I was walking down the street a few days ago and happened to notice the moon hanging in the afternoon sky. The sky was cloudless and blue; a beautiful summer’s day. The moon on display was cut in half, due to its position in the solar system and the amount of available light the sun was able to shine on it because of the Earth being in the way.
It got me thinking about Allah splitting the moon in two and Muslims believing that he did and could still do so. I’ve been to some very remote and high mountainous areas in New Hampshire and Scotland; areas so secluded that it felt as if I was the first person ever to have walked on the earth that was beneath my feet. The lack of electric light coupled with the complete black of the night sky meant that there was no visible horizon available to me. The stars were so bright and large that it seemed like I could reach up and pluck them, or that I could take one step forward and make my way into the cosmos by stepping onto the first of a million of them.
It was primal and scary, and I could see how our ancestors would look for portents in the changing weather and atmosphere. A bolt of lightning could very well seem to have been sent from an angry and vengeful God, for example. Thunder could seem to be His voice, and torrential rains or floods could be taken as a sign of physical punishment being meted out. Likewise, a half moon seen in the sky could be taken as a sign that Allah had cut it in half, something that Muslims don’t seem to consider.
I spoke about this recently with a young Arab Muslim woman (replete with very Westernized blue contact lenses). She told me that Allah split the moon in two and that there is documented evidence of this cut, as attested to by NASA. Of course, she was unable to find the link when she tried to google it on her phone. I asked her if she was aware of the impact the moon has on the Earth’s axial tilt and the tides. She simply replied by saying, “Don’t you think Allah could control all of these things?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t. I would need to see the evidence. Science, facts and reason trump blind faith at every turn.”
A fellow Muslim came up to her and told her not to talk to me because I was holding a bottle of beer. The implication being that I was drunk and didn’t know what I was talking about. I wasn’t drunk. I had just opened the bottle. It was late Sunday afternoon in the UK, a perfect time to drink a cold one, and of course it’s perfectly legal to drink alcohol in public spaces in London, so I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I replied by telling the Muslim that I might be drinking alcohol, but I have never in my life been so drunk that I thought the moon could be split in two. He walked away, and I left the young woman to pontificate to the crowd who had gathered around her.
The location was Speakers’ Corner in London; a place where a person can quickly lose brain cells if choosing to participate in what passes for debate. Next, I chatted to a smiling and seemingly pleasant enough man who claimed to be a Quranist, meaning that he ignores the hadiths and follows only the Quran. I asked him if he had ever heard of the battle of Yamama. He hadn’t. This is important because it’s believed that almost all of the hafizes (those men who had memorized Muhammad’s Quran by heart) were killed. After the battle, it was left to Abu Bakr to gather up the remaining written texts and compile the Quran that is known to people today. The point being that Muhammad’s Quran can never be known, and that what he is following might not be what Muhammad had intended.
He told me he would look it up and then, in the next breath, very pleasantly told me not to worry, that he wouldn’t kill me. I was taken aback by his gleeful arrogant reassurance, and I sarcastically said to him, “Well, thank you very much. That’s very generous of you.” And I told him that he, too, shouldn’t worry, and that he can feel free to go about his business safe in the knowledge that I won’t kill him either. It is incredible to me to think that any group of people feel they have the absolute right to kill another human being at their leisure and on a whim. His lack of knowledge in relation to the Quran quickly bored me, as it led down the same path as before – ignore science and facts, and instead rely on blind faith.
There was a young, tall, caucasian Muslim man in the crowd who was wearing gaudy black and gold trousers that looked like wallpaper, the velvet kind you find in British pubs. He had fashioned a headpiece out of the same material which made him look like a Saudi sheikh who had been dressed by Versace. The material was wrapped and rolled around the top of his head and fell halfway down his back in a kind of tapering tail. I would bet money that this man’s face will appear on the front page of a newspaper in the very near future, in relation to being involved with Islamic extremism. He seemed to be religiously devout in a way that is very specific to Islam, a way that relies on a literal reading of the texts and an intense allegiance to them.
Curious, I approached him and asked him if his outfit was representative of any particular sect of Islam. He told me he had had it made to his own specifications. He didn’t have much facial hair, but what he did have he had attempted to grow into a beard. I asked him why he had decided to convert to Islam. He told me that it would take him five months to explain it all to me and that I would have grown my own long beard by the time he was done. The conversation turned to homosexuality and he told me, “In Sicily, where I am from, we beat up and we kill gays.”
“Is that what attracted you to Islam,” I asked him, “the fact that you both agree on the treatment of gays?”
He was with two Muslim friends, and I had put him on the spot. He tried to deny what he had just publicly stated and told me that “sh*t” was pouring out of my mouth. I told him I was simply repeating to him the words he had spoken only moments before. At this point, together with his friends, he started backing away from me as though I had something on me that was contagious. They didn’t turn their backs on me, they simply backed away while I stepped forward with my own verbal onslaught, shouting at him that “Islam kills gays.”
There is only so much of this denial of reality I can take, and so I decided to venture home. As I exited the park, I was reminded of another conversation I had had with a white ginger convert there. He told me that sperm is created in our backbones. By joining Islam, he had reverted intellectually. He and I had both attended the same biology classes in the UK’s school system. We were both shown how sperm is produced in the testes, but when he joined Islam he threw this verifiable information out of the window in order to believe the unbelievable.
Muslims are standing on quicksand. Their logic can’t be defended, and is easily torn apart. Every time I talk to one of them it all comes back to blind faith, the kind that ignores and denies science, physics, astronomy, logic and reason to an embarrassing degree. Other religions will throw in the towel and admit that the more sensational parts of their texts are not to be taken literally when proven wrong, but Muslims don’t. They hang on for dear life to absurdities, such as their notion of the structure of the universe (that Heaven has a physical location above the Earth). We have sent space probes to the outermost reaches of our solar system, and we have seen no evidence of seven domed layers of Heaven where sits a sea, and above which can be found eight giant mountain goats. This is the stuff of fairy tales, and yet Muslims believe every word. It’s the kind of thing that can only be believed by infantilized minds.
I’ve mentioned this to Muslims before and they’ve all said to me, “We haven’t sent the space probes deep enough.” They actually believe that eight giant mountain goats are to be found hanging around in outer space. I find myself unable to argue with that kind of logic, and Muslims don’t appear to want to challenge the absurdities to be found in their texts any time soon. Until they do, the insanity will continue.