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EDITORIAL  Rampant Maha Madness Part II BY ALI SINA EDITORIAL, Feb 10 (VNN) — From Belief to Enlightenment: The treacherous and arduous path The traitorous passage to enlightenment: After my bitter experience with the Quran I found myself traveling in a torturous road riddled with torments. I was kicked out of the blissful garden of ignorance, where all my questions were answered. There I did not have to think. All I had to do was read and obey. But the gates to that garden were closed to me forever. I had committed the unthinkable sin of thinking. I had eaten from the forbidden tree of knowledge, and my eyes had been opened. I could see the fallacy of it all and my own nakedness. I knew I would not be let in that paradise of oblivion again. Once you start thinking, you don't belong there anymore. I had only one way to go and that was forward. This journey proved to be more arduous than I was prepared for. I was on the road to enlightenment. But the passage was not an easy one. The road was slippery. There were mountains of obstacles to climb and precipices of errors to avert. I traveled uncharted territories alone, not knowing what I will find next. Little I knew that this journey would change my life. It would became my odyssey in the realm of understanding and the discoveries of Truth, eventually leading me to the shores of enlightenment and freedom. I will chart these territories for all those who may also commit the sin of thinking, find themselves kicked out of the paradise of ignorance and in the route to an unknown destination. If you doubt; if the mantle of ignorance in which you had wrapped yourself is shredded into pieces and you find yourself naked, know that you can not stay in the paradise of ignorance any longer. You have been cast out forever. Just as a child, once out of the womb, can not go back, you will not be readmitted in that blissful garden of oblivion again. Listen to one who has been there and done that, and don't cling despondently to the gates. That door is locked. Instead look forward. You have a trip ahead of you. You can fly to your destination or you can crawl to there. I crawled! But because I crawled, I know this path quite well. I will chart the road, so hopefully you don't have to crawl. The passage from faith to enlightenment consists of seven valleys. Denial The first stage is shock and then it is denial. The majority of the Muslims are trapped in denial. They are unable and unwilling to admit that Quran is a hoax. They desperately try to explain the unexplainable, find miracles in it and would willingly bend all the rules of logic to prove that the Quran is right. Each time they are exposed to a shocking statement in the Quran or a reprehensible act performed by Muhammad they retreat in denial. This is what I did in the first phase of my journey. Denial is a safe place. It is the unwillingness to admit that you have been kicked of the paradise of ignorance. You try to go back and are reluctant to take the next step and go forward. In denial you find your comfort zone. In denial you are not going to be hurt, every thing is okay; everything is fine. Truth is extremely painful especially if one has been accustomed to lies all his life. It is not easy for a Muslim to see Muhammad for who he was. It is like telling a child that his father is a murderer, a rapist and a thief. This might be true yet the child who adulates his father will not be able to accept it. The shock would be so great that the first thing he will do is to deny it. He will call you a liar and he will hate you for hurting him. He will curse you; hold you as his enemy and he may even discharge his anger at you and physically attack you. This is the stage of denial. It is a self defense mechanism. If pain is too big, denial will take that pain away. If a mother is informed that her child has died in an accident, her first reaction is often denial. In a moment of great catastrophes usually one is overwhelmed by a weary sense that this is all a bad dream and that he eventually would wake up everything would be okay. But unfortunately facts are stubborn and they will not go away. One can live in denial for a while but s/he must accept the truth sooner or later. Muslims are cocooned in lies. Because speaking against Islam is a crime punishable by death, no one dares to tell the truth. Those who do do not live long. They are silenced very soon. So how would you know the truth if all you hear are lies? On one hand Quran claims to be a miracle and challenges anyone to produce a Surah like it, on the other hand it instructs its followers to kill anyone who dares to criticize it or challenge it. If you ever dare to take up the challenge and produce a Surah as poorly written as the Qruan your will be accused of mocking Islam and your punishment is death. In such an atmosphere of insincerity and deceit, truth is always the casualty. The pain of coming face to face with the truth and realizing that all what we believed were lies is extremely agonizing. The only mechanism and the natural way to deal with it is denial. Denial takes away the pain. Denial is soothing. Denial is bliss. But