Day 8 - Religious Belief Picklist (or) Build Your Own Religion

It is interesting to me how politically charged the religious choice is.

For instance, Catholics are very much against abortion, and also against family planning and contraception.
This is somewhat related to religious beliefs, I guess. If you believe that life begins at conception,  it is obviously against the law of "do not murder" (do not take a life) to have an abortion. I'm not sure where the Bible discusses condoms, but perhaps I've just missed it.

Muslims are against eating pork. They are joined in this belief by Jews, Hinduists, vegetarians, and members of PETA. This is based on Old Testament directives from God that pork is unclean and to avoid eating it.

While I may or may not believe that saying a prayer over food before its killed, before its cooked, before its sold, or any variation therein, changes the food composition or changes the spiritual attachment of "good" or "evil" to that food, I do see the advantages of abstaining from some of the following list...

Unclean (and thereby inedible) animals in the Old Testament for Jewish people are in The Bible, Leviticus, Chapter 11:

Camels, Coneys, Rabbits (who knew?!), Pig (poor pig, gets a bad rap in every religion), Anything that lives in the water that does not have fins and scales (ie, turtles), Eagles, Vultures, Kites, Ravens, Owls, Hawks, Osprey, Heron, Bat, All insects EXCEPT grasshoppers, locusts, katydids, and crickets; Anything that has paws, Lizards, Weasels, Rats, Geckos, Monitors, Wall Lizard, Skink, Chameleon...

The Muslim list is similar and found in the Qur'an Sura 5, and references throughout. One key difference is that Islam does not allow for consumption of alcohol, saying it is "abominations of Satan's handiwork." It does make reference to alcohol a couple times prior to this that could be construed in favor of drinking: saying don't pray while you're drunk (implication: its ok to be drunk as long as you're not praying), then that alcohol has good and evil but more evil than good (but still, there are some GOOD parts, right?). However, the final ruling appears to be the abomination ruling, and that alcohol is meant to distract you from praying. Makes sense, better safe than sorry, I guess.

While the fact that they don't eat pepperoni on their pizza doesn't earn them an "Un-American Card", similarly benign things seem to polarize the American public about their religion. Take the hijab for instance: It is their choice, just as it is my choice whether I want to wear pink hair or shave my head bald, or wear a baseball cap. Why is wearing a head scarf a more polarizing choice than hamburger as a pizza topping rather than sausage? It doesn't affect the non-hijab wearer any more than your personal pizza topping choice. Yeah, I might be judged if I pulled a Brittney Spears and shaved my hair, but I wouldn't be labeled "Un-American" (unless I also sported a swastika tattoo or something).

How about prayer five times a day? Is the call to prayer, said in a language other than English, the chosen language for America, the part that is Un-American? Or is it the fact that they are praying five times a day? Or perhaps the fact that they call God - the same God as the Christians have, by the way - by the name of "Allah" rather than "God"  (not that it is a different name, only a different language)?

And back to the abortion issue, you don't see Muslims blowing up abortion clinics to save the unborn children, murdering abortion doctors, or making their children hold graphic signs of aborted fetuses on the side of the road to invade the visual freedom of the American public driving by... instead they just encourage their members to make the choice that would please God and they leave the domestic terrorism to the Christians in that department.

It is, in my mind, illogical to associate the Muslim practices with not being American. Religion and Patriotism are not mutually exclusive, or choices dependent upon one another. The first Americans, those that formed this country, while they held strongly to a set of religious beliefs, they were not what we would label "mainstream Christians" today... they were so FAR outside the norm of mainstream Christianity due to their practices and beliefs that they had to move around the globe in order to be accepted! I can pretty much guarantee that  we would look at those first Americans with the same raised eyebrows that we observe the groups who dance with venomous snakes in their services.

By the same token, when did it become acceptable to build your religion like you build a salad at Sweet Tomatoes? "I'm taking the lettuce, but no tomatoes, please."

What? No tomatoes? But Tomatoes are the crux of the salad! In fact, you cannot have a salad without tomatoes! A salad without tomatoes is NOT a salad. It is just a pretend salad. There are no salads without tomatoes because if you have no tomatoes it negates everything else that you have on there. You may have lettuce, cheese, croutons, salad dressing, and bacon bits (none for our Muslim friends), it may be exactly like my salad except you didn't take tomatoes, but in my mind, you do not have a salad. You just have a jumble of veggies on a plate covered with salad dressing.

How silly, in my mind, that we make these distinctions, and yet, as Christians we abandon our own laws and beliefs in favor of more 'culturally relevant' behavior. The New Testament clearly says that women should cover their heads and dress modestly, yet I go to church and I'm not seeing head coverings OR modesty a lot of times. When did our religious context become a salad bar where we ranked the ingredients and said "although some of these are optional (bacon bits, croutons), your salad is not real unless you have tomatoes."

