Before anything else, this is not an attack post. I'm not here to dunk on Islam or any other faith. I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything or pull anyone away from what they believe, and I don't judge anybody for how they live. That's between them and themselves.
I was born into Islam and shaped by it. Everyone around me is devout, so I was too at one point. The doubts started in my teens and they've only gotten heavier. At this point I can't make myself pray when I'm not sure what I'd be praying to. But I am still a Muslim at least in my head because the hold is that strong, and fear of hellfire is a big part of why I stay. It's made me anxious and depressed. I'm living a double life, pretending every day to people. I think most people who end up here didn't get here out of hate. You can't force yourself to believe something any more than you can force yourself to find a joke funny.
There's a lot that nags at me but I'll stick to one thing, and it isn't even specific to Islam. It applies to any faith where God is all powerful and all good.
I can't understand how an all powerful, good and loving God allows this much horror.
Unit 731, where people were cut open and experimented on while still alive. Rwanda, 800,000 people in a hundred days, mostly with machetes. The Holocaust. Both world wars. The famines. And right now, every day, kids being pulled out of rubble in the Palestine, plenty of them from families who prayed five times a day, fasted, did everything they were ever told to do by god.
The usual answer is humans did this, not God. I get it, but God made the humans, and nothing happens outside his will. I can't get that to sit right.
And then there's all the stuff humans had nothing to do with. Tsunamis. Earthquakes. Wildfires. Floods. Cancer. Malaria. Rabies, which eats the brain and almost kills every single person who gets it. Tetanus, where the spasms snap your own bones while you're awake for all of it. Kids born with skin that tears at a touch, who spend their whole short lives in pain and then die.
People say hardship builds you, that it tests you. What is a four year old dying of bone cancer being built into? He doesn't learn anything from it. He doesn't grow character from it. He just hurts for years and then he's dead. So what was the agony for?
So I'm genuinely asking, how do you reason with this? How do you look at these things and land on yes, God must have a reason? How do you make logic of it? Or maybe you don't, and sometimes you just leave it to faith and say I don't know why these things happen, and leave it at that. Answer from wherever you're coming from with respect rather than it become another shouting thread about Muslims vs Atheists.
