Thoughts on absolutism – the virus of Maldivian minds

by Hilath | May 28th, 2010 | via Hilath.com

NOTE: After reading this article, a friend just now commented whether I was not ashamed to “discuss personal stuff on public space.” I told him I don’t have any personal stuff to hide… that this is all public stuff… I told him that I haven’t written here of any NEW personal problem that does not affect most children who were born in the late 1970s in Male’.

It is time to find out exactly how much Islamic Ministry is spending in State funds on sponsoring hate speech. It is time the Maldives’ mainstream media ask the Islamic Ministry why it is spending possibly millions of Maldivian Rufiyaa to fund a swindler posing as an Islamic scholar.

Well, my guess is these people can get funds because Maldives do not have proper income tax laws. When that problem is taken care of, we can find out just how much money goes into these ali-gadha Beybe fihaaras…

Last I heard, a more stronger, and possibly Tsunami-proof “Habee Screen of Doom” is now being erected at Henveiru Park — a tribute to blame Maldives’ tsunami victims? — who Salaf somehow blames was directly responsible for causing Maldives the devastating 2004 Asian Tsunami. In fact, a fear-mongering CD by Salaf mastermind Ali Rameez brainwashed rural girls and women and even female children to wear the headscarf — as if children themselves were sex objects, the perverts!

Ali-gadha Beybe fihaara is a term one of my journalist colleagues used to describe the brightly lit, “everything-goes” sale shops springing up in corners around Male’. It is alleged that some of these Ali-gadha Beybes actually fund poor rural island boys to go to be brainwashed in Afghanistan and Pakistan “Jihadist” camps disguised as Madrassas. Saudi Arabia’s Medina University is also a favorite destination, yet Saudi Arabia is now officially a government-sponsored Wahhabi State.

And when we point out these irrational actions we see all around us, it is people like us who are labeled “anti-Islamic”. Aren’t Adhaalath, which has been the pioneering party to politicize Islam, and the pedo-sex cult otherwise known as Jamiyyathul Salaf, the actual traitors to the Maldivian people?

Don’t be surprised: when you are active on Ban the Adhaalath Facebook group, you encounter all sorts of weirdos parroting their Wahhabi Masters. And me and many of my friends have gotten quite a few scoldings in mosques and the streets from Wahhabi groups and other groups sympathetic to the Wahhabi cause. Perhaps these are the kind of timid mice, who for some inexplicable reason, were too cowardly to bully other classmates. So, they get into groups, either on Cyberspace or in mosques or on the streets, to bully moderates and women who don’t wear the headscarf.

These are the kind of people, who really know they are quite vulnerable inside, but they can never (unless with proper psychiatric rehabilitation) confront you face-to-face if you pose them a logical question. When you really think about the kind of comments they make on the blogosphere and Facebook, you realize that these kids – and even some adults like the operators of Adhaalath and Salaf – are truly insane.

You want to know why? Try feeding “illogic” into an “intelligent brain” like a human brain, right from childhood, and he/she will grow up to be an insecure, unconfident, vulnerable and mindless robot whose only defense is mimicking their Taliban Masters like a parrot. Just imagine: if a human spends all his years trying to make sense in his mind and “truly believe 100 percent without doubt” that something like 2+2=5, you can imagine how much damaged that brain will become once the person enters teenage.

By the time they enter their mid-20s, that is when their sexual drive starts to wane, then these aging male Wahhabis start brainwashing other kids (a growing mind is a fertile empty ground to plant all sorts of mind viruses) so that these Wahhabi Masters will have constant attention, adoration, devotion, and perhaps, a little wayward sexcapade now and then… As Richard Dawkins pointed out, people who have undergone Organized Religious Brainwashing (myself included) would need years of rehabilitation, just to be able to make it through one-day-at-a-time without your “stress nerves snapping”.

You tend to wonder: Why are people, who are inclined towards religion, so hostile towards us? Is it because there is a problem with religion itself? Or is there a problem with Organized Religion?

Yes, there is a problem with Organized Religion. It is a virus against the human intellect. It aims to make you stop thinking.

As a child, I remember when I asked my elders: “Who created God?”

They replied: “Islam says you can only think up to a certain point. You are not allowed to think about things which is beyond human comprehension.”

I then asked: “Then why does it say in the first words God sent to Prophet Mohamed that humans’ top priority should be to ‘think and learn’”?

The elders were stumped. They had no answer.

As a child, I didn’t understand why they couldn’t answer a question which seemed so simple to me. I thought: “They are elders. They should know. Why aren’t they telling?”

