Before I continue I must raise the question, do we really need to be critical of religions or beliefs and practices or actions etc?

My response is that it is absolutely necessary to be critical of beliefs and actions, our own as well as of others. Why?

In short, because we each act out what we believe. The world is a global village and humans in it are a single family. Whatever each of us does anywhere in the world somehow ends up affecting us sooner or later and forces us to react to it. This chain reaction is known as interaction and is the origin of the saying, what goes round comes round.

Since we are all affected by each others actions therefore we each must keep each other in check to make our world a better and a safer place for all of us. This means we all need to have such beliefs as help us achieve this objective and anyone who holds any twisted desires for our world must be stopped in his/her tracks.

At the same time just because we have the said goal does not mean that it will happen all by itself, people must make individual and collective as well as organised effort to make it happen or bring it about. If some people pulled our world one way and the others the other way, it will never become a better place. A dispute between the family members is not a healthy sign if the objective of the family is peace, progress and prosperity, for divided family cannot achieve this objective. Not only that but the family I am talking about does not even agree on its objective or is at least not consistent in its goal or its achievement. So this family therefore first and foremost must decide its goal and the way it is going to go about achieving it. In other words, the world is full of people that are a single family regardless they like it or loathe it, they must get their act together and pull in the same direction for the very same purpose or goal, or else they are not going to make it or achieve it.

Unity is only possible in two ways a) by totally controlling all elements of our society and b) by helping people to see sense and come together for their own good and help each other to the best of their ability to get where we should be.

Now in order to get rid of disputes amongst us, we need to lay down proposals as a formula and thrash them out completely to see which of them will work for our set out purpose, if any, and which of them would not. This requires serious critical examination of all ideas from each and everyone of us and that is where in comes religious criticism as well. It is because each and every religion claims to have perfect solutions to all our problems, thus religions force us to examine them thoroughly to see if any of them stands the necessary scrutiny. If any does, fine otherwise they all must be discarded one by one just like political candidates who make big promises but cannot back them up with substance.

Now the question is, why islam is particularly singled out?

The answer is because all other followers of religions have accepted the idea of partition between religious and state affairs or if you prefer spiritual and secular affairs save muslims. India being a hindu majority state is not based on hindu constitution. Parsees do not have any state of their own, for they are living as minorities in various countries through out the world including India, iran, bangladesh and pakistan. Jews have their own state wherein they are the majority but their state is not based on jewish constitution. The USA, and the european states are mostly christian majority states but their constitutions are not based on christianity. Sikhs do not have their own state either and they too are living in many states as minorities.

None of these people desire religious constitutions, full-stop. Once a people accept that their religion must be kept out of politics, they take away other people's right to criticise it, for their faith becomes personal and non-scriptural therefore private. If you are not taking part in public life as a politician, people have no right to interfere with your private life in that respect. However as soon as you  put forth your self as a political candidate, you are putting yourself on the line for public scrutiny and if you are not up to scratch, you are in for humiliation.

It is therefore up to muslims to accept the separation between the church and the state (or if you prefer the masjid and the state) or face the public scrutiny. No point in complaining after you let the cat out of the bag.

1) The main problem is with ourselves being born ignorant. It takes decades to learn to be able to learn provided our circumstances and environment are helpful for this purpose. Our graduations or even masters do not teach us everything about life, they only prepare us or train us better or enable us to learn things we have not learned during our schooling but are essential for living a well fulfilled worthwhile life. Even the phd is only a first step in this direction hence  the cliché, life is for learning. This is not the only problem we face after our births but also the problem of untangling the issues that for one reason or another have been tangled by one or the other individual or group ie our problems have been compounded by silliness of some people from among us, thanks to their actions out of unawareness of the situation and the serious consequences that ensue.

As we open our eyes and, if lucky, come across a variety of people who believe and do different things, some good others bad, we begin to see the need for understanding what is going on. The problem is created for many of us by childhood brainwashing ie systematic religious dogmatic indoctrination. Religious doctors do say that there is no compulsion in religion but they do not mean it because as soon as a child is born in a community s/he is taught religion and so all her/his curiosity is dissipated the while still a child by providing her/him with all answers in religious context only. This is only the beginning of the problems created by shear unawareness of religious communities as to what it consequentially means in terms of loss to humanity. It is as if one is drugged and then left on one’s own to make sensible decisions for oneself including finding one’s own way in this chaotic world of many tangled paths. The right way to raise a child would have been to educate him/her in general so that one ends up with good commonsense and ability to judge things properly and dispassionately for their truth and benefit to humanity. Once one grows up, both in body and mind, that is the time one may be introduced to religion to judge it for its truth and make a conscious choice for oneself. This clearly shows that religion is not taught honestly even if religion itself is true. The question is why is that the case? There must be some benefit for someone in this who is creating this situation or is continuing it. It does not benefit the child for sure nor humanity at large rather damages it, so the only beneficiary of this system and exercise would seem to be the person who promotes it and even that may not be true in real sense, for such people may well be imagining the imaginary benefits in the imaginary world, for it has no basis in reality.             

