

Joomla templates by a4joomla