This is my clearest articulation of my personal faith to date. 

For the majority of my life, I would have told you that I was an Atheist, but I was lying to myself and others. I have always prayed to God privately. As a child, I knew that there was something bigger and so much greater than my life or anybody else’s. I just didn’t understand how to articulate those beliefs until this point in my life. 

Somehow, I’ve always grasped that that the Earth we inhabit is simultaneously filled with incomparable beauty and unimaginable pain— and that neither experience could not be fully described or understood by human beings, but that we were always trying in the form of the stories we tell each other. 

My parents aren’t religious people. My first memory of watching someone pray was the repetitive and hopeful prayer of Jenny in the 1994 blockbuster Forest Gump— “Dear God, make me a bird, so I can fly far-far away from here.“  

When my Dad died, there was no church service and no burial. His body was incinerated in a warehouse off Truman road on a cold and rainy day in November. My Mom tried to make me watch and I refused. On the day of his cremation, she wore Kansas concert T-Shirt that just said, “Dust In The Wind.” That’s what my Mom believes— that we are irrelevant dust in the wind.

That’s just not what I believe. 

Every day, I pray in the name of God that I will be guided to live my life the right way— the way of the people that God will favor on the Day of Judgement and not those who have lost their way. 

I worship God alone and nobody else. 

I am a monotheist, which means I believe that there is one single God and that one God is beyond compare. I also believe that I have a direct and personal relationship with God, as do all human beings. I don’t believe this relationship is inevitable, but I do believe that all human beings are born oriented towards knowing God— like a compass with a strong sense of True North. As is the case in all human relationships, sometimes the relationship is stronger than others. I believe that I have always known God and that all human beings have an innate predisposition towards finding God, eventually. 

Even my Atheist friends are still looking, whether they acknowledge it or not. 

I do not beleive that my relationship with God is special or somehow has more value than anyone else’s— or that because I have this relationship I am entitled to special forgiveness for my behavior. In the way that many would say that God is in their heart, I believe that God is always closer to me than even my jugular vein— every heart beat is something to be thankful for and I will never be able to be thankful enough or show enough grace to deserve the life I’ve been given. 

I believe all human beings are created equal in their worth and dignity— regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or social status— and that all human beings came from a single source, an all-knowing creator. I believe in the inherent goodness and purity of all human beings at the time of their birth because I believe all children are perfect gifts from God. I believe that we are only led away from God by Earthly temptations which convince us to sacrifice our relationship with God in exchange for temporary gratification. 

I believe that all human beings have a sense of “self”, a “soul”, or an “ego”— which is multi-faceted and, if not properly mastered, is as capable of driving us toward insanity via the pursuit of meaningless worldly desires (usually at the expense of other human beings). I beleive that all humans are tempted to see ourselves as masters of our own world, which we are very clearly not— another reason I believe in the temporal, fleeting, and inferior nature of this world, compared to promises of life Hereafter. I believe that the life Hereafter is one that human beings don’t fully understand, and that humanity — especially human beings who we can evidence anthropologically have lived in the last (approximately) 2,000 years— have clearly been sent people who society widely recognized as warners and prophets of God. 

I believe those warners and prophets are meant to each us how to live and provide moral lessons about what makes a good life— and yet we all still struggle with the limited comprehension of the universe inside our ultimately limited human field of metaphysical knowing. Put differently, I believe that human beings understanding of “time” and “space” — and how we experience those things during our life on Earth — is necessarily incomplete. I believe in the purity of all human beings —up to and until they are led astray by worldly desires and become perverted by people or institutions who must deny the existence of God in order to exercise dominion over people, asking fallible human beings to center their lives on Earth as all-there-is and all there ever will be. 

This is another way of simply saying, I know there is more that I don’t know. 

Because of this sincere belief, I am committed to a practice of having no intercessors between myself and God. I respect other people for their knowledge and scholarship, but not because any one of them is ever an intermediary between me and God. I believe that there are wise people who can counsel me and help me better understand God. I even believe that I should attempt to live my life in a way that mirrors many of theirs. For example, I believe that Jesus Christ was a prophet of God, but I do not believe that Jesus Christ the man is a mediator between people and God, nor do I believe that Jesus Christ is God himself nor that any part of my faith is dependent on the divinity of Jesus Christ. I believe in one God that is beyond physical description or gender and reject the idea that God necessarily is physically embodied or resembles creation or has ever been embodied in a human person.

I believe in the rejection of — and that I should attempt to repent for —  idolatry in all its forms. Whether you have prayed to statues or idolized people, I believe that our life in Modernity is insidiously full of idolatry. I believe that nationalism, materialism, celebrity worship, and our attention to media are all forms of modern-day idolatry which are damaging to the soul of human beings tempted by those behaviors, myself very clearly included. I do not believe in any intermediaries between humanity and God— for me, that includes a complete disavowal of structured religious “institutions” especially those in America which include clergy, priests, preachers, Popes, or saints. 

While I believe that the Mother of Jesus Christ (Mary) was a model of integrity, humility, honesty, patience, gratitude, and self-discipline. I do not believe this person was the literal mother of God, whose existence outside of space, time and comprehension could logically not be birthed by a human person. I believe that things we think of as “miracles” performed by Jesus Christ are actual acts that could only have occurred with God’s permission and that Jesus Christ is very much a man— albeit a very admirable man worthy of my praise — but not God. In fact, I do not believe that God is “him” or a man at all. Nor do I believe in any notion of God being physically embodied or resembling human creation or that God is my “Father”. I do not believe God anthropomorphized into the human form of a man named Jesus Christ who embodied God more than any other human beings. More accurately, I believe all human beings — Jesus Christ included — are mortal people only capable of reflecting partial and incomplete attributes of God in limited and created form. I believe Jesus Christ is one of approximately 25 major prophets or warners who have been given to humanity to help us better understand how to live and provide moral lessons about what makes a good life. I believe that miracles performed by Jesus Christ could only have occurred with God’s permission and that Jesus Christ is not literally God, because God’s existence must logically have no beginning or end and that God cannot be crucified. 

I believe that God’s power is something I will spend my life trying to comprehend, but I don’t ultimately believe that my capacity to understand, my brain, and my literal human form is befitting of the majesty of or my understanding of God. I believe God is self-sufficient and independent, with no dependence on time, space, or worldly creation. God’s power, knowledge, and mercy are unrestricted by the limitations that apply to creation. 

That’s why I call myself a Muslim. 

If you see truth in anything I’ve written here, I pray that you would consider opening your heart to the message of justice and mercy found in the Holy Qur’an.