denial is hiding one's head in the sand. One cannot stay in denial forever. Soon the night will fall and the cold shivering reality freezes one's bones and you realize that you are out of the paradise of ignorance. That door is closed and the lock is thrown away. You know too much. You are an outcast. Fearfully you look at the dark and twining road barely visible in the twilight of your uncertainties and gingerly you take your first steps towards a destiny of which you have no idea. You grabble and fumble your way and reluctantly try to stay focused. But fear overwhelms you and each time to run back to the garden to face once again the closed door. A great majority of Muslims live in denial. They stay behind the closed door. They cannot go in nor they can dare to walk away from it. Those who are inside the garden are those who never left it. This door will only let you out. But you cannot get in. That garden is the garden of certitude. It is reserved for the faithful, for those who do not doubt, for those who do not think. That place is the blissful garden of ignorance where those who believe and not think. They would believe anything. They would believe that night is day and day is night. They would believe that the Earth was created 6000 years ago, that Moses parted the sea, that Noah collected all the animals of the Earth in an ark, that Jesus rose with his body and ascended to heaven, that Muhammad climbed the seventh heaven met with God, split the moon and conversed with jinns. But just as Voltaire said, those who believe in absurdities commit atrocities, they also believe that killing the infidels is good, bombing is holy, stoning is divine, beating wives is prescribed by God, hating the unbelievers is the will of God. These inhabitants f the paradise of ignorance constitute the majority. Those who doubt are still the minority. This group of believers will ever see the truth if they are kept cocooned permanently in lies. All they have heard so far is the lie that Islam is good and if only Muslims practiced the true Islam the world would become a paradise, that the problems of Islam are all the faults of the Muslims. This is a lie. Most Muslims are good people. They are kind, generous, caring, hospitable, wonderful human beings. What is wrong is Islam. Those Muslims who do bad things are those who follow Islam. Islam rears the criminal instinct of the people. The more a person is Islamist, the more bloodthirsty, hate mongering, zombie s/he becomes. I wanted to deny what I was reading. I wanted to believe that the real meaning of what is in the Quran is something else. But I could not. I had read the whole thing and could no more fool myself saying that these inhumane verses were taken out of the context. I saw that the Quran does not have a context. Verses are jammed together at random often lacking any coherence. Yet the whole Quran was full of verses that taught killing the unbelievers and how Allah would torture them after they die. There were no lessons on morality, on justice, on honesty or on love. The only message of the Quran is to believe in Allah and to achieve this; Quran coaxes people with celestial rewards of unlimited sex with fair houris in Paradise and coerces them with the threat of blazing fires of Hell. When Quran speaks of righteousness, it really does not mean righteousness as we intend it but it means belief in Allah. A Muslim can be a killer and murder the non-Muslims and yet be a righteous person. Good actions are secondary; belief in Allah is the ultimate purpose of a person's life. What happened to me, after reading the Quran is that my perspective of reality was jolted. I found myself standing face to face with the truth and I was scared to look at it. It certainly was not what I was expecting to see. I had no one to blame, to curse and call a liar. I had found all those absurdities of Islam and the inhumanities of its author by reading the Quran. And I was shocked. Only this shock made me come to my senses and face the truth. Unfortunately this is a very painful process and I do not say it is easy. The followers of Muhammad must see the naked truth and they must be shocked. We cannot keep sugarcoating the truth. The truth is bitter and it must be swallowed. Facts are stubborn and they don't go away. Only then the process of enlightenment starts. But because every person's sensitivity is different, what shocks one person may not shock the other. Even as a man I was shocked when I read that Muhammad instructed his followers to beat their wives and called women deficient in intelligence. Yet I have come to know many Muslim women who have no difficulty accepting these derogatory statements uttered by their prophet. Not that they agree that they are deficient in intelligence or that they believe that the majority of the inhabitants of hell are women just because the Prophet said so, but they simply block out that information. They read it but it doesn't sink. They are in denial. The denial acts as a shield that covers and protects them, that saves them from facing the pain of shock and disillusionment. Once that shield is up, nothing can bring it down. At this point their beliefs must be attacked