One might ask why I single out Islam in my criticism, instead of attacking religions in general, as is customary in such cases.
The explanation isn’t all that difficult, but it might take some time, since I need to go to the fundamentals, and the most fundamental question is “why is anything good”, because without that you can’t really say why something is bad.
In my view of things, we can actually define “good” in a coordinate system of sat-cit-ananda, as Vedanta would state it. “Sat” means “reality”, “cit” means “consciousness” and “ananda” means “bliss”. According to Vedanta, brahman, the supreme reality, is sat-cit-ananda, reality-consciousness-bliss. Totality of reality-consciousness-bliss manifested in a relative frame of reference is called Iśvara, or Lord, also commonly called God. So, if we create a triaxial Cartesian coordinate system in which sat, cit and ananda are mapped on x, y and z axes, and we define any entity on this coordinate system, we get the magnitude and direction of its spiritual force, in a system in which the vertex (0,0,0) is your starting point. Furthermore, we can use mathematical tools such as matrices and tensors to perform operations with such vectors, if we can quantify the values accurately enough. Essentially, we have a great tool for inducing clarity into the entire mess.
So, to put it simple, it’s something like quantifying wind. In order to describe it, you need to measure its direction and strength. This can then be used to perform calculations if you’re operating a sailboat. For the wind to be “good”, it needs to be strong enough to propel your boat quickly enough, and it needs to blow in the right direction. You can use even a wind that blows in the opposite direction from where you want to go, but it’s such a pain in the ass it’s more along the line of using bad things for a good purpose. If you use your starting point as a vertex, and measure several forces relative to yourself, you can put their respective x, y, and z values in a matrix, add them all up and get the resultant.
Essentially, if you apply a certain force to yourself, and the result has a positive sat, cit and ananda values compared to your origin, then this force is good. If the result moves you in a negative direction in this coordinate system, it’s bad.
If something moves you toward greater understanding of reality, if it decreases illusion and increases awareness of the reality of things, it is good on the “sat” coordinate. If it produces greater illusion and ignorance, it is bad.
If something makes you smarter, more intelligent, if it sharpens and clarifies your mind, makes it more powerful and capable, it’s good on the “cit” coordinate. If it makes you stupid and unintelligent, it’s bad.
If something makes you experience joy and bliss, if it produces happiness, it is good on the “ananda” coordinate. If it makes you unhappy, depressed or miserable, it’s bad.
Obviously, some forces cannot be described simply, as they are more functions than values. For instance, some drugs will initially produce bliss, but this will gradually fade and reverse, starting to produce increasing misery and personal destruction. This means that those influences need to be evaluated as a function of time, and you need to integrate the function across your lifespan. A partial integral, in a short timespan, can deceive you. To put it simply, you can’t judge a marriage by the honeymoon stage. You need to judge it across the duration, and across your lifespan. Only then can you say if it were a good thing or not.
Also, some good things can initially produce great suffering. Quitting on an addiction, or healing from cancer, is initially very traumatic, but this phase passes and you’re much better in the long term. Conversely, if you do nothing, you will avoid immediate trauma but will eventually suffer more.
The things get more complex if we want to integrate the result across one’s total duration of existence, not only across one lifetime. Whether you believe in a heaven/hell scenario or in reincarnation, you can imagine a scenario where one performs evil deeds and has suffered no harmful consequences prior to death. Since the integral of this course of actions is positive across the measured timespan, one could conclude that it’s a good thing; however, if we accept that one is affected by the choice he makes, and that the true measure of a man is what he does, it is obvious that evil deeds have a detrimental effect and that they are obviously a negative-direction vector on the sat-cit-ananda coordinate system, and whether this will eventually result in an unfavorable reincarnation or in hell, is not all that important in the end, because in either case this is something to be avoided.
So, to get closer to the issue at hand, what is a religion, what is its purpose, and how can we judge one as good or bad?
A religion is, very generally speaking, a belief system regarding the nature of reality, based upon revelation from a supposedly transcendental authority.
I needed to resort to such a broad and general definition because people fail to understand how different the religions really are. For instance, people usually believe that religion is a revelation of divine laws, from God through a prophet, but this definition encompasses only two religions: Judaism and Islam. Christianity, for instance, is something entirely different – it’s basic tenet is that Judaism has been tried, and it didn’t work. God revealed the laws, but people couldn’t really obey them properly and thus attain salvation, because they lacked the redeeming spiritual force, and thus all their efforts were in vain. You can call it the original sin, you can call it weakness of the flesh, or you can call it absence of the Holy Spirit, but the basic idea behind Christianity is that revelation and obedience are insufficient. This is elaborated upon in great length in the Acts and in the epistles, and I could provide an abundance of quotations if necessary, but essentially, this has been decided at the first council of the early Church, in Jerusalem (Acts 15, 1-29), when the issue was whether the pagan-converts needed to accept Judaism first, and Christianity only later, as an addition, and the conclusion of the apostles was that neither they nor their fathers could bear this burden and didn’t attain salvation by anything other but the grace and sacrifice of Jesus, and should therefore not unnecessarily burden the new converts by all the laws and regulations of Judaism that proved to be useless anyway. Essentially, they weren’t saved by the virtues of circumcision, observing Sabbath or refraining from eating pigs, but because they recognized Jesus as God, and he poured Holy Spirit into them so that they were truly reborn, and in this state naturally refrained from all sin. So, essentially, while Judaism and Islam are the religions of law, Christianity isn’t; it’s a religion of redemption and spiritual transformation, which makes it much closer to some schools of Hinduism and Buddhism than it is to Islam or Judaism, regardless of the superficial and deceptive common denominator of Abrahamic monotheism.
