Hi Universe,
I now take a moment away from changing diapers and singing the alphabet (which Justin gives me flack for), to discuss my feelings on the current issues with foreign policy, Islam, Islamophobia and ISIS. I am by no means an expert opinion in this. I do however have quite an in depth knowledge on the thoughts of regular day Muslims and my experience in how they interact with the world around them.
So, in case you didnt know, I was born Muslim, and grew up in a very religious environment. I will inform the lay person of what this means. Some facts.. Muslims believe in a singular God, Allah(S), is just one of the many names to describe God. There are 99 other names as well. These names include giver of honor.. and dishonor. The Merciful and the Humilator....the list goes on. The Muslim concept of God is extremely singular, and quite abstract. When I was taught about God, it was often like this: think about each particle in the universe, where it did come from, where did that come from, etc. There has to be some master puppeteer.. Muslims call that God. Muhammad(S) is NOT a God.
God doesn't care about you in any real way, he created and then we existed. There were no accidents, no heaven vs hell epic laser gun battles (which btw make a lot more sense to me than using swords and shields). God is omniscient, there is no way of doing anything He doesn't know about. Whether he cares.. that is a different story. A Muslim's only purpose in life is to serve God, in fact Muslim means servant/submitter. Many stories of prophets include having God do ridiculous things to you while you keep saying Thank you. God may burn your field, but at least he gave you air to breathe. God may take away the air you breathe but at least he let you breathe it for awhile. Similar to the Jewish God, God can be kind but can also be kind of ruthless. In fact, one of the stories about praying.. God wanted us to pray 50 times a day, but as a mercy, and a lot of begging from Muhammad.. he whittled it down to 5. The Muslim God therefore is not an easy God who wants nice things to happen to you... He is a God that wants a LOT of attention, and any interruption in that attention is sacrilege. He commands to destroy idolatory similar to the Jewish prophets and you can't walk in front of someone while they are praying lest they be considered to be praying to a mortal. God views Humankind.. kind of like we view a dog. We want it to love us.. and spend a lot of time loving us. If it doesn't.. well we can spray in the face with some water.. or sentence it to an eternity burning in flames.
Now all jokes aside, one would ask.. why believe in a God like this? I've heard many liberal Christians say if God hates homosexuals... I dont wanna believe in a God like that. But the Muslim God (and I think very similarly the Jewish God) doesn't really care what you believe. To the believer, it is fact. That is the way God is, it is not a matter of debate. Sometimes dogs get a nice owner.. sometimes they get a rather fickle owner. You still love your owner. That's the way a dog should be because it cant just knock on the door of the neighbor and say.. well my first owner was a meanie.. so will you be my owner now? In fact, there is no reason to believe that God would be nice. There is sufficient reason to believe that God would be exactly the way he is described in the Quran and the First Testament. I mean God invented disease, famine, natural disasters, cancer, etc. If God wanted a nice beautiful world, She/He/It could have easily created that instead. He seems to have wanted to create a world full of random evils so She/He/It did. One could say that that one can only know good if they have seen bad, but who cares. If I had nothing to compare "good" to, then the only difference would be that I would be a little less appreciative of it. Which as we can see.. is exactly what God would NOT want. Hence, it is quite logical that if God exists...She/He/It is totally as harsh as Muslims believe.
In Islam, those outside of the religion belong to either two classes: the People of the Book and the kaffir. The People of the Book are Jews and Christians and the Kaffir are everyone else. Kaffir are idolators, i.e. Hindus, Buddhists, Romans, etc. The People of the Book are Christians and Jews, who have misguided beliefs that have either shared power with God (Christians) or not accepted the completing of the story (Jews) with Muhammad and Jesus. Jewish beliefs mirror Muslim beliefs quite heavily, and I actually don't know of many areas where orthodox Jews are that different from Muslims. However, with the politics of the world somehow Jews and Muslims don't get along. This somewhat multifactorial. One component is the state of Israel, which when formed really ticked off the Muslim world. But that was a generation ago, so why is the existence of a Jewish state such a continued thorn? Well I believe it is two reasons. One is the slash to pride, which Muslims hold to dearly. It really has nothing to do with Jews, Anti-Semitism, etc. It has to do with land. They had land, and they lost a war, and land was taken away. If it was given to Britain, Germany, etc, they would have felt the same way.
The other reason has to do with what I call the OSC, the Overly Similar Complex. This is why Protestants and Catholics have fought, why Sunnis and Shiites have fought, why Amanda Bynes and Miley Cyrus have fought, etc. If two religions/people,etc are very similar in traits, then you lose feeling unique. You lose feeling special. Thus you find exactly what it is different about you and the guy/gal next door and hold on to it harder than a hair metal band holds on to the 80s. This single unique thing that differentiated you from the guy next door now defines your identity completely, and you have to hate the thing that you were so closely related to.. lest you become unimportant. There is really nothing in Islam that says you should treat anyone with anything less than the utmost courtesy and respect, but if you have devoted all your time to God, and now you don't feel important because that guy next to you is spending his entire day praying as well.. Well.. we may just have a problem because my prayers are better than his prayers. (In fact, several branches of Islam argue about such things.. like whether the correct way to pray consists of keeping your forefinger up, or wiggling it up and down during a specific part of the prayer ritual.) Very few cultures embrace differences as a good thing, and even America, which does to more extent than other areas of the world, continues to be plagued by problems regarding this.
What makes Islam way different than it's Jewish counterpart? It's ability to stay exactly the same. While Judiasm has created conservative and reform movements, Islam has stayed exactly the same. Some people blame this on not having a Caliph (leader), but really other religions that don't have a strong centralized leadership have been able to modernize in some sense. Islam fundamentally prides itself on it's inabilty to change. Islam is complete .. whole.. final. The Quran is complete .. whole.. final. This is where Muslims really run into trouble with modern society.
Anyways.. I'm tired now.. so i guess this will be a multiple part submission.
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