Death Of Religion & Corruption Of The Message – Part 3

The concept of religion was not always as uncool as it is today and God or the concept of a creator was never so irrelevant and outdated(may Allah forgive me) like we see now in the minds of people and societies around the world. Since the dawn of civilization, religion was an integral part of cultures & societies and played an important role in the everyday lives of people. So today, I will talk about introduction/history of monotheism and then the reasons and causes that resulted in the mutation of the original message into polytheism and then transformation of polytheism into atheism and other belief systems. In the beginning of human civilization, there was only one God and only one religion, as Allah talks about it in Quran:

And they have broken their religion (into fragments) among them, but to us they are bound to return. [21:93]
In this verse Allah addressees the entire mankind and clearly states that all of the humanity belonged to one community and followed only one religion and that all the Prophets followed the same creed and message i.e. Allah alone is the Lord of all mankind and all should worship Him and Him alone. But afterwards with time, people corrupted their religion and invented, added, modified and adopted the things they liked, things that were convenient for them, made things that were prohibited permissible and hence mixed their own theories, wishes and practices into the true message of God Almighty. All these changes and modifications in religion expedited with the exponential growth of human population when people started to move away from their religious powerhouses and divinely guided personalities. So for example, God Almighty prohibited dealing with interest, the misguided and greedy men changed the commandment by saying that God prohibited charging interest to Israelites only and that it is permissible to charge interest to the Gentiles, Christians, and other nations.
It was not permissible to the Israelites to have a picture of a person on their coins and currency. When Roman’s took over Jerusalem and introduced their own currency with the picture of the emperor on the coins, Israelite religious scholars opened money changer shops inside the temple(masjid) of Solomon in order to follow the commandment of Yahweh and started converting Roman currency into “temple compliant currency” (without images on them) but ironically charged interest on each transaction. That btw was the reason behind Jesus a.s getting angry and attacking the money changers and their tables inside the temple. When God ordered the women to cover their heads for modesty, they followed the commandment by covering their heads with beautiful and attractive wigs increasing their sex appeal, murdering modesty. When He prohibited alcohol, they changed prohibition into moderation.
Paul or “saint Paul”, the one among the most staunch enemies of Christianity, the one who did everything to stop the spread of the message and took special interest in the persecution of early Christians and spent 70 years of his life working against the religion of Almighty, suddenly found truth in Christianity and changed the whole religion of Yahweh and the message of Jesus a.s. from it’s core beliefs & foundations into something totally new and hence singlehandedly distorted and destroyed everything Jesus a.s and his apostles stood for. It is sad, super weird and bizarre(for the level of acceptance he got) but he based all his updates and upgrades(version 2.0) to the original religion on a “vision” and claimed that he was guided by Jesus himself. …and that’s how my friends, pork was made permissible(he made it permissible) and that is the reason why I never underestimate the power of pork chops 🙂 Anyways, theses were some of the examples of what son of Adam did to the commandments of Almighty and His message.
As people were continuously corrupting the religion for worldly and material gains, Satan wasn’t sitting idle either, constantly whispering, plotting and working towards fulfilment of his promise, the promise he made when he disobeyed Allah by not bowing in front of Adam and said, “I will misguide sons of Adam till the end of times and will take with me, as many of them as I can to the depths of hellfire.” As Allah also promised humanity guidance to the righteous path, prophets and messengers were sent to the communities whenever misguidance and evil started to prevail and take roots. And hence those who followed the truth became the party of the light and those who were deceived by the darkness, greed, and arrogance of their hearts became the followers of Satan. And that is how the divide (between good and evil) that was defined in havens, started to define and shape civilizations, societies, clans, families and individuals here on planet earth.
Some time after Adam & Eve were Uhaul(ed) to earth, their son Kane’s arrogance, ego and greed resulted in the first divide among son’s of Adam when he killed his brother, kidnapped his bride to be, and ran away from his native land to the plains far away. As birds of a feather flock together, all in the community of prophet Adam a.s. with some kind of evil or sickness of hearts, preferred moving to the Kane’s side. Satan seized this opportunity and started visiting them(Kane’s side) in a form of a traveller and persuaded them to reserve one day of a month for party and relaxation. Then slowly and steadily he introduced nudity, erotic dancing, adultery, fornication and other evils among them using these monthly gatherings of pleasure. It is important to note that even with all the evil that prevailed in Kane’s community, they believed in oneness of God and were away from shirk and idol worshiping, which became a major problem at the time of prophet Noah a.s. According to Ibn Abbas(Bukhari), the idols of the people of Noah a.s. were named after the righteous men of the society hence idol names like Wadd, Suwa, Yaghooth, Yaooq, Nasar, etc. were all names of the pious and righteous people. Ibn Abbas states that when these people died, Satan came to the people of Noah a.s and told them that they should remember the great deeds and religious scholarship of these great men by setting up idols (that idols looked like these great people too) at the places of their worship. In the beginning they never worshiped these idols but as the time passed, standing in front of there idols for remembrance of these great men and their scholarship turned into bowing in respect, and then bowing in respect turned into bowing for prayer and worship. After this brief journey through time, we can now see that the basics and foundations of the “concept of religion and God” had single starting point, and that is why we see a strong influence of God/gods, afterlife, good vs evil, etc. in all cultures and civilizations around the world, from Egyptians to Mayans, from Indus valley civilization to the native Americans, from European pagans to Chinese/far east religions, and thousands of other beliefs and theologies around the world.(to be continued…)