from other directions. We have to bombard them with other shocking teachings of the Quran. They may have a weak spot for one of them and one of those absurd teachings may shock them. That is all they need: a good shock. Shocks are painful, but they can be lifesavers. Shocks are used by doctors to bring back to life a dead patient. For the first time, the Internet has changed the balance of power. Now the brutal force of the guns, prisons and death squads are helpless and pen is almighty. For the first time Muslims cannot stop the truth by killing its messenger. Now a great number of them are coming in contact with the truth and they feel helpless. They want to silence this voice but they cannot. They want to kill the messenger but they cannot. They try to ban the sites exposing their cherished beliefs, sometimes they succeed momentarily but most of the times they don't. I created a site to educate Muslims about the real Islam. I hosted it at Tripod.com. The Islamists forced Tripod to shut it down. But I got my own sit back and it was back again in a couple of weeks. So the old way of killing the apostates, burning their books and silencing them by terror does not work. Also they cannot stop people from reading. My site is banned in Saudi Arabia, Emirates and many other Islamic countries, despite that a great number of Muslims who never knew the truth about Islam are being shocked after they are exposed to the truth for the first time. I met a lady on the net (a Yahoo clubs) who had converted to Islam and had started to wear the Islamic veil. (liberty, if you read this please contact me.) She had a web site with her picture completely covered in black veil and her story of how she had become a Muslim. She was very active and she used to advise others not to read my writings. But when she read the story of Safiyah, the Jewish woman that Muhammad captured and raped after killing her father, husband and many of her relatives, she was shocked. She asked explanation from other Muslims who could not answer her. Then the door was open and she was cast out of the paradise of ignorance. She kept writing to me and asking questions. Finally she passed through the other stages that exist between the blind faith and enlightenment very quickly and wrote a thank-you letter to me for guiding her though this arduous road and withdrew from the Yahoo Islamic clubs altogether. I believe when people learn about the unholy life of Muhammad and the absurdities of the Quran they will be shocked. Their first reaction is to deny. But when they recover from denial, they will be in their way to enlightenment. That is what I intend to do. I want to expose Islam, write the truth about Muhammad's unholy life, his hateful words, his senseless assertions and bombard the Muslims with facts. They will be angry. They would curse me, insult me and tell me that after reading my articles their faith in Islam is strengthened. But that is when I know that I have sown the seed of doubt in their mind. They say all this because they are shocked and they have entered the stage of denial. The seed of doubt is planted and it will wait for the first chance to germinate. In some people it takes years, but given the chance it will eventually germinate. Doubt is the greatest gift we can give to each other. It is the gift of enlightenment. Doubt will set us free, will advance knowledge, and will unravel the mysteries of this universe. Faith will keep us ignorant. One of hurdles we have to overcome is the hurdle of tradition and false values imposed on us by thousands of years of religious upbringing. The world still values faith and considers doubt as the sign of weakness. People talk of men of faith with respect and disdain men of little faith. We are screwed up in our values. The word faith means belief without evidence, gullibility also means belief without evidence. Therefore there is no glory in faithfulness. Faithfulness means gullibility, credulity, susceptibility and easy to fleece. How can one be proud of such qualities? Doubt on the other hand means the reverse of the above. It means being capable to think independently, being capable to question and to be skeptic. We owe our science and our modern civilization to men and women who doubted, not to those who believed. Those who doubted were the pioneers, they were the leaders of thoughts, they were philosophers, inventors, and discoverers, but those who believed lived and died as followers, made little or no contribution to the advancement of science and human understanding. Confusion: Those who read my articles about Islam and are hurt by what I tell them about the Quran are lucky. They have me to blame. They can hate me, curse me and direct all their angers at me. But when I read the Quran and learned about its content, I could not blame anyone. After going through the stages of shock and denial, I was confused and started to blame myself. I hated myself for thinking, for doubting and for finding faults with what I regarded to be the words of God. Just like all the other Muslims I was exposed to many lies, absurdities and inhumanities inherent in Islam but I had accepted them all. I was brought as a religious person. I