Testimony

I don't ever remember really being "in" Islam. I do remember doing the things "good Muslim children" are supposed to do but I really don't know why I did them. I have a feeling it was to fit in with everyone. Even though I was raised in the United, where people routinely do immoral things like eating at McDonalds, I was told that I was different. I bought that. Then at some point, around puberty time, I realized that I was pretty much just acting mindlessly. I always was a bit of a thinker so acting mindlessly rubbed me the wrong way and between the ages of fourteen and twenty I went through solipsism, an independent discovery of the cogito, a brief digression into objectivism, some Buddhist type thinking, a return to solipsism, a little nihilism thrown in for good measure and now I'm at a point where I don't really have any definite belief in anything, and hardly any definite disbeliefs either.

I certainly don't believe that Islam is true. And if the words! "false" and "certain" have any practical meaning, I am certain that Islam is false. I think of myself as a scientist but am always bothered to see many people especially these days use supposedly firm "scientific truths" as a shield against their fears in the same way that religion was previously used. I oppose absolute certainty in any form. And taking things for granted too. That's bad. Well, not really, actually. We have to take things for granted.

I guess what really pisses me off is when people don't tell you what they're taking for granted, what their assumptions in life are (sometimes I wonder if they've even been honest enough with themselves to admit to themselves that they have taken things for granted) People need to get their assumptions out into the open. Scrutinize them. Tolerate alternate points of view. Be honest. Brutally honest. People really need to point out hypocrisy wherever they find it. I guess the hardest kind to point out is the kind inside yourself.

The most important thing, I think, is the acceptance of the fact that we're limited. We don't know everything. We can't know everything. Anything we call knowledge will potentially be disproved by posterity. My ideal world, isn't a world of atheists or a world of agnostics, or Buddhists, or Moslems. My ideal world is one of people. one of a billion different creeds. Where people aren't afraid of the fact that they have a unique perspective of the universe, each and every one of them and that only by sharing what we see and not what we think we should see can we really find out anything resembling Truth (if such a thing exists).

Most organized belief systems will have you believe that some phrase or another is the key to a happy existence "there is no god but allah" (islam) "capitalism is evil" (communism) "people should rule themselves" (democracy) or a host of others. If there is any such maxim applicable to all of mankind I think it is "There's a lot !I don't know, a lot I'll probably never know, but you know what I want to understand things as much as I can"