Death Of Religion & Disappearance Of God From Hearts – Part 2

Long time ago, when I was a student in Morgantown working on my Undergraduate engineering degree, few guys from the masjid started a tiny group and the main purpose of the group was to visit people in their homes and have a small talk about Islam as a reminder.  One day I saw these brothers from that group sitting in the masjid looking really sad, gloomy and demoralised. I just wanted to know what was going on so I asked one of them and he replied, ” Today we visited this family(three brother living with their parents, wives and kids) for our regular Islamic reminder visitation and these guys and their wives really belittled us, abused us and kicked us out of the house and were not even willing to listen to what we wanted to say”. This family was totally disconnected from the Muslim community and did not want to associate to Muslims in any way.
Four or five years passed by and one day, the same family that abused and made fun of the group that visited them few years earlier, showed up at the masjid in panic and were looking for an imam or  someone knowledgeable in religion. When inquired about the reason, they replied by saying that their father died yesterday and they don’t know anything about Islamic burial process, prayers and other related responsibilities that are the right of the deceased and that they need help regarding the whole process. Two of the guys who visited them few years ago were there too at that time and when they heard this, they volunteered to take care of the washing, burring and other related rituals. During the Janaza prayer, the sons of the deceased stood at the back of the masjid stating that they were taught prayers and everything but they have forgotten and that is why they prefer not to participate. After everything was done, these guys were looking very apologetic and asked for forgiveness for their behaviour few years back and promised to work on the religious aspect of their lives. I don’t know much about the later part of their lives but this event left a deep impact on me and I still remember thinking to myself about the general behaviour of majority of the people towards the religious and practising people of the society. Society always makes fun of them, belittle them, makes fun of the beard, calls them names, calls them backward, impractical, religious nut, fundamentalist, etc. But when someone dies in their families, or when they need someone for reciting Nikkah prayer for their kids these religious freaks are exactly the people society turns to… yes exactly… The humble religious guy with a long beard!
I have seen “ultra super progressive” people and religion hating families running around like mad dogs in search of an imam or religious person for guidance in similar scenarios. That’s the time when reality bites and these people realize but like Allah said in Quran, very few are willing to learn and improve. Hence in most cases, nothing changes and the same cycle continues until the one who was searching for the imam today replaces the one in the grave and his relatives start their search for someone to guide them through the burial process and so on. I was really shocked and saddened by this experience and that is why it is imprinted on my brain forever.
There are many reasons behind people going away for the religion which includes, social pressures, financial reasons, people doing anything and everything to be more like “normal” westerners, the deeply embedded inferiority complex about their own religion and culture by the the colonial powers, the bad and evil behaviour of the religious figures, any many many more. Now let us talk about some of the reasons behind the death of religion and disappearance of God. I will cover these reasons in some detail in my next few posts.
This was not the first reason I wanted to write about but unfortunately I was once again distracted by the history channel and hence I cannot write about anything else until I talk about this one.
So I was watching history channel and the “experts” in the program were talking about biblical events but in a modern and more scientifically acceptable way. So when they talked about parting of the seas, when they talked about three guys who visited Prophet Abraham a.s and Lot a.s, when they talked about Prophet Mohammad’s s.a.w journey to the heavens, etc. they replaced the word “Angel Gabriel” with alien Gabriel, the “miracle” of parting of the seas was replaced by “high tech alien technology”, and last but not least the ascension of Prophet Muhammad s.a.w to heavens was simply a spaceship ride, etc. Hence as long as one changes the religious and biblical names and concepts with more modern and SciFi names, the level of acceptability increases exponentially among the so called modern society of today. These programs and theories always make me laugh because for me, changing the names does not make any difference. It does not make any difference because let us consider that they are right and we were created by aliens which religion calls angels, then this means that there should be someone who created these aliens too and so on. So our search should always be to find and understand the ultimate and absolute creator and should not just concentrate on the beings one level higher. Hence the search should be for the one who created the aliens, the one behind all the laws of physics, the one behind the advance alien brain that enabled them to do high tech stuff, the one behind the inspiration that resulted in the creation of their high tech spaceships etc.
Many of you like me, may have noticed the irony and humor seeing the same logic lovers visit palm readers, tarot readers, fortune tellers, astrologists, etc. to get predictions about their future, love life, financial situation, etc. or the stuff without any scientific or physical evidence. But when it comes to these “impractical and illogical” shortcuts, concepts or ideas, all logic and reasoning goes down the drain and the horoscopes, cards with pictures, lines on ones palm seems all logical, all true, all revealing, all powerful.(to be continued…)

