I’m sick and tired of leftists claiming to know what’s the real Islam and what’s not, and you can see the examples of this everywhere.

Yes, Obama and Hillary will tell us who is a real Muslim, they know what a Muslim is better than ulema of Saudi Arabia. The guys in Saudi Arabia aren’t motivated enough to figure out what real Islam is and how to implement it, but the leftists who have never actually bothered to read Qur’an or the hadith, they know what a real Muslim is and is not, presumably based on the assumption that the true Islam is peaceful and nonviolent because that’s what they would like it to be, and everything that doesn’t match the assumption is evil and comes from an improper understanding of Islam.

Yes, Abu Bakr didn’t understand Mohammed properly when he launched the apostate wars, but Hillary Clinton understands Islam perfectly.

Tell me, what do you think is more likely, that the true Islam is what the Westerners would like it to be, or that it is what is officially practiced in Saudi Arabia?

What’s more likely, that Abu Bakr, who waged the apostate wars, properly understood the will and intent of Mohammed, or that “Islam is peace, there should be no compulsion in religion” guys did?

Allow me to illustrate.

A guy who understands what Islam is.

A guy who has an improper understanding of Islam.

Why it’s impossible for normal people to prove anything to Muslims?

It’s quite simple. Normal people think that something is good if it makes you a good person, and that there’s an objective frame of reference for “good”, in a sense that it’s intuitively clear that some things are evil, and it’s perfectly understandable for God to expect people to do good and refrain from evil, and if they don’t, they will be punished.

The Muslims, however, utterly lack such a frame of reference. They think that something is good if Allah commands it, and it’s evil if Allah forbids it. If Allah commands you to help someone, it’s good. If Allah commands you to kill that same person, it’s good. Basically, there is no morality outside of Allah’s will, as expressed in his commandments.

So basically, if you tell a Muslim that Islam is wrong because it makes people evil, he’ll look at you as if you said two and two are five. Not only will he not be convinced, he won’t even understand what you’re talking about. Islam is teaching the Muslims to obey the will of Allah. If the will of Allah is correctly written by the prophet, and it hasn’t been corrupted in the process of transmission, and one obeys it, there’s nothing better than that, because Allah completely arbitrariliy defines what’s good or evil, and all you need to know is that there’s no God but Allah, and that you submit to his commandments. The result is the only good there is.

Essentially, an ideal Muslim has the mentality of Adolf Eichmann. If Führer ordered him to help the Jews, he’d be known as the greatest benefactor. If Führer ordered him to calculate prime numbers, he’d calculate prime numbers. Since Führer ordered him to exterminate the Jews, he did that diligently, and he simply saw nothing wrong with it, because the Führer decides what is right or wrong for him to do, and it’s not for him to question, but to do as ordered, to the best of his abilities.

Or, as I put it once, never trust the hygiene of someone whose religion prescribes cleanliness.

One might ask why I single out Islam in my criticism, instead of attacking religions in general, as is customary in such cases.

The explanation isn’t all that difficult, but it might take some time, since I need to go to the fundamentals, and the most fundamental question is “why is anything good”, because without that you can’t really say why something is bad.

In my view of things, we can actually define “good” in a coordinate system of sat-cit-ananda, as Vedanta would state it. “Sat” means “reality”, “cit” means “consciousness” and “ananda” means “bliss”. According to Vedanta, brahman, the supreme reality, is sat-cit-ananda, reality-consciousness-bliss. Totality of reality-consciousness-bliss manifested in a relative frame of reference is called Iśvara, or Lord, also commonly called God. So, if we create a triaxial Cartesian coordinate system in which sat, cit and ananda are mapped on x, y and z axes, and we define any entity on this coordinate system, we get the magnitude and direction of its spiritual force, in a system in which the vertex (0,0,0) is your starting point. Furthermore, we can use mathematical tools such as matrices and tensors to perform operations with such vectors, if we can quantify the values accurately enough. Essentially, we have a great tool for inducing clarity into the entire mess.

