I see many Muslims who are otherwise good people and struggle to have faith in their religion and uphold their morals and values at the same time. They don't find Islam right, but don't leave it either because they fear the Islamic Hell and rather give in to the fear and be 'safe' than do what they think is right. This article is for them to overcome the false 'safety' factor in Islam.

 

When I was a young school boy in 5th grade, another student in my class and I were caught in a brawl by our teacher. To punish us, she told us we would each have to write the sentence: "I will love my classmates and not fight with them" several times. Instead of telling us how many times we had to write the sentence though, she made each of us decide how much punishment the other deserved for fighting. In other words, I had to decide how many times the other student had to write the sentence and vice versa.

Once we both whispered the numbers in the teacher's ear, she added a surprise to this punishment. She said that my punishment would be to write the sentence as many times as I had asked for the other student and he would have to do it as many times as he'd asked for me. I had asked for him to be told to write the sentence 1000 times. He had asked for 20 times for me! So I wrote the sentence 1000 times and he only wrote it 20 times!

Next week when I turned in my assignment, the lessons that I had learned were pretty clear:

- Love your peers and - Don't do (wish) something for others that you wouldn't want done (wished) to yourself. This is the Golden Rule for mankind.

Although this incidence was trivial in itself, we learnt our lessons well from it. Today, both of us have grown up into very successful men and we're even close friends.

When I think about life in general, I wonder if the irony in Islam is comparable to the above experience. Today, it is clear that Islam is a false doctrine and those following it are contributing towards a crime on humanity. They follow Islam in blind faith or by fostering fantasies of what Muhammad (pbuh) was like and what the Quran means. They make the Quran milder in interpretation and ignore the brutal and immoral sections of the hadiths knowing well that the hadiths are still biased Muslim accounts of what happened and the reality was far worse. They don't see that there is not one good reason for Muhammad (pbuh) to actually be a prophet.

There is no doubt that Muslims are guilty. Islamic extremists are guilty of executing on the agenda of hatred while moderate Muslims are guilty of forming a front for the religion and hiding the core faith from themselves and unsuspecting non-Muslims. The extremists are criminals and the moderates are knowingly or unknowingly partners in crime.

God will certainly punish them for blindly believing Muhammad (pbuh) and committing crimes in God's name. The punishment may well be based on the golden rule? What if God punishes Muslims in the same currency that they are okay in believing others will be punished?

If God uses the Golden Rule in executing fairness and justice, suddenly believing in Islam when history, geology, science, human rights, animal rights, one's brain and one's heart prove otherwise is not safe anymore, is it? In this case, Muslims will be the ones damned to the Hell they know of. Not the Kaffirs.

After all life is full of surprises. And so is the after-life.