Death Of Religion & Disappearance Of God From Hearts – Part 1

One day, a famous Islamic scholar from Baghdad decided to see how people perceive God, why they believe in someone unseen and how they came up to the conclusion about existence of the Creator. To get the answer to this question he decided to go out of the city and meet people in the desert and ask them the same question that is bothering the humanity almost since the beginning. During his journey through the desert, he saw a Bedouin sitting under a tree while keeping an eye on his sheep grazing nearby. The sheikh asked the Bedouin about his religion and if he believed in God? The Bedouin replied by saying that he is a believer and a Muslim. The Bedouin was not educated at all and knew only the basics. The sheikh asked him, “How can you believe in God that you cannot see, the God you have never met and there is no physical proof of His existence either?” The Bedouin looked around and replied, “Can you see the camel droppings over there? What do you understand by looking at it?” The sheikh said, “By looking at the camel droppings I can say that a camel walked through this area.” The Bedouin smiled and said, “so the lifeless camel droppings give you idea and information about the camel that passed through this area and it also tells you about the one(Camel) responsible for these droppings.” Then he said, “But all this around you, men, women, children, parents, grandchildren, animals, trees, sun, moon, stars and the whole universe is not enough to give you any insight about it’s Creator and that there should be someone behind all this?” The sheikh was shocked to hear the reply of the illiterate Bedouin and his level of understanding and the clarity of his concepts. The clarity that is impossible to attain for some, for many it comes with doubts, and very few attain the level of understanding where logic and belief starts to reenforce each other.
Hence an illiterate Bedouin who spent all his life in the desert was able to understand a concept most knowledgeable men of today are having trouble with. Steven Hawkings for example is one of the most knowledgeable scientist of our age but still cannot make up his mind about a creator of this universe. At first, he believed in the concept of a creator behind this universe as he talks about it in his earlier book the brief history of time. In early 21st century, he took an 180° and came up with the Spontaneous Creation Of Universe Theory, or the idea that something can come out of nothing and that the universe created itself from nothingness. This theory by Hawkings got a lot of resistance and criticism from the scientific community until he came up with the second version which avoids the concept of spontaneous creation making it more acceptable. For me, there is nothing wrong in something coming out of nothing, but the part that really bothers me is the idea of things spontaneously creating themselves or basically saying that everything is a god of itself or everything is god. I really respect Dr. Hawkings just like I respect all my other students 🙂 but I always fail to understand that how and why is it so easy for some people to believe in an idea suggesting everything is god or everything is it’s own creator and on the other hand outright disregard and belittle monotheism or a concept of one God. For me, there is nothing wrong with the scientific process these guys are following and I am in total favor of this because unlike most of humanity, these people are at least trying to understand and answer the most basic questions. And secondly, what these scientists are doing is exactly what Allah encourages all of humanity to do i.e. research, look around, experiment, experience, and understand.
This search for a Creator, workings of the universe and how everything was created is not new, and since the dawn of human civilization, people are trying their best to explain, perceive, believe, and understand the ultimate question i.e. why are we here and who is the creator of everything? These questions were answered by almost all the world religions in one way or another but now we see a sharp decline in belief and the rise of Atheism that only believes in things that can be proved by experimentation or inspection. In the world around us, there are many processes and entities that cannot be seen or directly proven and that is why science uses indirect methods or inference to prove their existence or execution. But ironically when the same process of inference and indirect proof is applied in case of supernatural and unexplained events, behaviours, and entities, it is considered backward, unscientific and baseless.