Abdullah Sameer

أَلَا يَعْلَمُ مَنْ خَلَقَ وَهُوَ اللَّطِيفُ الْخَبِيرُ Does He who created not know, while He is the Subtle, the Acquainted? (67:14)

History of God

Abdullah Sameer

I now see Islam as a fiercely intolerant religion that destroyed the native paganism / polytheism of Arabia.

The Islamic story we are told is that humans always worshiped One God, and then over time this was corrupted into the worship of many Gods. This does not seem correct.

For generations, human beings always worshiped many gods. Many cultures had local gods for their area.

From the earliest times, humans worshiped nature, spirits, ancestors, or their Gods that they invented.

In the Palaeolithic period, for example, when agriculture was developing, the cult of the Mother Goddess expressed a sense that the fertility which was transforming human life was actually sacred.

She was called Inana in ancient Sumeria, Ishtar in Babylon, Anat in Canaan, Isis in Egypt and Aphrodite in Greece, and remarkably similar stories were devised in all these cultures to express her role in the spiritual lives of the people.

In the ancient Babylonian text Enûma Eliš two primeval gods: Apsû (or Abzu) who represents fresh water and Tiamat representing oceanic waters.

Many cultures eventually got to the point of having multiple lower gods and one High God – Zeus (Greeks), Jupiter (Romans), or Allah (Arabs). They felt that the top God was too busy to be bothered with their lives, so they worshiped lesser Gods who would involve themselves with humanity.

It was notably in Judaism that this transformed into the worship of One God, who demanded exclusivity, worshiping nobody else, a jealous God, the cult of Yahweh (Jehovah).

Karen Armstrong writes about this in the “History of God“

Discussion regarding faith December 2016

Abdullah Sameer

Here is a recent discussion I had regarding faith:

In regards to the classical proofs of God’s existence. I have no problem in conceding that God does actually exist. I am skeptical of his existence, but I will accept it if there is a good reason to. I said this very clearly in my video that if there is a God, I believe he may be more akin an impersonal force or power without personality, similar to what Hindus call Brahman, or what the Greeks thought about God being a perfect abstract entity with no personality.

For all intents and purposes, this “deist” idea of God is completely irrelevant to us humans, so I call myself an atheist. There are several ways the universe may exist without the intervention of a God. You may want to look into Buddhist ideas about the universe to see what I mean. Buddhists do not believe in God by the way.

Whatever the case is, if God exists or not, I have not seen any good reason to believe God is involved in our lives whatsoever or sent any revelation.

All the so called revelations that we received from the Bible to the Quran to the Book of Mormon are all full of errors that we can clearly see that they were authored based on the understanding of the people at the time.
God does not care for us period. If he did, he would not allow people to starve to death. He would not allow little girls to be raped. He would not allow people to suffer unecessarily. Any reasonable human being who was given an unlimited or a large amount of wealth and power would improve the world, yet God allows people to die from diseases and creates worms that eat kids eyes?

In academia, it is pretty well known now that the patriachs – Adam Noah Moses and Abraham (and maybe even Jesus) were all inventions. There are great discrepancies and problems with the story of Moses, take a look at this video for some of the points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl2IHrh101Q

Look up Abraham or any other patriach and you will see what I mean. The story just doesn’t add up.

I don’t believe in absolute moral values but I do agree that there are some things which are better and worse for humans that we can agree upon. Things that lead to human flourishing are good, and things that don’t are bad. For example, killing women for honor related crimes is bad. FGM is bad. Allowing little girls to get married is bad and we can see why that is. Fistulas are an example of what happens when young girls get married.

So if you believe in absolute morality and you think your God allows wife beating, owning slaves, and so on, thats your choice, but I would say your God’s morality is flawed and does not facilitate human flourishing. Stoning people to death for adultery does not facilitate human growth or flourishing. Neither does allowing a man to divorce and not the woman. Or any of the other silly rulings in Islam

If religion makes a claim that praying to “Allah”, or performing Ruqyah has a very real and actual effect on healing, we should be able to observe this and measure it.
If One God is real, then praying to him should have a different effect than say praying to Krishna or Buddha or Ram, or even talking to your plants. A Harvard study on the efficiacy of prayer on healing of patients found that there was no effect of healing time… Infact, when patients were told they were being prayed for, it actually had the opposite effect of making their healing take longer! It was as if it caused them anxiety of having to get better..

If Allah is real, would he respond to a prayer to Christ, the Son of God? If he did respond to such prayers, what would that be telling us about him? That he is deceiving us, right?