Steve Skojec

Hilary White has a gift for writing with clarity that I lack. My thoughts are such a jumbled mass that they often seem to come out that way, lacking the clarity of insight I feel that I have in the abstract.

On the subject of Muslim reformists - those who wish for a better, kinder Islam, Hilary hits the problem I’ve been describing in this space over the past few months straight out of the park:

The problem of Islam is this:

The Koran is the literal word of Allah,
but the Koran is manifestly wicked, and is full of contradictions,
leading to only two possible logical conclusions: that Allah either does not exist at all and was invented by an evil megalomaniac to further his dreams of world conquest, or is a ravening demonic monster who must under no circumstances be mistaken for the living God.

This leads us to the next problem:
Islam requires submission to Allah, as revealed to man in the Koran.
But human beings are endowed naturally by their Creator with the ability to tell right from wrong and are created with the freedom to choose between them.
If a man submits to Islam, he knows that he is submitting either to the demonic monster Allah, or to something he knows is false. Either way, in order to submit to it, he must do violence to his nature and suppress his conscience and his intellect in order to do something wicked and dishonest. He must, in other words, become a wicked and dishonest man himself.

But to try to solve this dilemma by making the Koran better, by trying to make Allah into the True God, he is back to dishonesty again. If he remains a Muslim, since the only thing a Muslim is required to believe, the only “tenet” of Islam is utter submission to the Koran as it is, he must admit that his religion is wrong, false. To say he submits, but only to parts of the Koran, is to say he submits only to his own preferences, and we are back to dishonesty and internal contradictions again.

The only way out is to ask the question, “Can the Koran in its entirety be the true word of God?” And if we are starting with Christian presuppositions about the nature of God (He is always good, cannot will evil and cannot ever contradict His own nature), we are obliged to say that the idea of a good God is always and can only be utterly contrary and opposed to the savage beast represented as God in the Koran.

What they seem to be admitting is that the only way to be a good Muslim is to be a bad Muslim.

This is what Westerners, liberal and conservative alike, can’t seem to grasp about Islam. As a whole, it seems Western Civilization has utterly lost its sense of moral objectivity. For religion to evolve and change, even at its fundamental level, is simply taken for granted as part of the relativist canon. But for those who recognize that the principle of non-contradiction exists, a logical dilemma is presented with no way out.

A religion cannot be divinely inspired, exclusively true, and demanding of total submission and acquiescence and yet simultaneously subject to change according to modern ideals. When people say, “Islam is a religion of peace,” or “Most Muslims are appalled by what extremists are doing in the name of their religion,” they are failing to describe true Islam. They are describing what Islam has evolved into in the West, or in those countries that are sufficiently Westernized (or liberalized) that its adherents have chosen to ignore some of its more vile characteristics in favor of the more respectable aspects of its belief system.

While these people are to be applauded for their desire to be sensible in the living of their faith, they cannot be construed in any sense as orthodox. They are rather quite unorthodox - cafeteria Muslims in the way that Call to Action or Catholics for a Free Choice are cafeteria Catholics.

Or, as Hilary said, they have become good Muslims by being bad Muslims. There’s really no way around it. And while we can support a program of change within their religion to focus on its better aspects, we must never believe that in so doing we are assisting those who choose to make such changes in their beliefs in being honest. The more Western they become, the more evident it should be to them that either their religion or the way they are living it is a lie, because the two paths do not converge.

Why is this so hard for us to see?