The world is captivated and horrified by all of the brutally cruel religious violence the religious terror organization of Islamic State has unleashed upon our world. From beheadings and mass executions in Iraq and Syria to bombings and shootings in Paris, France and other parts of our world, it is painfully obvious IS must be eliminated.
While it is absolutely necessary to confront IS with military power, the way to rip their guts out and to permanently render them harmless is by stripping them of their financial supporters as well as their fighters/religious terrorists. The key to doing this is to remove the primary motivation the jihadists and their supporters have to spread Islamic terrorism around the world: belief that what they are doing is God’s will.
This past Sunday, November 29, 2015, on the CNN program Fareed Zakaria: GPS Maajid Nawaz, who is a Muslim and a former supporter of violent jihad, stated, “People that join ISIL (Islamic State) genuinely think they’re bringing about an end of days scenario, they genuinely believe they’re working on behalf of God.” Why do they believe this? Because they believe Islam’s false claims to divine revelation. If that belief in divine revelation is removed, the religious terror organization of Islamic State would cease to exist. If Deists can awaken enough people to the fact that none of the claims to divine revelation made by Islam or by any of the various “revealed”/hearsay religions are true, all of the “revealed”/hearsay religions will lose their believers/supporters and die on the vine. This would end religious violence on our planet.
I recently had a reveling online exchange with a Muslim. He inadvertently exposed a very weak and very important fundamental part of Islam. He responded to a post to a news article I made. My post was attacking the whole idea of divine revelations and “revealed”/hearsay religions. He wrote:
I’ll simply state the 1st principle of Islam which also serves as a Muslim’s declaration of faith is as follows –
I bear witness that there is no deity worthy of worship besides Allah; I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah
For the Muslim, for the believer it follows that there’s an explicit trust that what we receive from Muhammad in the form of revelation is as he received same from Gibril (Gabriel), Allah’s agent, and that this is Allah’s revelation. In the 1st principal/declaration there is an explicit characterization of Muhammad vis-a-vis Allah specifically and revelation generally. There’s no confusion regarding his role and his means of consort with Allah is identical to that of preceding Prophets excluding Moses (A.S.) who we believe had direct discourse with Allah without the agency of Gibril.
It is easy for Deists to rationally destroy this Islamic claim to revelation. For example, how can anyone “bear witness” who did not witness the alleged event which they claim they are bearing witness of? Bringing this very important fact to the minds of sincere Muslims at best will cause them to stop supporting Islam and to become Deists or some other type of freethinker. At a minimum it is planting real seeds of thought in their minds that will eventually bear fruit. This applies to all people currently in a “revealed”/hearsay religion. Notice that the Muslim referenced Islamic belief that Moses was an elevated prophet of God who actually had direct communication with God. All of the Abrahamic “revealed”/hearsay religions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Mormonism claim the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament to be at least an important part of the word of God and embrace the genocidal killer, Moses, as a man of God. (The Taliban used a Quran story involving Moses to justify trying to kill the school girl Malala.) Knowledgeable Deists can educate the sincere followers of these “revealed”/hearsay religions to the fact that they are being lied to regarding the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, the New Testament, the Quran and the Book of Mormon being the products of divine revelation and Moses being a man of God.
The Deist Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason and the mind becomes a wreck.” All Deists need to work together to help people free their minds from religious gullibility/”faith” and to get back to their gift from God of innate reason. This is the only long term solution to the problem of religious violence.
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