With my new found knowledge of various religions and the realization that they all basically said the same thing, I once again became at odds with myself as I tried to ease the conflict within me that was pulling me in different directions; what is my religion? After many sleepless nights I decided to ask the one person I could trust to give me an honest answer; my mother.
My Mother is a wonderful person. I think she would have made a competent scholar had she been given a chance But a chance she did not get for the war had started and all of her generations dreams where torn asunder. In spite of all the hardship, my mother managed to keep her mind active and her knowledge fresh as she pursued her interests whenever she could find herself a decent book. So my mother was well read on various topics that concern our world, mostly, and some of the more esoteric stuff people of her generation used to pursue. Also She was the only person I could confide my conflicting mind to without fear of being ridiculed. As a mater of fact my mother was pleasantly surprised with my question and my reasoning behind it. I still remember her words "Which ever ideology feels more right for your needs is the religion you should follow, even if that ideology means that you follow no specific religion or deity. a person who finds his faith his own way is better than the man who just follows without questioning. it is your god given human right, which ever god that may be, to believe in whatever you want to, no one can take that away from you." of course, I am paraphrasing, but that was the essence of her wise words.
I was quite young at the time, a teenager still, and a very dyslexic one at that. I was content with her advice, but that set me wondering more about human rights and i ended up reading more and more, me the dyslexic, devouring book after book on such topics as religion, philosophy, history, politics, and human rights. I learned a lot in a short time frame and that helped me pin down my religious identity and I declared myself an agnostic. and there i thought that my existentialist crisis had finally come to a gracious end. I now knew what I was. boy was I wrong.
Happy with the knowledge that I could choose to be what I was and that I had chosen to be an agnostic, I went on to declare my faith to the entire world (which consisted of my fellow high school class mates). Having read so much about our collective inalienable human rights, I was confident that I had chosen consciously and I expected the "world" to accept my decision.
I was thoroughly disappointed. My friends actually laughed at me and I did not at first understand why. actually it took me several more years to understand why they laughed at me. Again, i found my self ostracized... well to be honest i was always ostracized because everyone considered me too weird or something, but that's besids the point... any way.... I was found myself more ostracized than before and yet again I was beset by an existentialist crisis. Yet, it was to late for me to turn back now for i had educated and enlightened myself beyond my age (or so I liked to think so, yet not arrogantly so). So what was I to do? I tried my best to understand why my peers laughed at me.
Slowly I started to understand that they did not laugh at me because of my strangeness but rather out of ignorance. I had not considered that most of my friends did not have the same kind of luxuries I had, or more poignantly, they did not have my kind of mixed background. My friends, most of them that is, where entrenched in the idea that you should follow one specific religion and not the other and that agnosticism is akin to having no faith whatsoever. That thought did not sit well with me. Try as I might, I could not deiced on following one religious ideology over the other. I found myself arguing like a Muslim in the company of Christians or like a Christian in the company of Muslims, or a Buddhist , or a Hindu, or a Zoroastrisme or........ the list was long at that point. At some point, after many month of grieving over being ostracized and laughed at by my friends, I once again came to terms with my crisis and decided that being an agnostic fits me, a person with a varied background, best. Now I don't know if I did what I did next out of a sense of getting back at my friends or because of some crazy hair brained scheme or whatever, but I decided to conduct an experiment.... I decided to create my own religion. I based it on a dream I once had and presented it as such to two of my friends. I used ideas and examples from several holy texts. slowly but surly I attracted quite a following. I was on top of the world for a few days until I realized that my "experiment" was beginning to run amok with people becoming ridiculously devoted to my ideas to the degree that they came up with strange rituals of worship based on things that I had said. They where beginning to blindly accept without question.!!?!! of course that was not my intention. Fearing that things would start going more out of hand soon I abruptly put an end to the experiment. My friends where non the wiser. I learned a valuable lesson from my experiment; any one can start a religion if the ideas within the ideology appealed to someone, and that people where programmed to follow faith blindly.