believed in whatever I was told. These lies were given to me in small doses, gradually, since my childhood. I was never given an alternative to compare. It is like vaccination. I was immune to the truth. But when I started to read the Quran seriously from cover to cover and understood what this book is actually saying. I felt nauseated. All those lies suddenly appeared in front of me. I had heard all of them before and had accepted them. It was as if my rational thinking was numbed. I had become insensitive to the absurdities of the Quran. When I found something that did not make sense I brushed it off and said to myself that one has to look at the big picture. The big picture however was nowhere to be found except in my own mind. I had made a picture of Islam in my mind that was perfect. So all those absurdities did not bother me because I did not pay attention to them. When I read the whole Quran I discovered a different picture very much distinct from the picture I had made of it in my mind. The new picture of Islam emerging from the pages of the Quran was a violent, intolerant, irrational, arrogant picture that was a far cry from my mental picture that depicted Islam as a religion of peace, equality and of tolerance. My first reaction, of course was denial. That was the easiest thing to do. I had to deny it, to keep my sanity. But for how long I could keep denying when the truth was out like the sun right in front of me? I was reading the Quran in Arabic so I could not say it is the question of the bad translation. Later I saw other translations, I realized many translations in English are not entirely reliable. The poor translators had tried very hard to hide the inhumanity and the violence of the Quran by twisting the words and adding their own words sometimes in parenthesis or brackets to soften its harsh tone. When you read the Quran in Arabic and understand it, it is much more shocking than its English translations. I went through a period of depression. It was as if my whole world had fallen apart. I felt like the floor on which I was standing is no more there and I am falling to a bottomless dept. If I say that was like being in the hell I am not exaggerating. I was confused and I did not know where to turn. My faith was shaken and my world had crumbled. I could no more deny what I was reading. But I could not accept the possibility that this was all a huge lie. How could it be? I kept asking myself. How could it be that so many people have not seen the truth and I see it? How could it be that great seers and saints like Moulana Jalaleddin Rumi did not see that Muhammad was an impostor and that Quran is a hoax, and I see it? It was then that I entered into another stage and that was guilt. Guilt: The guilt lasted for many months. I hated myself for having these thoughts. I felt God is testing my faith. I felt ashamed. I spoke with learned people that I trusted, people who were not only knowledgeable but whom I thought were wise. I heard very little that could quench the burning fire within me. One of these learned men told me not to read the Quran for a while. He told me to pray and read only books that strengthen my faith. I did that, but it did not help. The thoughts about the absurd, sometimes-ruthless sometimes-ridiculous verses of the Quran kept throbbing in my head. Each time I looked at my bookshelf and saw that book, I felt pain. I took the Quran and hide it behind the other books. I thought if I do not think about it for a while my negative thoughts will go away and I will regain my faith once again. But they didn't go away. I denied as much as I could, until I could no more. I was shocked and it was painful. I was confused and bewildered, pleading for help and no one could help. I felt guilty, ashamed of my thoughts and hating myself for having such thoughts. This sense of guilt was accompanied by a profound sense of loss and depression. Naturally I am a positive thinker. I see the good side of everything. I always think tomorrow is going to be better than today. I am not the kind of person that would get depressed easily. But this feeling of loss was overbearing. I still recall that weight on my heart. I thought God has forsaken me and I did not know why. Is that God's punishment? I kept asking myself. I do not remember hurting anyone ever. I had gone out of my way to help anyone whose life has crossed mine and asked me for help. I stopped eating meat because I did not want to destroy a life just to satisfy my taste buds, although the smell and the taste of a good stake derived me crazy. So, why God wants to punish me in this way? Why He is not answering my prayers? Why He has abandoned me to myself and to these thoughts for which I find no answers? Does he want to test me? Then where is the answer to my prayers? Would I pass this test if I became stupid and stopped using my brain? If so why he gave me the brain? Would only unintelligent people pass this test? This period of guilt lasted too long. One day I decided enough is enough. I told myself that it is not my fault. I am not going to carry this guilt forever for thinking about things that make no sense to me. If God gave me a brain, it is because