2) Beside we being born ignorant the other problem is variety of religions that are available to us to choose from. That is if we are lucky enough to have freedom to choose one, if any. Looking at religions, one will clearly find the evidence that each religion seems to have come from another ie each religion seems to be child of another religion. In case of islam, one can clearly see that doctrine of one god was already around eg jews believed in one god only. In fact the Christians also believe in one god only that has three personalities in form of trinity. There was already concept of prophet-hood, miracles, revelation, divine commandments, worship, forgiveness, chosen people, angels, demons, spirits, heaven or hell etc etc etc just to name the few. There was already history of alleged divine participation in our world. So one may ask, what is new that islam offers that was not there before Muhammad declared his divine messenger-ship?

To understand let us see, what Judaism offered people as a way of life. It was a simplest form of religion to begin with ie originally Moses asked people to believe the jewish god called Yahweh and  that was all till jews became free people. Yahweh then gave moses miraculously the ten commandments as jewish constitutional framework to which some more were added about daily living eg about food, clothes and rituals etc etc. In other words the jewish religion became more and more commandment oriented till people became fed up with it. One may ask, why people got fed up with it? Because if you have more and more commandments, there comes a time when they begin to interfere with daily living more and more leading to eventual strangulation. Let me explain it by help of an example, let say that we have a growing up baby and a dress for him that we reduce in size on daily basis by trimming. Let us take baby’s growth as the daily growth of our world and the reduction of his dress size as the restrictions that are brought about by increasing number of commandments. If baby keeps on growing and the baby’s dress is also trimmed on daily basis and so reduced in its size, there will come a time when eventually baby will not fit in it and will become strangled or suffocated.

Since our world is dynamic and throws up new situations for us on daily basis creating more and more problems for us to solve on daily basis and like wise increasing number of commandments put more and more restrictions on us, eventually there will come a time that restriction would be so many that we will  not be able to function at all in the real world. When this happens people start looking for a way out. This gives birth to new ways of life ie people think enough is enough let us approach the matter in a new way. This creates disputes between people, some who become so used to living in a particular way would not give it up and the other who would not live that way any more. Call them conservatives and liberal perhaps or moderates. Amongst moderates people may split, some trying to modify the old way of life the while the others head for a completely new way of life ie this lays foundation for the birth of a new religion for example. Thus some jews ended up inventing Christianity. The Christianity too was a simple religion when it began but as it too grew and became politically organised, people began to live by commandments rather than by doctrine of salvation alone therefore dissention took over chritianity as well.

So it should not be difficult to imagine as to what islam offered the world that other religions did not. The answer is, originality that was offered by all new religions or cults. Islam too was originally a simple religion concentrating on spiritual aspects of humanity ie having nothing to do with politics. Only faith in one god was the demand. As soon as it grew ie got many followers, jumping into political arena was inevitable for it too. As a result, the commandments came one after the other till they became what we more or less have today. Muslims too ended up divided just as other religious communities before them. 

3) When Islam was simple, there were less number of commandments and so it was less confusing because it had less contradictory elements eg compare life of prophet in makkah to his life in madina. Also compare his early makkan life to his later makkan life when he went to madina and like wise compare his early madinan life to his latter life before his death. The quran does not contain many commandments, so it is not as restrictive as the hadith and the hadith is not as restrictive as fiqh because it too does not contain as many commandments as the fiqh. As we got more and more commandments, life became more and more restricted and in many cases unbearable in muslim states. Now sects began to appear as would reject fiqh, and even hadith amongst muslims as well as those who rejected even the quran partially or completely, turning moderate and even atheists. It is all logical reaction and expected. Thus even prophets began to appear after Muhammad amongst muslims who brought about new versions of islam. So disputes and conflicts between muslims are just the same as between the people of other faiths and that is nothing new. Bhais, ahmadis,  submiters, parwezis, sunnies, shias, nation of islam are all attached to islam despite condemning each other as heretics and even kafirs etc etc. Many from amongst muslims turned atheists.

