by Sujit Das
Throughout the recorded history of Islam; Qur’an, the most unholy religious book, had turned men into monsters – there have been millions of murderers, millions of rapists and millions of terrorists. They commit all sorts of crimes with a clear conscious and in the name of Allah. But while committing crimes in the name of God, they do not question the credibility of the revelations in this book. The God who created man would not deceive him or led him to hell as Allah does. Nor would He order men to terrorize, mutilate, rob, enslave, and slaughter the followers of other scriptures He claims He revealed, wiping them out to the last.
Chapter 5: The Allah Delusion
“Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because if there is one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear” .
Thomas Jefferson, 3rd U.S. President
“ All religions, with their gods, their demi-gods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the prejudiced fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties ”.
Mikhail Bakunin (1814 - 1876)
All the existing religions acknowledge that God is the Creator of the universe. As Creator of the universe, God must be distinct from the world, and His existence cannot depend on any of His creation. Hence, he is absolutely different from anything else that exists that makes him totally unknowable. Although God Himself is unknowable, we can, to some degree, understand His relationship to the universe. In this manner, we speak of God through His “attributes of action”. Though we cannot know what God is, we can learn much by realizing what He is not.
Muslims use the remotest language possible to explain Allah. They try to make Allah as awe-inspiring as possible in order to discourage people from conducting research on him. If a Muslim is asked to define Allah, he will just beat about the bush, ascribing attributes to Allah that neither belong to Him nor befit Him. But Allah is not really as mysterious as Muslims would like the world to believe. When the falsehood of Qur’an is exposed, the falsehood of Allah is also exposed. He has been at the Ka’ba stone all along before Muhammad commenced preaching his religion. Since God is eternal, there is no creator of God. However, since Allah is not a God but pretending to be God, he has a creator. In this chapter I want to find out who had created Allah and how he was created and why he was created.
5.1: Allah: The Ungodly God
“In what concerns Divine things, belief is not appropriate. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God”.
Simone Weil (1909 - 1943)
For past several thousand years, there had been two main religious groups predominant in much of the civilized world. One of them was sun worshippers and the other was moon worshippers. The main solar religions thriving today are Hinduism, Christianity and Buddhism (Buddhists follow largely lunar calendar but the main characteristic and many important doctrines and traditions are solar); whereas lunar religions are Islam and Judaism. Hitti (2002, p. 97) writes that the moon-worshiping is principally a pastoral society and the sun-worshiping is mainly an agricultural society.
Allah is at the centre of the Islamic faith. He has quite an interesting history. In ancient Arabia, much before Muhammad, the desert Bedouins used to worship a deity by the name Allah. Those half-starved anarchic tribes had a nomadic life as they were incapable of sustaining an agricultural society (Rodinson, 1980, p. 17). Daytime travel was nearly impossible due to the unbearable heat of the sun. Most journeys were undertaken at night, on moonlight and beneath a sky bedecked with glittering stars. Those indigent Bedouin Arabs were so intimately connected with the moon and its phases that their lives were literally governed by the moon. To them, the moon was their life-sustainer; an absolute holy entity to be worshipped and revered with utmost zeal.
After Muhammad forced Islam on these desert Arab indigents; these neo-Muslim Bedouins still continued with the practice of their age-old belief. Therefore, they associated Allah with the moon – Allah Taalaa, the supreme God. Islam is intimately connected with the moon. All its rituals are based on the sighting of the moon or on the moon calendar. Every religious act and ritual, jihad and Islamic bloodshed, attack on non-Muslims and every Islamic law is designed for only one purpose – to please Allah.