One of the things I admire about Muslims is their adherence to the laws of their religion. They believe God is pleased by x.They desire to please God, therefore they will do x. It makes sense.
But if A = B and B = C, how is it that the conclusion drawn by the modern American Christian church (and probably American religion in general) is:

If A=B and B=C, then
A = Tomato

B and C are irrelevant

I think Paulo Coelho had it right when he said "We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. It's one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it's another to think that yours is the only path."

Day 7 - Choices

"There's a way in which each of us makes small choices every day, and after a period of time, those choices develop into a pattern, and we might be thought of as choosing our "Selves."  So each moral, ethical choice forms our identity, and as we move forward... We choose our way into being ourselves."
Beyond Belief, a documentary about 9/11.

I wonder sometimes where you draw the line between choosing a religion/a way to worship God, and choosing God himself. Where do the lines blur between Ritual, Real, and Relationship?

Last night, my best friend and I were talking about the appeal of Islam. I said that most of the women I've met have chosen Islam, not out of lack of other choices, but because they have explored other religions and found Islam to be the one that spoke to them. After lunch with some Muslim friends yesterday, one thing I underlined three times was that Islam is a religion of SEEKERS. These women were seekers, they were trying to find the way and the truth. They sampled other religions - Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, Catholicism, and ISLAM was the one that stuck for them. Why?
My best friend and I wondered if it might be the clarity of Islam - it leaves nothing to speculation: if you do this ___ you will reap this ____. There are no variations of "good." Either you pray five times, and perform the ceremonial washing, or you dont. There are no two ways about it, almost as if you have a checklist and you can go down it, at the end of the day saying "Yes (or no), I have been a good Muslim today." It is concrete, it is measureable. It is real.

But my question is, in any religion, how do you discern when you cross from ritual into real and from real into relationship?

Day 4 - Becoming Who I AM

One of the most charming facets of Islam (can I call it charming without appearing condescending??) is the concept of conversion. Islam teaches that all humans are born with an inate desire to know God, and more, with a spirit and soul that longs to return to its creator. The nature of humankind, in Islam, is to revere, and fellowship with, its Creator. When a person embraces Islam, then, they are simply reverting to their natural state, that of being in relationship with God.

Convert v.:

1. To change (something) into another form, substance, state, or product; transform
2. To change (something) from one use, function, or purpose to another; adapt to a new or different purpose
3. To persuade or induce to adopt a particular religion, faith, or belief
4. To exchange for something of equal value

Conversion requires a complete change - from who you are and who you have been until now to who you should be. Conversion in most religions requires abandoning who you were and becoming a new person altogether. Convert means changing your chemical makeup.

... like maybe this:

becoming this:

 

Revert v.:
To return to a former condition, practice, subject, or belief

Reversion means to return to how you were - become who you were. In Islam, you revert to your natural state or relationship with God, and you embrace who you ARE, not who you should be.

What an amazing point of view, because, truly, I was made for relationship with my Creator and with the Universe, and the idea of stripping away everything I think I should be and everything I try to be to please everyone and becoming simply who I AM is a comforting and peaceful prospect. So far, it is the thing that impresses me and touches me most about Islam.

I imagine it something like this:

 

 becoming this:

Does God really want to change us?

...Or does he just want us to be who he made us to begin with?

Day 3 - About Me

I feel like I should go back and address why I'm doing this project on a personal level. I am very interested in all of the parts and pieces and theoretical that I have mentioned, but in addition to that, this is a very personal spiritual journey for me.

Raised Christian in a deeply religious family and community,  I learned from an early age to reject those things that were not like me. Remember the Sesame Street bit "One of these things is not like the others"? I saw one perspective of God and all the other perspectives were dismissed as "Wrong."

I think people may get the idea that I am angry with all Christians or that I need to bad-mouth them out of some revenge for wrongs against me, and while I have been hurt many many times by Christians in my life, I do not blame that choice on their religion. They are simply human beings, making poor choices, probably out of pain. My pastor used to say "Hurt people hurt people" and that rings true for me.

Personally, I feel that I have witnessed too many Christians (myself included) using Christianity, being "right", "God's Will" and the "great commission" as an excuse to feel validated and purposeful in their existence. At its worst, we Christians have used these things to gain power, prestige, and to rule over other people and take away their freedoms. While we are not the only people in the world who are hurting others in an effort to ease our own insecurity, I feel that we, as Christians, need to take responsibility for the failure to give love, grace and acceptance to the people around us. The Christian faith is not about judgment, it is about Grace. It is not about hatred, or separation or discrimination, it is about Love. I am not the first one to say this, but it bears repeating.