So, to put it simple, it’s something like quantifying wind. In order to describe it, you need to measure its direction and strength. This can then be used to perform calculations if you’re operating a sailboat. For the wind to be “good”, it needs to be strong enough to propel your boat quickly enough, and it needs to blow in the right direction. You can use even a wind that blows in the opposite direction from where you want to go, but it’s such a pain in the ass it’s more along the line of using bad things for a good purpose. If you use your starting point as a vertex, and measure several forces relative to yourself, you can put their respective x, y, and z values in a matrix, add them all up and get the resultant.

Essentially, if you apply a certain force to yourself, and the result has a positive sat, cit and ananda values compared to your origin, then this force is good. If the result moves you in a negative direction in this coordinate system, it’s bad.

If something moves you toward greater understanding of reality, if it decreases illusion and increases awareness of the reality of things, it is good on the “sat” coordinate. If it produces greater illusion and ignorance, it is bad.

If something makes you smarter, more intelligent, if it sharpens and clarifies your mind, makes it more powerful and capable, it’s good on the “cit” coordinate. If it makes you stupid and unintelligent, it’s bad.

If something makes you experience joy and bliss, if it produces happiness, it is good on the “ananda” coordinate. If it makes you unhappy, depressed or miserable, it’s bad.

Obviously, some forces cannot be described simply, as they are more functions than values. For instance, some drugs will initially produce bliss, but this will gradually fade and reverse, starting to produce increasing misery and personal destruction. This means that those influences need to be evaluated as a function of time, and you need to integrate the function across your lifespan. A partial integral, in a short timespan, can deceive you. To put it simply, you can’t judge a marriage by the honeymoon stage. You need to judge it across the duration, and across your lifespan. Only then can you say if it were a good thing or not.

Also, some good things can initially produce great suffering. Quitting on an addiction, or healing from cancer, is initially very traumatic, but this phase passes and you’re much better in the long term. Conversely, if you do nothing, you will avoid immediate trauma but will eventually suffer more.

The things get more complex if we want to integrate the result across one’s total duration of existence, not only across one lifetime. Whether you believe in a heaven/hell scenario or in reincarnation, you can imagine a scenario where one performs evil deeds and has suffered no harmful consequences prior to death. Since the integral of this course of actions is positive across the measured timespan, one could conclude that it’s a good thing; however, if we accept that one is affected by the choice he makes, and that the true measure of a man is what he does, it is obvious that evil deeds have a detrimental effect and that they are obviously a negative-direction vector on the sat-cit-ananda coordinate system, and whether this will eventually result in an unfavorable reincarnation or in hell, is not all that important in the end, because in either case this is something to be avoided.

So, to get closer to the issue at hand, what is a religion, what is its purpose, and how can we judge one as good or bad?

A religion is, very generally speaking, a belief system regarding the nature of reality, based upon revelation from a supposedly transcendental authority.

I needed to resort to such a broad and general definition because people fail to understand how different the religions really are. For instance, people usually believe that religion is a revelation of divine laws, from God through a prophet, but this definition encompasses only two religions: Judaism and Islam. Christianity, for instance, is something entirely different – it’s basic tenet is that Judaism has been tried, and it didn’t work. God revealed the laws, but people couldn’t really obey them properly and thus attain salvation, because they lacked the redeeming spiritual force, and thus all their efforts were in vain. You can call it the original sin, you can call it weakness of the flesh, or you can call it absence of the Holy Spirit, but the basic idea behind Christianity is that revelation and obedience are insufficient. This is elaborated upon in great length in the Acts and in the epistles, and I could provide an abundance of quotations if necessary, but essentially, this has been decided at the first council of the early Church, in Jerusalem (Acts 15, 1-29), when the issue was whether the pagan-converts needed to accept Judaism first, and Christianity only later, as an addition, and the conclusion of the apostles was that neither they nor their fathers could bear this burden and didn’t attain salvation by anything other but the grace and sacrifice of Jesus, and should therefore not unnecessarily burden the new converts by all the laws and regulations of Judaism that proved to be useless anyway. Essentially, they weren’t saved by the virtues of circumcision, observing Sabbath or refraining from eating pigs, but because they recognized Jesus as God, and he poured Holy Spirit into them so that they were truly reborn, and in this state naturally refrained from all sin. So, essentially, while Judaism and Islam are the religions of law, Christianity isn’t; it’s a religion of redemption and spiritual transformation, which makes it much closer to some schools of Hinduism and Buddhism than it is to Islam or Judaism, regardless of the superficial and deceptive common denominator of Abrahamic monotheism.