4) Now question is, can the quran unite muslims? No it cannot. Why not? Because if the quran had the ability to unite people, they would not have separated in the first place to begin with. So looking at their quran for muslims for uniting the muslim ummah is as absurd as looking of hindus to their stone gods for guidance. Because confusing books and silent idols do not have the necessary ability to guide human beings who are born ignorant and have to climb the mount knowledge to be sensible enough to learn from other people’s experiences, which is not easy. Take an example of a curious child who asks question after question to learn but his dad is silent. However, as the child tries to do something his dad suddenly jumps up and down, shouting at him, don’t do this, it is bad. This child stops but after a while he tries to do something else. The dad once again tells the kid don’t do that. So the story goes on and on till child gets fed up with his dad for telling him don’t do this and don’t do that and not making things clear in a simple and straight forward way. Not only that but child also becomes aware that his dad is not helpful to him at all when it comes to guidance to good things in life so that he could go and get them. His dad is only interested in stopping him if he decides to do something which dad does not like for some reason that only dad knows.

The situation is very similar in case of alleged divine guidance and its followers. It is not interested what people need for living their lives, how they may enable themselves to get it or whether they get it at all or go to hell, but one thing is certain that they must find out everything for themselves. If this was not the case, no way   better equipped people could ever be envisaged to have upper hand in competition in this world. Those who are looking for hereafter cannot compete effectively with those competing for better life in this world. These are two opposing objectives, if one goes for one the other becomes out of reach. It is simple as that. Now one has to think about it that if going after this world full speed ahead does not guaranty a better life then how can the half hearted effort for the same when mind is not even focused one way or the other? So it is absolutely necessary that people put their money where there mouth is. Religions therefore clearly interfere and hinder human progress on a grand scale.   

Muslims keep mentioning that people are deliberately disbelieving in islam and doing this or that, it shows that they are not aware of human psychology. How can they be when the quran assumes that people think with heart instead of the brain. A human being can never do anything deliberately wrong knowing full well the truth ie being aware of it and knowing the serious consequences. Humans only and only act out of motivation and that what motivates them they assume it to be worth while thing that somehow benefits them in some way. They never act out against their own self interest knowingly. Even those who claim to be selfless are motivated by personal gain, for that is how they feel comfortable within themselves. So why we do wrong is because we are either mentally insane or ignorant of the truth and the consequences therefore unaware what is to follow. Here the quran is seriously wrong when it keeps telling us that people are rejecting the truth deliberately after knowing it full well and being fully aware of it and the consequences for doing so.

Tell me, would you kill an innocent person and be comfortable with it knowing that you are going to be caught and put in prison for rest of your life? You will only kill somebody if you are driven to it and yet be able to justify it in your own mind at least, so that it does not make your life hell. Likewise, it is impossible for a psychologically normal minded person to disbelieve in god knowing that he does exist, especially due to the consequences as stated in all the religious scriptures. So Please think about it.

I do not challenge people with wrong ideas and beliefs and never argue with them to accept what I say because I am interested in putting forth the information and let it work out itself on the minds of the readers. The human mind always accept what it deems to be right, for it makes sense to it. Human mind does not like confusion because it puts it into awkward position, which makes it feel uncomfortable. This is the reason a contradiction is seen by mind an unacceptable state of existence.

My own peace of mind is important for me and that is why I rather believe what makes better sense to my mind than accept something that I do not understand and remain uncomfortable with it for as long as this situation lasts.

So you see dear friends, my approach is very simple, I am only here to share my thoughts regarding various issues for a reason. If they make sense to you, you would have no choice but to accept them because they please your mind and by not accepting what is right you will feel awkward within yourselves, if they do not make sense to you, you have nothing to worry about.

As I already said that the quran is confusing, one may ask, why? Because it contradicts itself, obvious facts and logic and such contradictions only and only confuse human mind. For example, if one person tells the other to believe in one god as well as two gods, what sense would the other person make of it other than get confused? One may ask, does the quran really contradict itself, obvious facts and logic? My view is that the quran contains such faults as are raised in the question but one has to see the quran for oneself for that, it may well be that I may have misunderstood the quran. For example, according to the quran as I understand it, it is ambiguous as well as clear 3/7, 18/1, 43/2-3 etc etc. According to the quran hud hud=hoopoe and ants are cleverer than simple human beings 27/16-35 etc. The quran says that infidels are worse than animals, for they have no sense 7/179 etc.

Problem a) If animals are so intelligent as the quran assumes them to be then they are like people so why Allah is allowing muslims to kill them and eat them? Moreover how right are muslims to contradict the quran when it comes to killing of animals the halaal way by claiming that animals do not feel any pain because they are not intelligent and do not have memories like humans etc?

Problem b) Does the quran not insult nonmuslims by calling them worse than animals just because they hold differing opinions regarding islam 8/55 etc?

Problem c) Does the quran not contradict itself by telling us that the animals are intelligent as well as they are deaf and dumb ie have no sense, for that is the only reason for such a comparison?

