Ramadan always seems to make my faith weaker rather than stronger, every year, and I don’t know what to do about it other than ‘be awake at 1am consumed with doubt’

I don’t know what to tell you, I’m struggling with religion

I don’t know. It’s not like I don’t pay my religion a lot of attention the rest of the year. I’m reading Quran more I suppose https://twitter.com/bread_viking/status/1386109739285712896

And one thing about the Quran is that it doesn’t give you a lot of ways to ignore the bits you don’t like. It is very specific about how you can’t just be like ‘well you have to put it in a historical context’ because it doesn’t have one, it’s a series of eternal literal truths

I don’t know that I feel positively about ‘if a guy steals you should cut off his hand’ as an eternal literal truth

Likewise that a woman’s witness is less certain forensically than a man’s, and so on and so on

None of this is new to me, you understand, but for some reason it really starts to seem insurmountable every year

And I mean then I start thinking about the afterlife and then it’s really off to the races. One of the things that’s explicit about the souls in jannah is that they won’t grieve. What if your sister is in jahannam being tortured

And speaking or, where does the most merciful being in existence get off on torturing anyone in the first place? By definition I’m infinitely less merciful than him and I don’t want to threaten anyone with half the stuff he does

Then if you do get to the - again, entirely literal - lakes of perfume and servants and so forth, you’re rewarded with the like or better of everything you denied yourself in life

Which raises some *interesting* questions about whether or not you have free will in jannah or not

Not to mention the question of having denied yourself things that were wrong. Do you just get a simulacrum of them? If I wanted to murder someone but stopped myself for fear of Allah do I get to murder a fake guy up there

Oh and while I’m at it if the morality of the Quran is eternal and infallible then it sounds pretty hesitant about slavery being an immoral thing

Plus a decent proportion of the book is Allah getting mad at us for arguing with him and threatening us with torture for it, when he gave us the capacity to do it in the first place

I dunno man this shit fucking sucks, not least because if I do give it all up and become a nihilist or whatever, all of the worst people online will feel as if they have been proven right and I was just pretending to be muslim for clout or vibes or whatever

I’m trying to work backwards to whatever convinced me in the first place but I am grasping at shadows

Is jannah just going to be full of thieves who got their hands cut off in life, repented and were forgiven and are running around robbing the vaults of heaven forever

Is everyone there just in some kind of glowing transcendental orb of nearness to god? If so then why bother with all the flowery description of gardens and lakes and so on

What if I don’t want to be in an orb

Why are my two options horrifying torture or garden centre and which one I gets depends on how nice I am to something I cannot harm in any way, and is extremely merciful but also extremely vengeful

And if the answer is just ‘shut up and do as you’re told and get in the orb’ then why add all this set dressing to it

I guess that’s always a possibility https://twitter.com/mustafa52024969/status/1386114428538560515