he wants me to use it. If what I perceive as right and wrong is skewed, then it is not my fault. He tells me killing is bad and I know it is bad because I do not like to be killed, then why his messenger killed so many innocent people and asked his followers to kill those who disbelieve? If rape is bad and I know that it is bad because I do not want it to happen to people I love, why Allah's prophet raped the women he captured in war? Is slavery is bad and I know it is bad because I hate to lose my freedom and become a slave why the Prophet of God reduced so many free people into slaves and made himself rich by selling them? If imposition of religion is bad and I know that it is bad because I do not like another person to force on me a religion that I don't want, then why the Prophet eulogized Jihad and exhorted his followers to kill the unbelievers, take their booty and distribute their women and children as spoils of war? If God tells me something is good and I know that it is good because it feels good to me then why his prophet did the reverse of that thing? Disillusionment It was then that guilt was lifted off my shoulders but entered the next stage, which is dismay, disillusionment or cynicism. I felt sorry for having wasted so many years of my life. I felt sorry for all the religious people and especially for the Muslims who are still trapped in these foolish beliefs. I felt sorry for all those who lost their lives in the name of these false doctrines. I felt sorry for all the women in virtually all the Islamic countries that suffer all sorts of abuses and are so subdued that do not even know they are being abused or what is the source of their abuse. I thought of all the wars waged in the name of religion, so many people died and all was for nothing. Millions of believers left their homes and families to wage war in the name of God and in their minds they thought they are spreading the religion of God but never came back. In so doing they massacred millions of innocent people just because they were not believers. Civilizations were destroyed, libraries were burned and so much human knowledge was lost, for nothing. I recalled my father waking up in the early hours of the Morning and in the icy water of the winter performing vodu. I recalled him coming home hungry and thirsty during the month of fast and I thought billions of people torture themselves in this way for nothing. The realization that all what I believed were lies and all what I did were waste of my life, and the fact that a billion other people are still lost in this arid desert of ignorance chasing a mirage that to them appear to be water was disappointing. Prior to that I had always God in the back of my mind. I used to talk to him in my imagination and those conversations seemed to be real to me. I thought God is watching and taking account of every good act that I did. The feeling that someone is watching over me, guiding my steps and protecting me was very comforting. It was difficult to accept that there is no such thing as Allah and even if there is a God, Allah is not it. I did not give up the belief in God but by then I knew for sure that that if this universe has a maker, it cannot be the deity that Muhammad envisioned. Allah was ignorant to the core. Quran was full of errors. No maker of this universe could be so stupid as it appeared to be in the Quran. Allah could not have existed anywhere else except in the mind of sick Muhammad. I realized that he was but a figment of a Muhammad' imagination and nothing more. How disappointing was I when I realized all these years I was praying to a fantasy. Depression: This feeling of loss and disappointment was accompanies with a sense of sadness, or some kind of depression. I felt betrayed and violated. I cannot say which feeling was predominant. At times I was disillusioned, then I was sad and then again dismayed. But curiously I was no more confused nor I felt guilty. I knew for sure that Quran was a hoax and Muhammad was an impostor. But despite that feeling of liberation, I had some sense of loss and sadness. It was as if I had lost something and I was feeling empty within my soul. Even if faith is false, it is still sweet. It is very comforting to believe. To overcome this sadness I tried to keep myself busy with other activities. I even took dance classes and experienced what does it mean to be alive, to be free of guilt, to enjoy life and to be just normal. I realized how much I missed and how foolishly I deprived myself of the simple pleasures of life. Of course self-negation is the way cults exert their control over the believers. I had negated myself the simplest pleasures of life and was living in constant fear of God and I thought this was normal. I am talking of pleasures like sleeping in the morning, like dancing, like dating, like sipping a glass of fine wine. Anger: At this time, I entered another stage of my spiritual journey to enlightenment. I became angry. Angry I became for having believed in those lies for so many years. Angry I was for wasting so many years of my life chasing a wild goose. I was angry at my culture for it had betrayed me, for the wrong values it gave me. I was angry