Here are other similar verses ; 2/18,171, 5/63, 6/25,39, 7/176, 9/28,34, 10/42, 22/46,73, 25/44, 27/81, 43/40, 47/12, 62/5, 63/4 and there are yet more. The verses will make better sense if one replaces their nonmuslim object by muslim. That is just assume that kafirs are calling all these names to muslims. For example, how would it feel to listen if one said, muslims have no sense, they are worse than animals, they are brain dead, they eat like animals etc etc.... Now animals include dogs and pigs etc etc as well and muslims include prophets and saint as well so if one puts all this together what does it mean? After calling people names you cannot explain them away, can you? For damage is already done. Moreover it is part of muslim prayer to read the quran during slah. How does it sound, one standing up praising the lord and saying kafirs are this and kafirs are that etc etc? What kind of prayer is that in which a person stands up and starts swearing at  other people who are not even there listening to all this rubbish?

Could god not find a better way to express himself and teach muslim better? Especially when it is said in the quran that muslims should discuss things with nonmuslims wisely 16/125, 29/46, 31/19, 41/34. It is like somebody is teaching others to do things nicely but ignores the same oneself. How does this reflect on the teacher ie god himself?

Please read verses and realise the task the hoopoe has carried out. For example, the hoopoe goes on a journey and observe a people in detail and remembers the detail and comes back and explains it to solomon. Can a human kid do that? It clearly shows intelligence like humans at work here. Likewise show intelligence the ants. We deal with ants on daily basis and you can see how many are killed under our feet, they do not detect the danger even so close nor run for cover in time and end up crushed never mind sensing the danger from a distance as these ants do according to the quran. Again a human kid is not able to do that? I do not say that these things were cleverer than all human beings but they certainly appear to be more intelligent than a lot of people. Thus we have double contradiction in the quran ie talking nicely as well as insultingly to infidels etc and animals intelligent as well as dumb.

The next issue is of fairness ie treating each other fairly. First, the verses according to which the quran itself demands that people treat each other fairly 2/182, 4/58,135, 5/35,48, 7/29, 16/90, 17/35, 39/29, 42/40, 55/8-9, 83/1-3 etc etc…... Now the verses that seem to contradict these verses.

Problem 1) The verse 4/34 is backed by 38/44. In 4/34, Allah legalises wife beating and in 38/44 explains it by an example that it is ok to beat up your wife, for that is what prophet job=ayub intended and did to his wife. The question is, if men are allowed to beat up their wives for their actions or mistakes, are wives also allowed to beat up their husbands for similar actions or mistakes? The answer is, no. The question is, is that fair? Do husbands never make such mistakes that they may need such treatment by their wives? Please do realise that legalising something and individual acts are two different things. For example, in UK wife beating is illegal but individuals still do it or that in islam drinking is illegal but many muslims still do it. By allowing something, law is letting the individual decide to do as one pleases. Thus in my view the quran is giving man unfair advantage our woman in this matter and thus it is contradicting itself.

Problem 2) In 2/228 we are told that men are a degree better than women. This means that needs, wants, desires etc etc... of men as per Islamic law are superior as compared to needs etc etc …... of women. Is this fair?

Problem 3) In 4/3, 24 etc men are allowed to have up to four wives at the same time and unlimited female slaves to sleep with. Being able to divorce wives at will, husbands can change wives as they wish. In contrast to this women cannot have more than one husband at the same time and they cannot divorce their husbands at will ie they must get divorce through raising the legal action for this purpose. Now is that fair? Also can a muslim woman have male sex slaves and sleep with them, for this time children will belong to her regardless who the father is because she own the slaves may be inherited them from her father? If not, why not and is that fair? Also muslim men are allowed to marry nonmuslims women but women are not, is that fair?

Problem 4) According to 4/11, 176 etc, sons are allowed to inherit double the share as compared to daughters of their parents, is this fair? If women do not need shares because they are looked after by their male relatives then why give them any share at all?

Problem 5) A woman’s testimony on her own is not acceptable even in civil matters 2/282, is that fair?

Problem 6) Islam allows slavery it is obvious according to many verses and these slaves are not only infidels but muslims as well. This means islam allows master slave concept and thus no matter how good slaves are treated ultimately they do not have the same legal rights as masters and that is what is questionable ie it is not fair and thus the quran contradicts itself. The case is same with husband and wife ie wife is just a slave.

Problem 7) In 2/178 in case of a murder the law dictates to kill, a free person for a free person, a slave for a slave and a woman for a woman etc etc. This is an ancient tribal custom taken in by islam as well. Why, because only tribal people make such demands of each other ie if you kill a member of my tribe I want an alike person to die in your tribe regardless who the actual murderer is. For example, if a woman of your tribe kills a man of my tribe than I am not going to kill her but a person from your tribe that is like the person of my tribe who was murdered eg young for young and old for old etc. One has to ask, if to do this is fair ie kill the person other than the murderer in retaliation?