Finally I graduated from high school and joined the ranks of adults and my existentialist crisis grew worse. At school we where very much sheltered from the overt hatred and bigotry of the outside world of adults. I was utterly shocked when I sat with people of a certain religion and they would start bad mouthing people of another religion for no logical reason other than the fact that they followed a different warlord than the one they did. The Lebanese have a very nasty habit, one which I still find distasteful. At university, many people where interested in where I come from. My family name, though an old name with deep roots, was not so well known anymore because the family had shrunk considerably, where we once were a very prominent family. Having lived most of my life in Beirut, being born there, I would generally answer exactly that; Beirut! (despite the fact that my family had changed residence 13 times in the span of one year because of the war). somehow that answer was not suficent for them, they would continue to ask which pat of Beirut I was from all the way down to the street. of course, this is an indirect way of figuring out the persons religious affiliation. how? based on ones family name, of the known families, one can tell what religion they followed. with my family name being obscure and my first name rather neutral, used by both Muslims and Christians, they'd go on with the interrogation and attempt to find determine my religion based on what part of Lebanon I came from. Beirut being a mixed city was not a sufficient answer, so they would go deeper to figure out which part of Beirut... they had no interest of who I was, they just wanted to know what religion I belonged to so that they would know how to treat me. when I eventually caught on, I started playing a game with them. confusing them more and more, keeping them guessing until they finally gave up and asked the question directly; what religion do you follow? my reply to that usual consist of a long tirade about the insignificance of that question and how I belonged to all the religions, giving them the often dizzying account of my family background.... Inevitably I had fun giving them a headache and making them sorry for asking in the first place.
The more i thought about the subject of religion in the context of Lebanese society, the more I got turned off identifying with any religion whatsoever. I already saw a lot of hypocrisy but at that point i was seeing the hypocrisy grow and spread. The more I learned about the religions the more I realized that no one follows the teachings the way they are spelled out. i found out that Christians did not turn the other cheek, nor did they love their neighbor. Muslims fasted, but failed to understand why they had to fast; to sympathize with those whom have nothing. instead they would fast out of a sense of duty, diving like maniacs during Ramadan, screaming at others that they where fasting, as if that gave them sacred privileges over others, and then they would get home to a table filled with various rich foods of which much would be left over and thrown. they missed the point. they all did.
I took a cab one hot summer, and Lebanese cabbies are some of the most interesting people you can meet. always ready to tell you stories or jokes... anything to communicate and feel less miserable about having to drive people around all day for living. This one cab driver was rather interesting. He was agnostic in the sens that he did not care who came and went with him so long as they paid the fee. He described himself as a Muslim to me, to which i gave him my standard reply, "good for you". And like any good Lebanese he started asking me those prying questions i talked about earlier "where are you from amo?" (amo is a Lebanese word that usually refers to an older man referring to him as an uncle... but when said to a young man or girl with a certain inflection it akin to saying "my young one") So I answered with my usual evasiveness untill he finally asked more directly and i gave him my background. his head spun a little but then he laughed and remarked "you represent what all Lebanese should be". This was a remark that I rarely got from people and usually denoted that the person was only prying out of common habit and not because he wanted to know or to judge. so I felt more at ease with him and we had a long talk about people and how they where like sheep and hypocrites. I was actually stunned at how much this old Muslim man was more of an agnostic than he cared to admit and I commended him for it. He sighed and started to explain how he did not care much about what religion someone wants to follow as long as they where doing it out of conviction and not being hypocrites. he told me that he use do chouffure this lady whom he knew to be a high class prostitute, he said he had reservations and that she would end up disgracing him. but he quickly realized that this woman was very correct, very modest, paid her dues and treated him very kindly and with respect. normally, a prostitute in Lebanon is considered to be a woman living in "sin" and therefor without religion or faith. he contrasted this prostitute with another man he used to chouffure. the other man was an imam. obviously a very devout Muslim. the cab driver cursed and then explained why. apparently the imam was anything but pious. he cheated the cab driver of his fees several times, had no decency towards him and was disrespectful more often than not. the cab driver finally said that if being pious meant being infringing on other peoples rights by treating them like dirt then he would rather be a sinner and drive prostitutes around because at least they where honest and respectful. I though to myself that this cab driver understood the reality of the situation and wished there where more people like him.
every day I wok up and was confronted with more ridiculousness by people who called themselves religious. I had the misfortune of meeting a rather "pious" christian one day. at first he thought I was a christian myself so he took liberty in throwing every insult at the Muslims, calling them dirty, godless, speaking of them with such disdain. I asked him if he had a reason for speaking of the Muslims as such. his reply shocked me; "they are Muslims, ignorant Bedouins from the desert following a goat lover of a man who thought he was a prophet.. Muslims are sub humans and barbaric.. that is a fact... they steel, they kill, they swindle, they have no honor". I asked him if he thought Christians where any better and he was very vehement about the purity of Christians to which i listed all the faults that i find in Christians and how many of them are also thieves, , swindlers and without honor. his defensive argument was to tell me not to judge the entire christian community based the actions of a few stray idiots. Maybe i should not have said what i said next but i was never a cautious person, i am told. my reply to him was that as long as he chose to judge people of other religions based on the actions of a "few stray idiots" then he should expect the same to be done onto him, and before he could say anything i reminded him of the tenets of Christianity ending with an accusation that he was no christian according to his own beliefs. obviously that infuriated him and it earned me a curt dismissal from the cab in the middle of a highway.