Allah revealed the Qur’an to Muhammad but did not reveal Himself in the Qur’an. This is especially puzzling because Allah wants us to know His will even more than we want to know it. He preferred to remain a mystery to the Muslims. In fact this mysterious, intangible nature of Allah is the essence of Islam. Through Qur’anic revelations, Allah notifies the humankind what He likes and expects from us, and what He forbids. But why He does not do that by showing us what it is like to be God? Allah wants absolute obedience and He does not like to be questioned, but in this case how do I know that Allah had really appointed Muhammad to act as a Prophet? In this regard Allah failed miserably. If there was a strictly direct disclosure of Allah, then we could have no further doubt about his existence. As Caird (1956, p. 60) concluded, “ A God who does not reveal Himself ceases to be God; and religious feelings, craving after a living relation to its object, refuses to be satisfied, with a mere initial and potential revelation of the mind and will of God - a God who speaks once for all, and then through the whole course of history ceases to reveal Himself .”
For us, this is a crucial problem. If there were a direct disclosure of Allah, and we could see Allah strictly as He is, then there could be no doubt about him and his revelations would carry an absolute guarantee in itself and we knew it was Allah who spoke. If it is Allah’s intention to confront us with his presence as personal will and purpose, why has this not been done in an unambiguous manner – by some overwhelming manifestation of divine power and glory? As Lewis (1961, p. 228) concluded, “ If God wants to communicate with us in terms of what we understand as finite beings, if He has to make Himself known within the human situation, how are men able to recognize the ways in which He does this, how does an occasion which is in substance a finite one carry with it some reference or overtone which is more than finite? ”
Why Allah did not disclose himself? Is he ashamed of his own creation? As Shaikh (1998a) wrote, “ The cause of God would have been served better if He were to show His face to mankind frequently for assuring them that He is there”. If a child refuses to open his clenched fist to show what he has in it, we may feel sure that it is something wrong – something he ought not to have. Is not the same logic applicable to Allah? Allah did not disclose himself because he lacks one element of perfection, namely “existence”, and those Qur’anic revelations are actually a parody of Allah for his imperfection. In fact Allah did not disclose himself to Muhammad also. Qur’an confirms that even Muhammad did not have much knowledge of his Allah. No doubt, Allah was playing a sick game with Muhammad.
I had no knowledge of the Highest Chiefs when they disputed; It is revealed unto me only that I may be a plain warner. (Q: 38.69-70).
What a heavenly paradox – Muslims have to put their trust on Qur’an because their bread and butter in the afterlife will depend on Allah’s heavenly pension, but in doing so, they are actually mocking Allah for his imperfection.
Goodness and love are treated as two attributes of God. If Allah is a perfectly loving God, Allah must wish to abolish all evil; and if Allah is all-powerful, Allah must be able to abolish all evil. But evil exists (and more amongst the Muslims); therefore Allah cannot be both omnipotent and perfect loving. So when a revelation describes Allah as all-powerful and merciful, the revelation must be false.
In several verses, Allah prescribes eternal torment of hell for the disbelievers which logically cannot be true. It is unjust for God to burn a disbeliever in hell forever. A disbeliever, being a finite being, can only commit a limited amount of sin in his entire life. Eternal torment of hell is an infinite punishment. It is unfair to punish for a finite amount of sin with infinite torment. Also, since such punishment would never end, what co
nstructive purpose will it serve? Can this give any solution to the problem of evil? Why Allah is silent on this issue and did not send a suitable revelation to justify his divine decision? If eternal torment is Allah’s will, then on what basis He is “most gracious, most merciful”?