So, if we accept that the definition of religion is much broader than that of Divine law revealed through a prophet, and that the true nature of religion is closer to being a signpost that points toward a transcendental goal, what we are left with as the true question is “how well does it work?”. Basically, we are left with a combination of Jesus’ criterion of the fruits (Mt 7,16) and my Cartesian-vector-space analytics: how much sat-cit-ananda does it add to your already present spiritual vector? Does it make you more aware of reality or does it brainwash you with lies? Does it make you intelligent and smart, or does it turn you into a robot-like dogma-spewing creature? Does it make your existence blissful, or does it turn you into a creature of hate? Those are the really important questions; not whether the religion itself is true or is it a result of a cave madman’s hallucinations, but whether it turns you into a creature of reality, consciousness and bliss, or into a hateful cave madman.

And that’s the crux of the matter, and that’s why I hate Islam more than any other religion. It’s a spiritual pathogen that turns humans into zombies. And don’t tell me about good versions of Islam or good Muslims. My first contact with Islam was when I read some extremely good texts by Sufis, and only later did I understand that it’s not authentic Islam, but a heresy, a distortion created by smart people in order to make Islam into something it’s not, just like there are heresies that turn Christianity into something it is not. The problem is, Osama bin Laden was a good Muslim; Rumi and ‘Attar were not. Saudi Arabia is a direct and uncompromised rendition of Islamic teaching. ISIS is practically indistinguishable from Saudi Arabia, which makes it obvious that their common denominator is the direct and accurate rendition of Islamic teaching. That’s what Islam really is. It’s not the teaching and life of ‘Attar, it’s the teaching and life of Osama bin Laden. That’s why I hate it, because I know what it is, because I know its true nature, and because I know its true nature is evil. It turns humans into demons and world into hell. It is the strongest negative sat-cit-ananda vector I can imagine, and it intends to lead the world into millenia of endless darkness.

Sure, you can point me to some sweet sugar-coated talk by Muslims, about peace and good and whatever, and you know what my answer to that would be? That this vector points to Saudi Arabia as the end-result. That’s the eventual target and goal, that’s how the Muslims see the ideal world. If they don’t, they will be pressured by others who will quote scripture to them until they are either brought into Islamic orthodoxy (“radicalized”, as it is usually called in the West), or they conclude that Islam is not at all what they thought it to be and they abandon it, which is discouraged by the threat of death for the apostates. So, you can see why I claim that Islam is a spiritual pathogen which attempts to transform the world into Saudi Arabia as the desired end-result of human evolution on Earth, from which there will be no upward motion ever, under penalty of death. Some say that it’s as bad as Nazism, but I disagree. If Nazis had won the second world war, they would proceed to kill millions of people, but they would probably have bases on Moon and Mars by now, considering how advanced their technology was for the time. Americans profess to be better than the Nazis, but how many Iraqi children did they kill, not to mention Vietnam? But they also did some great things. They invented transistor, integrated circuit, home computer and Internet. But what did Saudi Arabia ever invent? It has only two major export products: oil and Islam. That’s about it. And it only exports oil because someone else invented some useful purpose for it. Islam certainly didn’t tell them what to do with it, but it sure does tell them how they are the best of all people.

What does ISIS produce? It uses Toyota trucks provided by America, it uses TOW missiles provided by America, it uses Kalasnikovs made by Russians, it uses APCs made by Russians, it uses cameras, computers and phones made by the people they hate, in Japan, China, Korea and America, but what do they make? They make videos of themselves killing people and breaking historical artifacts. They make destruction, ignorance, pain and suffering. There’s not a single fucking thing they make better. They hate, they kill, they rape, they steal, they make propaganda about how good it is to hate, kill, rape and steal. They are what Islam truly is, when it isn’t afraid; they are the naked truth of Islam.