Somehow, when those humans wouldn’t tell me the answer, I somehow started getting angry with God Himself. I thought: God had all these hundreds of pages in the Holy Scriptures of all religions (at least the Old and new Testaments and the Quran combined because they say Hinduism and Buddhism is not a “Sky Religion”), yet he (conveniently?) failed to answer the Eternal Question that would have easily put human minds at rest and we could have “believed 100 percent without a shadow of a doubt” that he exists (I don’t care whether as a Super Intelligent Cosmic Consciousness or Being or “something a human mind will NEVER be able to comprehend until He shows Himself to Believers on Judgment Day”, etc…)

Later I came to know that my 29-year struggle to find the First Cause really had no Absolute Answer. It just always ends in an Eternal Regress: If you are forced to stop thinking who created God, my 29-year-old mind told me I might as well not think about God at all and just treat the Universe as another given. If my Elders can treat God as a given, which conveniently seems to fit, like a Cosmic Cork, into any metaphysical blanks in human knowledge, why can’t I treat the Universe as an Eternal Given and if I personally prefer, I could name this Set of Natural Laws as either Universe, God, Allah, Jesus, Brahma, Jehovah, Eywa, Gaia, etc, as perceived by my limited five physical senses and by my limited knowledge of how this Universe exists and functions.

It seems to me that psychological problems arise when a human being ends up in the dead end I termed as Eternal Regress.

What happens then?

An obsession arises to find absolute answers! We want to know what happens after death.

Then what happens is that, when your logical mind actually makes you realize that there is no 100 percent way to actually know what happens after death, your mind goes into over-drive and gets stuck in a loop: Deep at the back of the mind you know you can never be sure that Islam is 100 percent true because you were not born during the time of the Prophet and you have all these second-hand Hadith and Sunnah which you can never independently and scientifically verify.

So what happens when a machine that is Naturally wired to perform logical calculations try to solve this unsolvable “religious conflict of the inner mind”?

You start feeling so insecure, you always feel vulnerable and defenseless. You develop a constant need to be surrounded by family, friends and well-meaning “Islamic breathren”. You need Constant Reassurance and Confirmation that Islam is “100 percent true”, that it is an “absolute answer”… It doesn’t matter where you get the Reassurance from: You always need to hear and Reaffirm that “Islam is 100 percent true” because somewhere you were brainwashed that if you don’t believe in Islam as a “100 percent absolute truth, you will burn in Hell Forever”. Clever way to hijack an insecure young mind, isn’t it?

So… Because people like your parents, friends and even Dr. Zakir Naik (who you absolutely trust) believe that “Islam is a 100 percent absolute truth”, then it MUST be true, no?

That is why you should take a child’s mind seriously, without brainwashing it — deliberately or not! My advice: when your child voluntarily asks you about God for the first time, refrain from giving your opinion. Rather give him/her the chance to study Comparative Religion and decide to choose for him/herself. If I had my way, I would make Comparative Religion compulsory for all grades!! Remember, one man’s food is another man’s poison, and vice versa.

What goes wrong is that a human mind can never accept, much less believe, in illogic. So, what happens after that is, you want to keep constantly hearing “religious stuff” either at home or work, because your stress and depression seems never to come to a rest, unless you keep Reassuring and Affirming your faith by hearing other people’s Affirmation. You seek repeated viewings of a sermon or from serial conversations with another Wahhabi buddy (I was a Haabee when I was 15). You are always afraid to be alone, because every time you are alone, that Ultimate Scary Thought enters your mind: You are not “100 percent sure Islam is the true religion” and so you are constantly afraid that Allah will send you to Hell for Eternity! As I said before, what other clever way to hijack a young, curious, and delicate mind?

With a Constant Fear on Your Head for Years on end, do you think you will grow up into a rational adult?! Remember how Anakin Skywalker later became the epitome of evil, the Darth Vader? Anakin’s heart and mind was always occupied by fear. All the energy and focus on his brain was wasted on constantly battling that inner fear. In the end, the insecurity that was created in his mind, resulted in him going to the dark side. At least that is my interpretation of Star Wars and the only “fan value” of the franchise I have for that classic series.

It’s time to get rid of your insecurities. Allah is all merciful and I’m sure he won’t punish you eternally for something you did in a limited lifetime (I think Maldivians’ average life expectancy now is around 77 years). He is most fair. At the risk of being accused of blasphemy, let me reveal some personal secrets, which people like Adam Waheed may be totally surprised to hear… Let me say this, if it would ease any of my brethren who may have undergone the same “religious conflict of the inner mind” which I was finally able to let go at the sad late age of 29: If you should know, I was a good Conservative Muslim until the age of 29. If you guys and girls really should know, my first kiss and even my first sexual experience was at the age of 29.