If God really punishes or rewards a man at His judgment, it is more justified to say, “ Good conduct will be rewarded, and bad conduct punished, either here or in a life hereafter” (Durant & Durant, 1961, p. 187). In fact, this is same as the “Law of Action and Reaction” (the doctrine of Karma) in Hinduism (Abhedananda, 2005, p. 79). But these moral values are in contradiction with the Qur’an. In countless number of verses Allah punishes a human only because he does not accept Islam. Why Allah needs to resort to sex, violence and torture to gain followers? Why our good conducts have no value? Radhakrishnan (1970, p. 19) wrote, “ We can believe only in a just God, who is impartial to the saint and the sinner even as the sun shines on those who shiver in cold or sweat in heat. God is not angered by neglect or placated by prayers. The wheels of His chariot turn unimpeded by pity or anger. God is not mocked. ”
Thomas (cited Durant, 1950, p. 969) agrees with Radhakrishnan, “ The highest knowledge we can have of God in this life is to know that He is above all that we can think concerning Him”. What we humans are doing always concern Allah. He is believed to watch us day and night like a hawk just waiting for us to disobey Him even once. He is jealous, revengeful, hateful and proud. If Allah is the only God, then he is jealous on whom? How can I call Allah a perfect God? Why is He so upset and suffering from inferiority complex?
When Muhammad started preaching his religion in Mecca, there were never-ending arguments going on between the Meccans and Muhammad over his lack of prophetic credentials. In this regard Allah seemed to be very puzzled in the Qur’an,
Is it that their mental faculties of understanding urge them to this, or are they an outrageous folk, transgressing beyond the bounds? (Q: 52.32)
The above verse demonstrates Qur’an’s lack of divine inspiration. A God can never ask such a question if He is all-knowing. We wonder, whose inadequacies are reflected in the above verse, Muhammad or his Allah? The above verse also directly contradicts the following verses.
He (Allah) is the Wise, the Knower. (Q: 43.84)
He hath perfect knowledge . (Q: 2.29)
In fact, Allah itself is a very confusing God. During those days there was much idolatry in practice with hundreds of deities around. This made Muhammad utterly confused. Therefore he experimented with various brands of Allah, but the Meccans disappointed him and hence he changed his mind several times. Every time, as situation demanded, he made some necessary changes to his version of Allah. Finally he designed his own Allah to go well with his requirement and hence Allah has the likes and dislikes similar to Muhammad.
Such a God is an absolute fake. Allah is one of the most famous fictional superheroes of all time. Muhammad had developed a reverse (benign) form of paranoia which is very common to the Narcissists. A Narcissist feels constantly watched over by senior members of his group or frame of reference, the subject of permanent criticism, the center of attention. If a religious man, he calls it divine providence. For Muhammad it was Allah, the superego of his false self.
In the following few pages of this chapter, we will re-discover Allah, wrest him out from the hands of the Islamic clerics, pull him down from his divine position and put him under the limelight for everyone to see his true color. But before we attempt to recognize Allah as Muhammad’s superego, we should try to understand the very concept of superego and its importance in the structural model of a human mind, how superego forms, and how much influence does superego can have on the day-to-day business of a normal person (normal in the sense, he is not suffering from NPD) and of a malignant Narcissist.
5.2: Theology versus Psychology and God versus Superego
“Psychology has questions that need to be answered. Theology has answers that need be questioned.”
Unknown
“Man is a strange being; he cannot make a flea, and yet he will make gods by dozens.”
Michel de Montaigne (1533 - 1592)
“Guilt: Punishing yourself before God doesn’t.”
Alan Cohen (1954 - )
The basic concept of superego makes common sense to us. Most of us, as adults, often hear of our own superego, while some of us hear it very often. It is the voice in our heads that commands us, “Do not harm others” or screams, “Thou shalt not kill”. This internalized authoritative figure which has such a tremendous influence over us and direct us with such a strident voice, is called superego by the psychologists.
Ever since the beginning of human civilization, men have tried mightily to pin down “good” and “evil” and to find some ways to account for those who amongst us seems to be inhabited by the later. In the fourth century, a Chinese scholar Saint Jerome introduced the Greek word “synderesis” to describe the innate God-given ability to differentiate between good and evil (Stout, 2005, p. 27). It was the interpretation of Ezekiel’s Biblical vision of four living creatures emerging from a cloud “with brightness round about it and fire flashing forth continually” (Barthelemy & Ryan, 1963, p. 112). Each creature had the body of a man but four different faces. The face in front was human, on the right a lion, on the left an ox and the face in back was of an eagle’s. The human face represents the rational part of a man, the lion reflects the emotions, ox symbolized the appetites and the eagle’s face represents our sinfulness when we are overcome by evil desires.