Americans spread negative propaganda about the Russians, how they are this and that. But let me tell you a thing or two about Russians. In the times when the Muslims were riding their camels and contemplating how akbar their Allah is, the Russians invented the law of the conservation of mass and the periodic system of elements. The Russians had Lomonosov and Mendeleev and Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov and Sikorsky, they invented spaceflight and probably half of all the science and tech we have today. The Russians produce nuclear-powered submarines and icebreakers, they have the best rocket engines in the world and they landed a space shuttle on full autopilot during strong wind, and that was in the 1980s. Compared to the Muslims, the Russians are super-aliens. Their contribution to culture, science and technology is so immensely huge, that we are usually not really aware of it, in a way we are unaware of the size of a huge mountain if we stand on it; we need distance in order to get perspective.

When you figure out that the Nazis invented a number of good things, and still managed to kill less people than the Muslims, you know you’re dealing with probably the most blatantly evil ideology to ever darken the face of the Earth. So, do I ever again need to explain why I single out Islam with my criticism? It looks like some sort of dark evil that Satan himself invented in order to keep humans in darkness and submission.

When people talk about the spiritual sphere, their thoughts are mostly disorganized, but if you listen to the followers of major religions, you get the gist of things – all Creation is in essence bipolar, where on one pole you have God, and on the other end His opposite. According to some criterion, be it decision or submission or love or virtue, the beings are closer to one pole or another. This Earth is somewhere in between the poles, and the various forces vie for influence over it, and qualities and loyalties of the beings are divided here.

So, basically, the spiritual world is simple. You have God and Satan, one is good and the other is evil, and you need to choose one over the other. It’s as simple as it can get, and other interpretations, such as polytheism, are merely inferior, philosophically immature versions of this theology.

This concept makes sense, and it made sense to the people who first thought of it… around the times when people thought many things about the world that were later proven completely false. For instance, they thought that quartz crystals were made when water permanently froze from bitter cold in the high mountains, or that during solar eclipse a big cosmic dragon swallows the Sun, or that the emotions come from the heart, or that the function of the brain is to cool blood. This all makes sense when you’re scientifically ignorant, but in mineralogy, astronomy and anatomy human knowledge grew over time, and things that used to make sense to people no longer do. However, regarding the spiritual spheres, we more-less have the same theories, made by more-less the same people on the same level of knowledge, and they still make sense to us for the same reasons.

The thing is, the theories that made sense in antiquity weren’t abandoned in favor of some other theory that made less sense in antiquity, but in favor of a much more complex, sophisticated understanding of the world we live in. Essentially, what we believe now is beyond what Aristotle or Pliny the Elder could ever have thought of, and we didn’t get this understanding by thinking about it, but by observation and experimentation. We didn’t use philosophy to figure things out; we actually started figuring things out when we gave up on philosophy and started depending on observation and experimentation, because thinking is useful in coming up with a hypothesis, but then you need to either prove it or disprove it, and at this point thinking is not of much use: you need to get back to the actual world and poke and prod things in order to see what they really are, outside of your head.

So, let us for a moment assume that the ancients didn’t just get chemistry, astronomy and anatomy wrong, but that they also got religion and philosophy wrong.

But wait, you will say, spirituality is a different category, significantly different from physics or chemistry. Humans are spiritual beings and can explore spirit directly, by their very existence, unlike physical matter, which they can explore only indirectly, via senses and instruments. Furthermore, religions don’t really function on the principle of figuring out what makes sense; they are based on a revelation from a higher being, and thus have a greater potential accuracy.

