Religion

“The notion of “us” versus “them” is hardwired into every religion. If you don’t believe what | believe, leave your foreskin on to prove it or drink this wine and believe it’s the blood of the Lord or turn your face away from Jerusalem when you pray. The Buddha said, Islam itself says, that there is only one truth out there, only one message that’s sent down over and over. Just the one message, one truth, one well from which everyone drinks. And yet somehow the message gets twisted and corrupted and adulterated by our own clumsy attempts to humanize it, to create systems from the ineffable. The Voiceless, The New Press, 10 May 2017 » p25

"". I am uncomfortable with this blatant display of religious affiliation. Is it too much to ask that my local shop be free of it?” p27

“She encourages me to write more, to be fearless—a directive I can’t help but snort at. She’s asked me to expound on thoughts of religion, to re-tool entire articles so they : come from that angle: Did the war make you hate religion? Has all that death and destruction and pain made you abandon God? Do you have an uneasy relationship with all religions, or is it only Islam? »p28

"“We don’t wrestle with the Problem of Pain, so at least there’s that. Ours is an Old Testament god, one who does not shy away from conflict, who doesn’t hesitate to mete out punishments, who is unafraid to show creation how utterly unfair life can be and that your one measly existence DOES NOT MATTER in the grander scheme of things" p28
". I don’t share that certainty of cosmic justice. As I see it, the . hubris of the atheist is matched only by that of the ardent believer. »" p28

"“Theirs must be some new brand of hip imam. Islam is not a celebratory religion, .. They play Pakistani pop and Iranian psychedelic and Arabic love ballads from the fifties, and already some of the men are jumping around in wild,.. A few of the girls try moving their arms or shoulders or hips”" p45

“Not interfaith dialogue, but just dialogue, and I wonder if I can slip that into a piece for Josie without it coming out trite.( in the feast party at the mosque)" p47

"Does he think he can cure me with religion, tell me everything is going to be okay, that this is all part of Allah's grand design? Does he think anything he says will be something I don’t already know" p52

“I check my watch, but I don’t know when the prayer times are, and so I don’t know if this is a reaction to last night or just a normal lull in the day. »p67

". Is it my job, as a Muslim, to try to convince you not to be afraid of me? That my people are not hardwired to hate you, to want to blow you up on a tube or ram you with a van? They said globalization would make the world better, but instead the word has become some hysterical shorthand for anything that threatens the status quo" p73

""there was a man leading prayers down by a muddy river. i didnt join in, um hasan glared at me later and wouldnt let the girls show me the bunny they found”"p76

"« There’s a woman here(Serbian borders)), older than time, shriveled as a fig in the sun… She prays all the time. More than five times a day, like she thinks the original fifty is the actual revelation.”p87

"“... At the end of the day, anyone who says he’s a Muslim is a Muslim. What follows is if they say their actions are motivated by religion, then we should probably take their word for it. Cries of “That’s not Islam!” or “They aren’t real Muslims” or “They’re not us” are not only unhelpful but fundamentally flawed. There is no cult of orthodoxy in Islam, no pope, no keeper of the faith. There is no higher authority to judge your piety, no intermediary between you and God, no gatekeeper to salvation. Perhaps if there were, these attacks would not happen. The truth is that Islam is a religion of self-governance, a true ( page 109) democracy where consensus forms around individual imams and religious scholars. There are brands of Islam with wildly different tenets: one says tattooing your body is fine, another says it’s haram; one says anal sex is only distasteful while another says it annuls your marriage in the eyes of God; one says self-flagellation is an important act of commemoration, another says it is an affront to Allah. Like most things in life, there are pros and cons to this. On the one hand, it means free will and self-determination are built into Islam—“There shall be no compulsion in the religion.” On the other hand, there’s no one around to tell fundamentalists to knock it off. The Voiceless, The New Press, 31 May 2017 » p108

"“I thought all disasters happened like that, as though they were all preceded by a period of nakedness and exposure before the chaos swallowed you up.It’s not true. Sometimes disaster comes out of nowhere.” (Adam and Eve) p110

“They accuse me, me, of painting with | a wide brush, of not understanding my own culture and religion, that I’m no better than once-upon-a-time Muslims who leave the faith only to immediately begin attacking it.”p110

“@SkyRider: Im a Muslim and I can tell you they AREN'T real Muslims.”p110

“@TheLionOfGod: The Voiceless doesn't understand the relationship between creator and creation. This is the problem with their opinion of Islam.”p111

“ @Mattbow199: has the Voiceless ever heard of protestants?”p111

“ @theSavageLiberal: The majority of my friends are Muslims & not one of them agrees with this horseshit.”p111

"« There are still others who tell me to burn in hell, that I am blaspheming somehow with my opinions. They tell me the fundamentalists are upholders of the “true faith,” whatever that is. They say these people are fighting the oppressors, the Western devil, the insidious ideologies of freedom of thought and action. They compare me to Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali as though have gone anywhere near that far with my words.” P111

"@NickPick: Sad to see someone who should know better spouting this shit. TheShahmansays: YOU are the problem! The prophet (PBUH) and the Quran said that if you kill one person, it’s as though youve killed all of humanity. The logical conclusion from this is that these terrorists DO NOT REPRESENT ISLAM. Why is this such a hard concept to get into your head? »p113

« God breathes life into you, and then it’s Good Luck and Try Not To Get Dead."p227

““Say, I seek refuge in the Lord of the Dawn, From the evil of that which He has created, And from the evil of the darkening when it spreads, And from the evil of those who blow in knots, And fromi the evil of an envier when he envies.” I cry—and even here, I make no sound—face in palms, bent at the waist, as words I’ve not heard in years, in lifetimes, wash over me. »p275

““We are one being. All of us. You are not made any differently than I am. And these religions of ours are nothing but languages. You speak in English, I speak Punjabi, he speaks French, she speaks Japanese or Chinese, but we all say the same thing. These religions, they are words, only a language. Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, we are all saying the same thing. Your humanity and my humanity are the same. We are of one being, one value. All of us equal, all of us the same.”p277

“If you believe as Muslims do, the Quran is the word of God, undiluted and uncorrupted. It is the miracle sent to a people who found divinity in language, who marveled at the potency of oratory, who thought words to be totems of power.”p275

« I wonder about what the imam said, about religion and language and all of us being the same. And if religions are all the same, then why did they come down in the first place? Why not just come down once and be done with it? Why the reformers and divisions . and sects and schisms? I can’t conceive of the point of it all. The only reconciliation I can think of is that we were not made in His image, but rather we projected ourselves into the heavens. Seeking assurances, seeking incentives for morality, seeking meaning, we twisted ourselves into all sorts of knots of belief. In our attempts to grasp what cannot be grasped, we spun out all these languages with which to beat each other. »p278