So, if we accept that the definition of religion is much broader than that of Divine law revealed through a prophet, and that the true nature of religion is closer to being a signpost that points toward a transcendental goal, what we are left with as the true question is “how well does it work?”. Basically, we are left with a combination of Jesus’ criterion of the fruits (Mt 7,16) and my Cartesian-vector-space analytics: how much sat-cit-ananda does it add to your already present spiritual vector? Does it make you more aware of reality or does it brainwash you with lies? Does it make you intelligent and smart, or does it turn you into a robot-like dogma-spewing creature? Does it make your existence blissful, or does it turn you into a creature of hate? Those are the really important questions; not whether the religion itself is true or is it a result of a cave madman’s hallucinations, but whether it turns you into a creature of reality, consciousness and bliss, or into a hateful cave madman.
And that’s the crux of the matter, and that’s why I hate Islam more than any other religion. It’s a spiritual pathogen that turns humans into zombies. And don’t tell me about good versions of Islam or good Muslims. My first contact with Islam was when I read some extremely good texts by Sufis, and only later did I understand that it’s not authentic Islam, but a heresy, a distortion created by smart people in order to make Islam into something it’s not, just like there are heresies that turn Christianity into something it is not. The problem is, Osama bin Laden was a good Muslim; Rumi and ‘Attar were not. Saudi Arabia is a direct and uncompromised rendition of Islamic teaching. ISIS is practically indistinguishable from Saudi Arabia, which makes it obvious that their common denominator is the direct and accurate rendition of Islamic teaching. That’s what Islam really is. It’s not the teaching and life of ‘Attar, it’s the teaching and life of Osama bin Laden. That’s why I hate it, because I know what it is, because I know its true nature, and because I know its true nature is evil. It turns humans into demons and world into hell. It is the strongest negative sat-cit-ananda vector I can imagine, and it intends to lead the world into millenia of endless darkness.
Sure, you can point me to some sweet sugar-coated talk by Muslims, about peace and good and whatever, and you know what my answer to that would be? That this vector points to Saudi Arabia as the end-result. That’s the eventual target and goal, that’s how the Muslims see the ideal world. If they don’t, they will be pressured by others who will quote scripture to them until they are either brought into Islamic orthodoxy (“radicalized”, as it is usually called in the West), or they conclude that Islam is not at all what they thought it to be and they abandon it, which is discouraged by the threat of death for the apostates. So, you can see why I claim that Islam is a spiritual pathogen which attempts to transform the world into Saudi Arabia as the desired end-result of human evolution on Earth, from which there will be no upward motion ever, under penalty of death. Some say that it’s as bad as Nazism, but I disagree. If Nazis had won the second world war, they would proceed to kill millions of people, but they would probably have bases on Moon and Mars by now, considering how advanced their technology was for the time. Americans profess to be better than the Nazis, but how many Iraqi children did they kill, not to mention Vietnam? But they also did some great things. They invented transistor, integrated circuit, home computer and Internet. But what did Saudi Arabia ever invent? It has only two major export products: oil and Islam. That’s about it. And it only exports oil because someone else invented some useful purpose for it. Islam certainly didn’t tell them what to do with it, but it sure does tell them how they are the best of all people.
What does ISIS produce? It uses Toyota trucks provided by America, it uses TOW missiles provided by America, it uses Kalasnikovs made by Russians, it uses APCs made by Russians, it uses cameras, computers and phones made by the people they hate, in Japan, China, Korea and America, but what do they make? They make videos of themselves killing people and breaking historical artifacts. They make destruction, ignorance, pain and suffering. There’s not a single fucking thing they make better. They hate, they kill, they rape, they steal, they make propaganda about how good it is to hate, kill, rape and steal. They are what Islam truly is, when it isn’t afraid; they are the naked truth of Islam.
Americans spread negative propaganda about the Russians, how they are this and that. But let me tell you a thing or two about Russians. In the times when the Muslims were riding their camels and contemplating how akbar their Allah is, the Russians invented the law of the conservation of mass and the periodic system of elements. The Russians had Lomonosov and Mendeleev and Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov and Sikorsky, they invented spaceflight and probably half of all the science and tech we have today. The Russians produce nuclear-powered submarines and icebreakers, they have the best rocket engines in the world and they landed a space shuttle on full autopilot during strong wind, and that was in the 1980s. Compared to the Muslims, the Russians are super-aliens. Their contribution to culture, science and technology is so immensely huge, that we are usually not really aware of it, in a way we are unaware of the size of a huge mountain if we stand on it; we need distance in order to get perspective.
When you figure out that the Nazis invented a number of good things, and still managed to kill less people than the Muslims, you know you’re dealing with probably the most blatantly evil ideology to ever darken the face of the Earth. So, do I ever again need to explain why I single out Islam with my criticism? It looks like some sort of dark evil that Satan himself invented in order to keep humans in darkness and submission.