This makes sense until you test it; but in fact, since the spiritual senses and experiences are mostly intangible and difficult to quantify, they are actually on worse ground than physical senses, which are very consistent and reliable, and if an apple falls from a tree, all the witnesses will see it in the same way. Hearing is so reliable people use it as a primary means of communication. So basically, you can build a reliable construction around the physical senses, and in the spiritual sphere, it’s difficult to agree on anything. Furthermore, the issue of revelation is tenuous at best. Yes, there were revelations. However, those revelations more often than not contain a mixture of spiritual and physical information, and information about the Universe obtained by means of revelation produced all the glorious science of the dark ages, with geocentric paradigm and what not, and to claim that somehow the spiritual part of the revelation is more reliable doesn’t sound very convincing, and even if it does, everything that Jesus, for instance, told us about the structure of the spiritual Universe is, basically, that there is a spiritual sphere, that God and the holy ancestors exist there in a non-corporeal, angelic manner, that there is hell and that there is divine judgment. Not much to work with, I’m afraid; all the information about the spiritual world that we can get from Jesus’ revelation wouldn’t even fill a sheet of paper. Some of that information is very important, true, but it is all very basic, which is why the Christians adopted much of Greek philosophy in order to make a working model of the Universe – because there’s not much to work with in the Bible. The trick is, Jesus is a very good source on the quality of the spiritual world, as those go. Others are equal at best, and usually worse.

So, we end up with the simplistic theory of heaven above, Earth in the middle and hell below, sort of like what the Greeks envisioned, with Ouranos and Tartarus being the antipodal forces above and below, with Gaia as a thin plate between them. And it makes sense, in a way it makes sense that the Sun revolves around the Earth. But, allow me to offer a different model.

Let’s imagine some habitat, a rainforest or something like that, with a huge variety of plants and animals. They all exist there, and do their best to eat, reproduce and not be eaten. There are birds above, snakes and frogs below, trees in the middle and green stuff all around. How exactly do you reduce this complexity of existence into the polarities of “good” and “evil”? Is a snake evil because it eats frogs? Are ants evil because they eat snakes? They all have their particular interests, and those interests are often opposed, but what if anything can be called good or evil in this complicated mess?

Let’s take another example. We have a laboratory in which scientists experiment on animals in order to produce cures for human disease. From the position of laboratory animals, this is the worst possible hell, and the scientists are devils. From the position of scientists, this is a job and laboratory animals are tools, just like microscopes. From the position of the outside population, this is merely a part of the process of solving the problem of disease, and they mostly don’t care how things are done there, they just want the results. They give money as an input and demand medications as an output.

So let’s imagine another scenario, more relevant to our original question. Let’s imagine that this world is not important. It’s not something God created – not as His main idea, anyway. Rather, it was a byproduct of some experiment on some other world, where some spiritual being had particular ideas about how a Universe should be organized in a different way from what God intended. This being then designed a particular form of a computer, or whatever they had on this world, but basically something analogous to our modern gaming computers with powerful graphics cards, which can already be seen as alternative Universe simulation engines. He then offered this simulation as an alternative to the spiritual beings, saying that it will allow them to spiritually evolve more quickly and effectively than the real world, but they need to accept a certain set of terms in order to enter the simulation.

And then, literally, all hell broke loose.

In order for the simulation to be effective, it wipes your memory and caps all your inherent spiritual powers. It has laws which basically force you to break fundamental spiritual laws of the real world by your actions in order to survive in this world. If you don’t do your best to survive, the rules state that you committed offense against the owner of the simulation by rejecting the great gift that he bestowed upon you. And when you die, you can leave the simulation only if you sign that you will hold the owner blameless for all the evils you experienced, and that you didn’t commit any fault against either the owner or other players, otherwise you will be forced to reenter the simulation in order to pay off debt. Essentially, the souls got trapped, and the number of trapped souls increased as the new ones entered in order to rescue their friends. At several points the higher beings attempted to intervene, trying to show the way out of the system from within. The problem is, the only way to access the simulation is conventionally, from within the system. The idea to destroy the simulation outright was abandoned because it would either destroy or seriously cripple the souls that are connected to the system. You also can’t easily power it down, because it uses the spiritual energy of the connected souls to power the system. Basically, there are several ways to end the system. First, the souls would need to stop investing energy into the system. This would at first degrade, and eventually power down the entire simulation. The second way is for souls to stop returning to the simulation. They would need to surrender all their “sins” and “merit” to God, basically they would need to stop requiring repayment for faults they experienced within the system, or for “achievements” within the system, and they would need to stop committing offense against other “players” even at the cost of their own “lives”. The third way would be for someone to take over the control of the simulation device, modify the basic rules and perform an orderly shutdown of the system, which is an immensely difficult task, since the device is tied to the life-force of its creator, and to the life-force of all the “players”, the owner is some sort of a lunatic rebel against God and refuses to cooperate or yield control in any way, and his ownership and control over the system are based on the concept of spiritual sovereignty of the beings, so God cannot intervene in a direct manner without revoking the basic rules of the real Universe.