Augustine, Jerome’s contemporary, agreed with Jerome and concluded, “ Men see the moral rules written in the light which is called truth from which all laws are copied” (cited Bowie & Bowie, 2004, p. 146). However a noticeable problem still remained even after the above theological explanation. If the truth – the absolute knowledge of good and evil – is given by God to all human beings, why all human beings are not good? This question remained at the centre of the theological discussion for several centuries and gave birth to two more questions – Did God withhold the truth from a few of His servants? Why God had created the evil and had distributed it randomly among all the types and enterprises of humanity?
After much debate on the above issues for centuries, the theologians came to the conclusion that if only human reason were perfect, there would not be any bad behavior. Again after much discussion that centered around the relationship between human reason and divinely given moral knowledge, the theologians asked – is there a divine loophole wherein reason asks us to do something “bad” in order to bring something “good”; e.g., a “just war”? In sum; though the theological theories were developed in renowned theological schools throughout the centuries, the confusions were never totally dispelled. To many people it appeared that the God hypothesis was more of a muddle than a mystery.
In the beginning of twentieth century, the theories of a physician/scientist (also a hardcore atheist) on psychology were so revolutionary that they were to “agitate the sleep of mankind” (Strachey & Gay, 1961, p. ix). This brilliant researcher was none other than Sigmund Freud, and he argued that religion and science are mortal enemies. Freud dealt with the problem of religion and psychoanalysis in one of his most profound and brilliant books, The future of an illusion. His analysis attempted to show why people formulated the idea of a God. The internalized authoritative figure, as proposed by Freud, is not of a divine origin but all-too-human. He called this authoritative figure as “superego”.
With this discovery of the superego, Freud effectively wrested “God” out of the hands of theologians and placed him in front of the psychologists for further study. The psychologists and the psychoanalysts are now slowly occupying the priest’s domain and the symbol of psychology is overshadowing the symbols of religion. A violent opposition between them is unavoidable once the psychological jargons start contaminating the word of God.
5.3: The Importance of Superego in the Structural Model of a Human
Mind
Freud saw the adult personality structured into three parts, the id (real self), the ego (false self) and the superego; all developing at different stages in our lives. All these components are functions of mind, not parts of the brain or in any way physical. They are separate aspects and elements of the single structure of the mind. For Freud, the “eternal struggle” among these forces that occurs at an unconscious level, constitutes the problematic of the human condition. In sum; throughout his analysis, Freud saw “man” as a closed system and this theory characterizes the mental apparatus as a “dynamic union of opposites” (Marcuse, 1972, p. 35). In previous chapters, I have already discussed in details the functions of true self and false self and how they interact with each other.
In the initial days when Freud put forward his theory on narcissism, he did not have much clear idea about the function of this third component, superego. In 1914, Freud published the paper On narcissism: An introduction where he suggested that the adults are often devoted to an ideal ego which sets up within himself. Freud then put forward the notion that there may be a “special psychical agency” whose task it is to watch the actual ego (the false self) and to measure its strength performance. He attributed a number of functions to this agency, including the normal conscience and certain paranoid delusions. In another 1917 paper Mourning and Melancholia, Freud insisted more definitely that this agency is independent and apart from the rest of the ego. In 1921, Freud published one more paper where this was made still more clear. In 1933, Freud concluded that the superego is “the vehicle of the ego by which the ego measures itself” (Riviere et al, 1960, p. xxxvii). Having securely established the concepts of the ego and the superego, Freud became preoccupied with the relationship of the ego to superego. When the new account of the analysis of the mind was established, it formed the subject of many more new writings which came in rapid succession.