Ahmadi Muslim ‘Loverofpeace95’ on Reddit and Alternate Viewpoints

What follows are your statements (the quoted parts) interspersed with my responses and commentary…

Let’s begin.

The life span prophesy allegation I’ve seen it before. Give me something more resounding.

Well now, I could use the same argument for your “scientific miracles” in the Qur’an claim. I personally read rebuttals from Ahmadiyyat to other critiques of the life span prophecy, and found they did not address the level of argument found in Nuzhat’s critique. If you feel you are exhausted from weaker critiques of this prophecy, your choosing not to investigate further is your prerogative, of course.

Don’t waste your time with these long flowery pieces of linguistic mastery.

So my taking time to write to you thoughtfully and preemptively give you an out from further dialog if you don’t have time, is somehow a waste of time and not one of empathy and initiative to build bridges of understanding? Alright. I get it now.

May I ask you what do you believe now? Are you an atheist?

I’ll be writing more about this in my next major essay on ReasonOnFaith.org. Stay tuned. Short version: I identify as an agnostic deist. I have no issues with deist positions. I have issues with unsubstantiated religious claims.

I’m not going to watch anything that insults the Prophet Muhammad (saw).

Well then, you’ve just ensured that you don’t get to hear the other side of the argument. Yet you claim to have made objective, rational decisions to arrive at your position. It sounds to me like you’ve just succumbed to indoctrination and do not have the emotional maturity to set aside the thorny discomfort of evaluating opposing arguments.

If the concept of insults being a detractor from considering an argument was a universal one, then why should anyone read the Qur’an? It insults people who disbelieve in it and threatens them with hellfire over and over again. I could say that this is a disgusting and insulting book. See how that would get us nowhere?

Side note: for those interested, this video from The Masked Arab exposes the double standards regarding insults and respect that many Muslims espouse.

I know for certainty that he was true.

Yes, you know this by only being willing to read things that make him look good which you can find at the Jalsa bookstall. Congratulations on coming to conclusions by having limited yourself to material that re-enforces your childhood indoctrination and social conditioning. Bravo.

You don’t understand what faith is I suppose.

Right, because you must be God to ascertain that anyone who now rejects religion, must never have been a devout Muslim before. I must never have had sincere intentions and sincerely sought to make Islam make sense to me. I must be imagining senior Jama’at leadership (i.e. senior missionaries) telling me that they had no responses to my queries.

I’m not compelled to enter into dialogue at this very moment, since I have a lot of stuff going on, something quite terrible in my life has just happened. I think textual communication is just too time consuming. I respect that you have different views, but unfortunately I just feel like you are wasting your time.

Fair enough. This is what I spent time writing about preemptively, so that you wouldn’t need to feel obliged to write back. I can fully accept that discussions on social media can be excessively time consuming. I myself prefer to focus on writing content many can access, instead of narrow conversations that likely, only a few will see. I’m sorry to hear that you are going through difficult times.

I just had a skim through the link you posted…. Straight away I see there is an agenda at play “This is the truth”, a scare tactic.

Let me get this straight. You’re against scare tactics, but okay with the Qur’an telling people who disbelieve that they will have their skins roasted and boiling liquid poured down their throats? Every viewpoint is going to claim it represents truth or a closer approximation to it than the counter viewpoint. That’s implicit. You’re somehow scared by that being an explicit statement of confidence, before the real argument has even been laid out?

Further, I think you’ve conveniently and completely mis-characterized what I’ve written as a preamble to The Masked Arab’s videos. Let’s take a look at the only paragraph from that post that contains the word “truth” in it:

That’s pretty gentle. And it’s putting control back with you, the reader, as the one who decides. For fans of the movie “The Matrix”, you’ll see this as an homage to what Morpheus said to Neo.

Further, it is acknowledging how heavy a word ‘truth’ is, and how it is often misused. Even as a believing Ahmadi Muslim in my youth, when I would go to a Jalsa and see banners of Ahmadiyyat being “The True Islam”, I would get uncomfortable. It sounded really arrogant. So does the True Islam campaign that the Jama’at runs today.

Surely my usage, couched in qualifiers here, is far less problematic. Unless that is, you’re looking for an excuse not to engage with content that will challenge the very core of your comforting indoctrination.

Let me ask you this? Did you have a reason to challenge your original faith?

Yes, to believe in it for reasons greater than, “I was born into it and being a religious Ahmadi makes my parents happy.”. Didn’t you find a reason to question your beliefs and verify they held up to scrutiny, especially if you were born into Ahmadiyyat?

Did you see something in the Jamaal [sic] you didn’t like? Were there certain things you neglected in Islam? Did you feel guilty? Did you then decide that you’d find a way out of the jamaat?

Alright, so here comes the psycho-analysis. This angle won’t work on me. I was active in tabligh and researching hot topics to be better at tabligh. I then came across arguments I could not answer, and nor could the murrabis when I had dialogs with them. Their non-answers were my answer. I have since found way more at issue with both Islam generally and Ahmadiyyat specifically, although I focus more on the former.

Did you feel guilty? Did you then decide that you’d find a way out of the jamaat?

No, I have always lived a pretty austere life in comparison to most. More so than peers my age who were far less religious, had far more to feel guilty about, and have since taken leadership levels in local and national levels of the Jama’at in the countries in which they now live.

I left to follow my conscience, not for an easy life. Given my social standing (friends, family, acquaintances, opportunities) I gave up a hell of a lot disappearing from the Jama’at. The easy thing to do would have been to stay involved and milk it for all the social benefits. But that would be wrong and difficult to pull off. You’ll hear more of that when I tell more of my story, later this year.

At one point you might have thought it was the truth, what was the trigger to leave?

Yes, I was a very committed young mubaligh. The trigger was non-universal teachings in the Qur’an. Problematic verses even missionaries in private conversations conceded were tough to explain and which they were trying to boldly re-interpret themselves.

Don’t take anything I say personally, peace be with you.

Likewise. I hope you can understand that we have to let go of our inherited biases and as much as is humanly possible, strive to be objective. This requires exposing ourselves to viewpoints that we may initially find uncomfortable.

I hope things improve on the personal front for you, as you work through this difficult time. Peace.