slowly but surly i was beginning to tier of the every day stupidity of religious people and i started to withdraw more and more. every where i turned someone was flaunting their "piety" for all the wrong reasons. i grew more exasperated by the day. up to that moment, i still considered myself an agnostic. until one day i had quite the bad day and was finally going back home during Ramadan to take a brake. i got home and there was no electricity.... which is not uncommon in Lebanon as electricity is rationed on a rotating business, but it was not my neighborhood's turn. it was a hot summer day and i just wanted my AC too cool me down and help me relax. I sighed and decided to go make myself some food only to realize that we where also out of gas. i was slowly beginning to get infuriated between the heat and hunger when i heard a knock at the door. i went to see who it was and recognized the electrical company man who usually does the rounds to collect the due fees. he handed me the bill and asked that i pay it then and there. i was surprised, because normally they deliver the bill and then come a week or so later to collect the money, this is how Lebanon functions. I did not have any money on me but he kept on insisting until i finally blew my lid and asked him why he was insisting. he said that he normally brings the bill earlier than the due date but that he could not do so this time because he was fasting and too tiered to do the proper rounds. at that i finally flipped my lid and let him, Ramadan, god and all religions have a piece of my mind. I told him off for being a poor excuse of a Muslim and reminded him of the reason why Muslims fast and how he should, according to his religion, endure the hardship as if he where not fasting and that he has no right to complain about it because that would invalidate his fasting. I think the entire neighbor hood must have heard me and they must have been terrified because for the first time ever, the mosque in front of my house did not crank up the volume on their sound system when announcing prayers. usually they blare the call to prayer to the degree that i start developing a headache. anyway! The man was stunned at my anger and tried to lecture me on being a good Muslim, automatically considering me as a Muslim becuse of where i lived. I took out a cigarette and started smoking it in front of him, he flinched, fasting for that day had not yet come to an end. he was surprised and asked me to clarify if i was a Muslim or christian to which i replied "me? i am an atheist and you are the reason i have become so." The mans face went as white as snow as he fumbled to put me back on the "righteous path" preaching to me all about the goodness of Islam and the sinfulness of being a godless atheist and how i might end up in hell. i laughed and decided to toy with him. i argued every point, shooting his arguments down one by one, telling him that i would rather be an atheists than pretend to be a Muslim so that others would feel at ease. I cut him to pieces by showing him what a bunch of hypocrites all the religious folk where, giving him exact examples and he could do nothing but agree. still he could not leave me standing there, he had to try to convince me to return to the "righteous path" so that i could live better in the grace of god and how he did not wish for an intelligent person like me to end up in hell. I seized on this last remark and smiled. now i had him. i said the following: "so you say that someone who does not follow your an Abrahamic religion will be consigned to hell, tell me then, lets say you where to meet a Buddhist one day, a man who lives far out in Asia in some remote village, where he has never heard of Islam or Christianity or anything other than Buddhism. This man however, is the kindest of people, he will not hurt a fly and he will give you the shirt off his back if you asked him for it without so much as a grunt.. a truly good man who does not pray or fast or anything else. compare him to a pious Muslim who prays five times a day and fasts during Ramadan, but this man is a swindler who would sell his own mother if it meant more wealth for him, he treats others like vermin, yet he prayed and fasted and was in the eyes of his community a good Muslim only because he prayed and fasted. which one of the two do you think is going to end up in hell?"
I had him at that point because he was too confused to reply. he wanted to say the Muslim but knew better, in the end he agreed that i had a point but kept on insisting that i should not be an atheist. I relented and told him that i was really an agnostic. he accepted that and apologized to me and said that since it was his fault he would come back in two days to collect the bill payment.
after he left, for the first time in my life i started to consider the implications of a world without a god. That is when it struck me that i have always known that god did not exist, not the way everyone thought of god, its just that i chose to believe in a concept that supposedly tought goodness. and my existentialist crisis flourished further..
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