with my parents for teaching me a lie. I was angry of my self for not thinking before, for believing in lies, for trusting an impostor and I was angry of God for letting me down, for not intervening and stopping the lies that were being inseminated in His name. When I saw the pictures of the millions of Muslims who with so much devotion went to Saudi Arabia, many of them spending their lifesavings to perform haj, I became angry for the lies that these people were brought up with. When I read someone had converted to Islam, something that Muslims love to advertise and make a big issue I became saddened and angry. I was sad for that poor soul and angry of the lies. I was angry of the whole world that tries to protect this lie, defend it and would even abuse you if you raise your voice and try to tell them what you know. And this is not just the Muslims, but even the westerners who do not believe in Islam. It is as if it is okay to criticize anything but to question Islam. What amazed me and made me even angrier was the resistance I faced when I tried to let others know that Islam is not the truth. However this anger fortunately did not last much. By then I knew that Muhammad was no messenger of God but a charlatan, a demagogue whose only intention was to beguile people and satisfy his own narcissistic ambitions. I knew that all those childish stories of a hell with scorching fire and a heaven with rivers of wine, honey and milk full of orgies were the figments of a sick, wild, insecure and bullying mind of a man in desperate need to dominate and affirm his own authority. Soon I realized that I could not be angry with my parents; for they did their best and taught me what they thought to be the best. I could not be angry with my community, society, and culture because my people were just as misinformed as my parents and myself. When I looked carefully I saw everyone is a victim. There are one billion or more victims. Even those who have become victimizers are victims of Islam too. How I could blame the Muslims if they do not know what Islam stands for and honestly, though erroneously, believe that it is a religion of peace? Muhammad the narcissist: What about Muhammad? Should I be angry with him for lying, deceiving and misleading people? How could I be angry with a dead corps? Muhammad was an emotionally sick man who was not in control of himself. He grew as an orphan, changed five foster parents before he reached the age of eight. As soon as he came to be attached to someone, he was snatched and given to someone else. This must have been hard on him and was detrimental to his emotional health. As a child, deprived of love and a sense of belonging, he grew with deep feelings of fear and lack of self-confidence. He tried to make up for it by becoming a narcissist. A narcissist is a person who has not received enough love in his childhood, who is incapable to love, but instead craves for attention, respect and recognition. He sees his own worth in the way others view him. Without that recognition he is nobody. He becomes manipulative and a pathetic liar. Narcissists have grandiose dreamers. They want to conquer the world and dominate everyone. Only in their megalomaniac reveries they find their narcissistic supply. Some famous narcissists are Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Pol Pot and Mao. Narcissists are intelligent but they are emotional wrecks. They are deeply disturbed people. They set themselves extremely high goals. Their goals always have to do with domination, power and respect. They are nobody if they are neglected. Narcissists often seek alibis to impose their control over their unwary victims. For Hitler it was the party and race, for Mussolini it was fascism or the unity of the nation against others and for Muhammad it was religion. These causes are just tools in their quest for power. Instead of promoting themselves, the narcissists promote a cause, an ideology, or a religion while presenting themselves as the only authority and the representative of these causes. Hitler did not call the Germans to love him as a person but to love and respect him because he was the Fuhrer. Muhammad could not asked anyone to obey him. But he could easily demand his followers to obey Allah and his messenger. Of course Allah was Muhammad's own alter ego so all the obedience was for him at the final account. In this way he could wield control over everyone's life by telling them he is the representative of God and what he says is what God has ordained. Dr. Sam Vaknin, the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited explains: Everyone is a narcissist, to varying degrees. Narcissism is a healthy phenomenon. It helps survival. The difference between healthy and pathological narcissism is, indeed, in measure. Pathological narcissism and its extreme form, NPD (Narcissistic pathological Disorder), is characterized by extreme lack of empathy. The narcissist regards and treats other people as objects to be exploited. He uses them to obtain narcissistic supply. He believes that he is entitled to special treatment because he harbours these grandiose fantasies about himself. The narcissist is NOT self-aware. His