This is actually not far off from what I personally perceive to be closest to the truth; some of it is Buddhism, some of it is Christianity, and some of it is my own personal experience, with some glue that binds it together. But if you play with those ideas, suddenly there’s a big difference between the creator of this universe and the creator of Universe proper, of the real world. The creator of this universe is some sort of a messed up Satan figure, and suddenly you have sufficient complexity to explain all the contradictions in the world, for instance why it doesn’t work according to what people perceive as the deep spiritual laws, and why a philosophy that will make you effective here is also most likely to doom you.

Is it true? I think the general concept has a good probability of being accurate. But let’s put this part aside for the moment. Let’s just work with the part that assumes that this is not the real Universe, but some sort of a off-shoot, either a simulation or some strange backwater segment that works differently from the real thing, comparable to the way in which parts of this world don’t work the same way as the others, for instance Antarctica which is so cold, you have serious problems with ordinary machinery which works fine elsewhere, or the highest mountains, with air pressure so low you start dying as soon as you pass certain altitude. All you need to assume this is possible is to assume that God granted all spiritual beings free will, that consistency is very important and decisions are binding, that beings have a high level of independence and sovereignty in their actions, that it is possible for them to modify the substance of the real world in order to create artifacts that God didn’t intend to be created, and that at least a certain percentage of spiritual beings react to virtual realities and simulations the way some humans react to sophisticated videogames, in a sense that they would prefer to be completely plugged in and absorbed into the game if it were at all possible. So it’s not something that requires a great stretch of imagination to visualize, but this doesn’t prove that it’s true.

The idea, however, is intriguing, and gives significant weight to the polytheistic interpretations of the world, where different Gods have different agendas, which often collide and produce unpredictable and strange consequences. This assumption gives us a more convincing explanation for the mess we are facing, and it has the additional benefit that it doesn’t necessarily negate existence of the real God, as the source of existence and powers of everything else. However, it’s more like the concept of all life on Earth getting energy from the Sun. That’s mostly true if you disregard the organisms living on the undersea volcanic vents, but only the plants absorb the Sun’s energy directly. Others either eat the plants, or they eat the herbivores, or they eat the decaying bodies of other beings in some form or another, but it’s not like “they all get energy from the Sun” is to be interpreted as “they have solar power cells on them”. If we see it that way, all the main points of the good religions remain valid, and at the same time we have an explanation for the disorderly complexity of the world and its divergence from the assumptions made by the spiritual teachers. For instance, there’s Jesus. His instructions are so deadly in this world that almost none of his most ardent followers dare to practice them – for instance, “care not for what you eat or wear”, or “leave everything, take your cross and follow me to suffering and death”. However, he also says that he who keeps his life in this world will lose it in the other, and he who gives up this life will inherit the life eternal. So, the thesis about the spiritual world having different fundamental rules from this one isn’t that much off the mark if you go by the Bible. Also, in the Bible Satan is called “prince of this world”, which also implies that God doesn’t really control this place, and that it works according to the rules God doesn’t approve of, and explains why people would need saving and what Jesus intended to do. The funniest thing is, it appears that the Yazidi sect also hits very close to this explanation, as the only non-major religion that has anything to say about the matter; they actually believe that the spiritual being that rules this world is called “Peacock Angel” and is more crazy and evil than not, but it’s better to be on good terms with him because he’s the boss here. Hinduism also supports the concept of hierarchical creation of the Universe, where it’s not God with great “G” who creates it all, but it’s more of a clustered mess. Buddhism, however, concentrates only on getting the hell out of here. It doesn’t care who made this pit, what matters is that it’s a pit, we need to get out, there is a way and here’s how we should go about it.

Something to think about.