Now you know why I hate Organized Religion and want to promote Personal Religion instead… Organized Religion wasted half of my life, for fuck’s sake! I will resent it to my very end. I will fight against it no matter where I am. As the Colonel in Avatar says, “Nothing’s over while I’m breathing.” You have no choice but to kill me if you want to make me go silent!

After Maumoon came to power, the 70s discos in Male’ Ice Ge and Hakuraa Fair were closed down. My relatives started dressing conservatively. Earlier, their skirts were so short that in some photos of them you can even see their panties.

So I really hate the double standards these “well-meaning” relatives later adopted: They had all the sex, drugs, and rock and roll and bisexual orgies in their time, but when it was my teenage, they were like: “Hilath, you should never even hold a strange lady’s hand. All the baraka from your hand will wear off!”

So, in my ripe sexual age of 20, I remained celibate. It was frustrating. Like David James and all other anonymouses on Facebook, I used to vent my anger at everything: at all Organized Religions who treat sex as something dirty, at homosexuals, at Jews, etc. I “believed” all the so-called “Western Conspiracy Theories” against the “Islamic Ummah”…

My sexual experiences over the past 5 years are so limited, I don’t even know whether I’m heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual. I just haven’t had the time to get sexually experienced as to prefer a certain sexual orientation! LOL… So, Adam Waheed, give me some time, ingey?

In fact, I blamed everything and everybody around me. It was only last year that I finally realized that I have to forget the past, and move on if I have to enjoy the little time left in my life.

The String Theory really helped — from an unexpected angle: I now see myself as a String on a Guitar. When I am played, I produce beautiful music, and I’m happy and everyone else is happy. When my String is not played, it’s just there, sitting peacefully, bothering nobody, and enjoying Existence by itself because the whole setup of the Universe seems to say to me, “Hilath, Let It Be”…

I mean, basically I have now done everything I want to in life, and I am ready to die even today. No regrets at all. I have forgiven everybody because they acted in my best interests under the then prevailing social circumstances.

President Nasheed, who is related by blood to my extended family, was once quoted by a close friend of mine as saying that: “We all draw conclusions from all available information and take a decision based on the best judgment that seems appropriate for that time. Later, circumstances may turn out to prove that that decision was wrong. But it’s important that we know we did our best, and we did the right thing according to the limited knowledge available then. That is the only Knowledge that will bring Inner Lasting Peace and Redemption while you are on your Deathbed.”

Like Naafiz also pointed out in his blogpost, I also waited for hugs which were not forthcoming. It just wasn’t in my extended family’s “etiquette” then to be physically close to children.

So, basically, I grew up by myself alone as a Blue Monkey in my own little forest in our vast ancestral home in the Royalty heart of Male’. But today, I’m glad I finally broke from the chains of Organized Religion which had hijacked my mind until I was 29 years old. Better late than never, eh? hehe. The feeling of finally being truly liberated from ALL THINGS is sheer bliss…

Because Organized Religion means you have a self-appointed-by-law God’s “Agent” on Earth, dictating even little things like how to cut your fingernails.

Why do I say Organized Religion (as opposed to Personal Religion which an individual follows according to his personal interpretation of Holy Books) is a poison of the human mind is because, these people fail utterly when confronted with logic. On the blogosphere, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook, childhood chums from decades ago suddenly pastes a malicious comment on a public forum, questioning my integrity.

There’s no need to be jumpy about it. I mean, do you see people like me (who don’t believe in the traditional concept of God as taught by your Wahhabi Slave Masters) being jumpy about it? If you haven’t noticed, we usually make some ironic comment and move on.

But do Wahhabis really move on? If their mind is set on an “honor killing”, they will hunt down the girl, no matter what. That is why the only way this Salafist menace can be get rid of from Maldives’ society is by forcing these “converts” to undergo a government-observed, an independent-organization-administered mental rehabilitation center.

Believe me, mental rehabilitation is not easy. The last five years I’ve spent mostly as a hermit, letting my feelings show only on Cyberspace. My mind is also recuperating; it is in a rewiring process. Hopefully, some part of the logical software in my brain can still be salvaged. But if ever there comes a day when my health makes me depend on someone, there’s always that Tahiti monster wave I told you about :)

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