cognition and emotions are distorted. The above perfectly describes Muhammad. Muhammad was a ruthless man with no human feelings. When he decided that the Jews are no more of use to him and he needed their wealth for the advancement of his plans, he stopped kowtowing them and eliminated them all. He massacred all the men of Bani Qurayza and banished or murdered every other Jew and Christian from Arabia. Surely if God wanted to destroy these people he would not have needed the help of his messenger. So I found there was no reason to be angry of an emotionally sick man who is dead long time ago. Muhammad was a victim himself of the stupid culture of his people, of the ignorance of his mother who instead of keeping him in the first years of his life when he needed her love most entrusted him to a Bedouin woman to raise him. Muhammad was a man with profound emotional scars. Dr. Vaknin writes that a narcissist "lies to himself and to others, projecting 'untouchability', emotional immunity and invincibility. For a narcissist "everything is bigger than life. If he is polite, then he is aggressively so. His promises outlandish, his criticisms violent and ominous, his generosity inane." Isn't this the image the Prophet projected of himself? I could not criticize or blame the ignorant Arabs of the 7th century for not being able to discern that Muhammad was sick and not a prophet, that his outlandish promises, his impressive dreams of conquering and subduing the great nations when he was just a pauper, were caused by his pathological emotional complications and were not due to a divine power. How could I blame those ignorant Arabs for falling prey to a man like Muhammad when only in the last century, millions of Germans fell prey to the charisma of another narcissist who also Muhammad gave them big promises, who was as ruthless as him, as manipulative as him and as ambitious as him? When I looked with care, I saw there is not a single person I could find guilty to be angry with. I realized we are all victims and victimizers at the same time. The only culprit is ignorance. It is our ignorance that makes us believe in charlatans and their lies. It is because of ignorance that we let these impostors inseminate hate among us in the name of false deities, ideologies or religions. It is our ignorance that does not allow us to see our oneness and hinders us from understanding that we are members of one body of humanity related to each other and interdependent with each other. It was then that my anger gave way to a profound feeling of empathy, compassion and love. I made a promise to myself to fight this ignorance that divides the human race. We paid dearly for our disunity. This disunity is caused by ignorance and the ignorance is the result of false beliefs and pernicious ideologies that are concocted by emotionally unhealthy individuals for self-serving purposes. Ideologies separate us. Religions cause disunity, hate and antagonism. Humanity needs no ideology nor it needs any religion. As members of the human race, we need no ideology, cause or religion to be united, but to be disunited, fight and kill each other we need to have an ideology, a cause or a religion. And this is enlightenment. I realized that the purpose of life is not to believe but to doubt. I realized that no one can teach us the truth because truth cannot be taught. It can only be experienced. In reality, no religion, no philosophy or doctrine can teach you the truth. Truth is in the love we have for our fellow beings, in the laugher of a child, in friendship, in companionship, in the love of a parent and a child, and in our relationship with others. Truth is not in ideologies. The only think that is real, is love. Synthesis: The process of going from faith to enlightenment is an arduous and painful process. Let us borrow a term from Sufism and call that the seven valleys of enlightenment. Faith is the state of being confirmed in ignorance. You will continue to stay in that state of blissful oblivion until you are shocked and forced out of it. This is the first valley. The natural and the first reaction to shock is denial. Denial acts like a shield. It buffers the pain and protects you from the agony of going out of your comfort zone. The comfort zone is where we feel at ease, where we find everything familiar, where we don't have to take new challengers or face the unknown. This is the second valley. But growth doesn't take place in the comfort zones. In order to go forward and to evolve we need to get out of our comfort zones. We won't do that unless we are shocked. It is also natural to buffer the pain of the shock by denial. At this moment we need another shock, and we may decide to shield ourselves again with another denial. The more a person is exposed to facts and the more he is shocked, the more he tries to protect himself with more denials. But denials do not eliminate the facts. They just shield us momentarily. Facts are stubborn and they will not go away. When we are exposed to facts, at one moment we will find ourselves unable to keep denying. That is when one of those facts will hit us and we go into shock. Suddenly we will find ourselves unable to keep our