Salam.
I think I’ve been losing my faith, and hope some of you can help me out.
One of my biggest problems with Islam lays with the fact that hell is eternal. So many people say that this is due to God being just (heaven is forever so hell must be as well) but there are so many terrible Muslims out there who after being “purified” will go to heaven while there are also incredible atheists and disbelievers who will burn in hell forever. Some may argue that this is because we earn salvation through our faith, not works, but clearly this is not 100% true. We know certain sins will require us to serve a sentence in hell even if we are fully faithful in God.
Another thing I am very uncomfortable with is that God does not seem to show empathy to mankind when talking about hell. He says in the Quran that he is the most merciful and the most compassionate, but if this was true wouldn’t he realize that the path to him is tough and not as simple is it seems (also, why did he make it so difficult?)? There are so many people who think they are following the one true God. How is this bad on them? They are trying their hardest to reach God, to please him, to gain salvation from him, but just because the way they thought was correct was unfit for God they are punished forever?
Imagine that you have spent your entire life seeking God. You finally discover what you think is the one true religion. You pour your heart out to God, dedicating hours upon days upon years to him. One day, you awaken during the day of resurrection, only to find you are going to hell forever because you worshipped God in the way you thought would help you get closest to him which is not what God wanted.
There are so many people in the world who think they are advancing civilization in the form of improvements to human rights, equality, poverty, healthcare, mental health, etc. These people are dedicating their lives to improve the world around them, yet just because they do so in a way God deems unfit they suffer eternally? This doesn’t seem fair.
Perhaps an answer to my questions would be that the philosophy of God is far too complex for what mankind can comprehend, but this presents its own issues as our understanding of ethics and morals is much of all that we have. Scholars have repeatedly stated not to rely on potential scientific miracles in the Quran as doing so would be to undermine the glory of God. Leaving those aside, then, what exactly do we have? Some may refer to the acts of the prophet Muhammad, but these are based on the same worldly ideologies I mentioned. Besides, there are so many negative hadith of the prophet. Maybe these are incorrectly translated, just plain wrong, or whatever, but they do still exist, meaning the same things could have happened with the “good” hadith.
I also do not see why, if I was approaching Islam completely unbiased, I would want to pursue it. It does not put forth any groundbreaking philosophies or set of laws. There are so many things that could have helped mankind had God put them in the Quran, such as mental health/illness, spirituality, emotions, relationships, etc. Many of these things are covered in the hadith. Why, especially concerning some of the more important ones, were these not mentioned in the Quran? One example I can provide is prayer: salat is one of the main pillars of Islam and is seen as every Muslim’s duty, but our knowledge of how to perform it comes from the hadith, not the Quran. There are many controversial verses in the Quran (e.g. wife-beating, women are stupid). Perhaps people take these out of context or they were only meant for certain people. We try to justify these in different ways. The Quran is God’s eternal miracle, however, so shouldn’t its text remain applicable for the rest of the world? Even if we were able to justify these verses without using the reasoning mentioned, why does it need to be so complicated? It requires our own confirmation bias to perform this justification. Someone unbiased would see these verses in a straight-forward manner unless then being a metaphor or sign was mentioned in the Quran, which it isn’t. This leads back to one of the points I made earlier: people may get scared off by the complicated nature of the Quran, once again seeking the true God and attempting to gain salvation from him, for which they get shut down and punished for doing what they thought God wanted from them.
These are all the questions I have so far, I may come back hear to ask more if they arise. Thank you to anyone who tries to help. I haven't proofread this so please let me know if anything doesn't make sense and I'll try to fix it.
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