A Humbled Atheist

For a long time spirituality had been black and white for me. I didn’t feel a connection to it, I felt resentment towards it, so I denounced it and belittled it. I didn’t value what it does for some many others because I did not benefit from it myself. Over the last couple of years I have revisited this strange relationship I have with spirituality to try to understand and relearn these concepts as an adult.

When I was a child I never completely bought into the religion I was raised with. If we are right what about everyone else? Being raised Muslim in America also has its stigma. I didn’t want to stand out as a foreigner. My mother was American and my father was Arab. I always had one foot in one world and one foot in another. I didn’t completely fit in anywhere. All my white girl friends viewed me as the other, while a lack in fluent Arabic prevented me from really being immersed into the Muslim Arab community. My father tried to teach us, and we went to Arabic school, but we never spoke it at home and my mother never learned Arabic either. I always say I could probably manage if necessary.

I used to have dreams about the devil, three consecutive ones as a matter of fact. My mother said prayers over me and they went away. I wanted to disbelieve then. Believing the devil was real was much to scary for me. To eliminate evil I had to become a skeptic of the whole construct. One cannot exist without the other. Good and bad, right and wrong, black and white.

When my parents divorced and my family and way of life fell apart I denounced God. I decided that there was no purpose to any of this. Why should I suffer by someone else’s hand. I became very atheist, feeding into the rise of Islamophobia. It was a cheap way to fit in. I was in survival mode just trying to live. I had enough baggage that I didn’t want to carry the stigma of a Muslim girl too.

In college I took a class called comparative religion. I loved the Hindu idea that Vishnu is everyone’s God. God is the top of a mountain and we humans are all at the bottom. We all have different perspectives and interpretations but we are all looking at the same thing.

In Islam there is only one God, but God is not a human or a tangible object of this earth. From this I feel that God is a force and a feeling that is everywhere. Its a higher power…

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