defenses up and the wall of denials come down. We no more can keep hiding our heads under the sand pretending that everything is okay. The first shock will have a domino effect and we find ourselves hit from all directions by facts that up until now we avoided and denied them. Suddenly all those absurdities that we had accepted and even defended, do not seem logical anymore and we won't be able to accept them. It is then that we are driven into the painful stage of confusion and that is the third valley. The old beliefs seem unreasonable, foolish and unacceptable yet we have nothing to cling to. This valley, I believe, is the most dreadful stage in the passage of faith to enlightenment. In this valley we lose our faith without having found the enlightenment. We are basically standing in nowhere. We experience a free fall. We ask for help but all we get is the rehashing of some nonsense clichˇs. It seems that those who try to help us have no clue of what they are talking about, yet they are so convinced about it. They believe in what they don't know. The arguments that they present are not logical at all. They expect us to believe without questioning. They bring the example of the faith of others. But the intensity of the faith of other people does not prove the truth of what they believe in. This confusion eventually gives way to guilt and that is the fourth valley. You feel guilty for thinking. You feel guilty for doubting, for questioning, for not understanding. You think it is your fault if the absurdities mentioned in your holy books make no sense to you. You think that God has abandoned you or that he is testing your faith. In this valley you are torn apart between your emotions and your intellect. Emotions are not rational but they are extremely powerful. You want to go back, you desperately want to believe but you simply can't. You have committed the sin of thinking. You have eaten the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. You have angered the god of your imaginations. You are cast out of the paradise of ignorance. At this stage you find yourself naked, and ashamed of your thoughts. This is the valley of guilt. You are embarrassed of your own thoughts and strive to get rid of them and go back to the paradise of ignorance. But that door is closed. Finally you decide that there is no need to feel guilty for the understanding. That guilt does not belong to you. You feel liberated but at the same time dismayed for all those lies that had kept you in ignorance and the time wasted. This is the valley of disillusionment. At the same time you are overtaken by sadness. You feel you are liberated; yet like coming out of a prison after spending there a lifetime, you are overtaken by deep sense of depression. You feel lonely and despite your freedom, you miss something. You ponder upon time lost. You think of so many people who believed in this nonsense and foolishly sacrificed everything for it including their lives. How many millions of lives were sacrificed at the altars of these false religions? How many people voluntarily faced death and in the case of Islam how many people took the lives of other innocent people with complete clear conscience? The pages of history are written with the blood of people who were killed in the name of Yahweh, Allah or other gods. All for nothing! All for a lie! Thereupon you enter the valley of anger and that is the sixth valley. You become angry at yourself, and at everything else. You realize how much you lost of your precious life believing in so much lies. But then you realize that you are the lucky one for having made it this far and that there are billions of others who are still trying to shield themselves with denials and not venture out of their comfort zone. They are still wading in the quagmire of the first valley. There are billions of believers who are cocooned in lies and desperately try to stay there. At this stage, when you are completely free from faith, guilt and anger, you are ready to understand the ultimate truth and unravel the mysteries of life. You are filled with empathy and compassion. You are ready to be enlightened. The enlightenment comes when you realize that the truth is in love and in our relationship with your fellow human beings and not in a religion or a cult. You realize that Truth is a pathless land. No prophet or guru can take you there. You are there already. In this odyssey you are not alone. You have a nagging companion that will not leave you. He will try to hinder your advancement and stop you from going forwards. He is your fear: the fear of punishment, the fear of hell, the fear of after death. It is completely irrational yet it controls you and acts on your subconscious mind at every step of the way. The passage from faith to enlightenment is arduous but you will not be able to make the first step if you cannot get rid of your fears. You will only get rid of them completely when you arrive at your destiny and you are enlightened. Then you break the chain of fear and acquire wings of enlightenment. This is the true liberation. Contact VNN about this story  Send this story to a friend
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