Rashna - you appear to have had exposure to many different religions - what are your current beliefs?
I'm not very sure of my current beliefs, one thing I know is that I don't believe that any one religion has all the answers or any one religion's holy book was dictated by God. I'm almost certain that they were the works of men (not women) who desired to codify the moral values that they held and announced to people that these came from their God or gods so that they'd be more acceptable, and so that they could announce more dire consequences for breaking them. They also spun stories of Heaven and Hell so that those who didn't believe would be scared into believing. In case even that didn't work, quite a few religions (mainly the Abrahamic ones from what I know) claimed that God has given them the right to kill those who don't believe, so punishment for apostasy wasn't postponed to the Hereafter, it would be doled out right now. Hammurabi also claimed that his code came from the god Baal. They were also woefully ignorant of science and how the physical world works, but humans then just like today wanted answers to why the world is the way it is, so they cooked up elaborate creation myths with supernatural incidents. I also think that people have a fear of death, both their own death and the death of their loved ones and they'd like to believe that they'd exist forever. Religion gives them this sense of immortality-that there'd be a better place where they'd eventually go to where everything would be all right, the wicked would be punished etc. However as times and morals changed, and they've changed drastically in the last 200 years, people were left to explain how come a just and loving God came to propound such misogynistic, barbaric and unscientific beliefs. They resolved this in different ways, Christians' claimed Jesus made a whole new set of laws, disregarding parts of the OT which they previously believed, or explaining Jesus' fables as meaning something differently, or simply dodging the question. Muslims claimed that Islam ultimately came to abolish slavery etc.
I'd also like to add that I have a somewhat more negative opinion of Islam as it currently exists than other faiths. I see a lot of Muslims sticking to the most barbaric and obscurantist interpretation of their faith, regular acts of terrorism perpetrated in the name of Islam, and accomplishing little good.Quite a few Muslims also seem to believe that the world owes them more than they owe the world. Thats' why perhaps to many Muslims its perfectly all right to demand a separate Muslim homeland and divide the Indian sub continent driving out millions of non Muslims from what became Pakistan and Bangladesh, but if a few million Jews settle in a tiny piece of land called Israel, the global Muslim ummah, as far off as Malaysia is outraged.
I'm not a Christian, and I've come across many very fanatical Christians but I do realise how many excellent schools and charitable institutions are run by people who believe in such (to me) unbelievable stuff like Trinity. However, I'm certainly not an Ali Sina devotee, I acknowledge that there're many nice, extremely tolerant Muslims like my mom and her family, and I don't think a complete Islamic reformation is impossible.
Welcome Rashna! Thanks for joining this forum, you certainly are a smart gal with a nice attitude. I imagine squeezing your cheeks right now
I'm curious, how do you access the internet? Does your school provide WLAN for pupils with private notebooks, or do you have some kind of internet-cafe there?
Thanks Aziz! We have a sort of what you call an internet cafe in our girls' hostel. On the second floor of our girls' hostel, we have some 45 computers with internet access. Practically all of us have Orkut and Facebook accounts, and we do some of our our school projects on the computer.
Topic: I'm Rashna, new to CEMB