That being said, I tend to believe that the path to God is not so narrow as anyone would have us believe. If God created us for relationship, and desires us to know him and see him, I wonder that he would make it so difficult and tedious to reach him.

I also have begun to feel over the years that, although my context of God is different than others, perhaps it is possible that I am not seeing the whole picture. Maybe I'm just seeing a little piece, and there is another piece that someone else sees, and another that a third person sees.

It made me wonder, how their perspective of God changed who they are - because my perspective of God definitely changed me, but what if I had seen their perspective? Would it have made me a different person than I am now? I began to plan my journey to see other perspectives of God and one night in the planninng process, I went to bed and had a dream that brought it all together for me:

I’m sitting in a completely empty room, thinking and contemplating about my life. I actually think that this room is my mind, so I'm sitting in my own mind. I’m remembering the past three years. Not the literal past three years, more the past three portions of my life:

I am remembering the first year, which I spent searching for God in church. I went to Christian churches and I followed my traditions, and I searched for him. I had the feeling that I found a part of him there, but it was an incomplete picture.

The second year, I searched for him all over the world, in temples of other religions. I was looking for him in faces and places of worship everywhere else in the world, and I found a part of him there, but again, an incomplete picture.

The last year, I was alone with myself. I remember thinking this was the most uncomfortable time for me – being alone with my thoughts, with myself, with my past. I found him there too, in a personal accessible way.

As I pulled out of the room of my mind, thinking about the things I had seen, and the places I had gone to search for God, I looked back on the room that was my mind. I saw myself sitting in the floor, surrounded by a circle. The circle was like a flow-chart circle with three different sections, but all connected. And I saw year one, year two and year three like a cycle. And the thing is, in each section, I did not find a complete picture of God, but together, I saw a circle and a complete picture of myself and God, and what it was supposed to be for ME.

Today, as an American woman, I find myself in a paradigm of existence. The "traditional woman" - the stay at home, "Christian" wife and mother - vs. the "empowered woman" who is apparently put into another box - the box that says, to be empowered and successful, you must have a high-powered career, beat men, have degree(s), have a family with well-balanced children, and be an amazing wife, lover, friend, as well as take over the world. neither of these sit with me.

I am a proponent of dreams.

Of seeking truth.

Of believing in destiny.

And it is my hope that through this project, I (and maybe someone else) will see more of God, and perhaps more of themself as a woman.

Day 2 - Note on Making Religion Accessible

When I was considering what religions to explore, I decided to go with the largest six religious groups in the US. It seemed the only fair thing to do, considering that we in the US have at least 313 religions actively practiced, according to an independent study performed by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (the study can be found here: http://www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/research_briefs/aris.pdf) . 85% of households identified themselves as religious. Of those 85%:
more than 90% identified themselves as Christian (including Catholic, Mormon, and Jehovah's Witness)
1.7% suscribed to Judaism as their religious preference
0.7% were Muslim
0.6% were Buddhist
0.5% were Hindu
and 0.4% were Unitarian

Those were the top 6, and definitely the most prevalent accross the nation.

I set out to find out some information about these religions, and, because I really prefer books, I went online to see what I could find. I wondered how these religions get their information out there: is it purely online? Can I order materials from their websites? And will it be free or inexpensive? Because this could get expensive.

The first one I went to, even though it wasn't on my list, was Scientology. Scientology had a bad rap, from what I could tell - full of "crazy people who do bizarre things and believe in aliens." Their book had to be pretty good.  The scientologists did offer one free book on their website: A catalog, out of which you can order their extensive library. Must reads for beginners: Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, the flagship book of Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard. $20 on the scientology.org website. There were 8 more books on the beginners reading list for Scientology. Thats...$140 to be a beginner Scientologist.

Mormonism was my second stop, and they offered a free book of Mormon, which I quickly signed up for. They also offered personal delivery of the book, which I wished I could opt out of, but didn't have the option.

Interested to see if my own religion offered any free books, at least a free Bible maybe, I searched for a Christianity website. I found an article on about.com titled "How to get a free Bible" (without stealing it from a hotel room). There were a couple websites that offered copies of the Bible for free including freebibles.net  and freebiblesociety.org. The website also suggested hitting up a local church for a free Bible. I didn't need a Bible, since I have a few around, so I moved on.

When I arrived at why-islam.org, I found to my delight a completely free welcome-packet for new or prospective Muslims. I signed up immediately. A few days later, I recieved my packet, and it was in a huge box. My box included: 7 books on Islam, a Qu'ran, a prayer rug, a head scarf, a magazine, and some other handouts. WOW. I was overwhelmed and I hadn't even started!

I think marketing the religion and making it accessible to people - particularly young people on the internet - is important in growing your religion. In my opinion, I don't know how else you do it, to reach my generation and those younger than me.

Day 2 - Whats that? Its a muslim on a moped!




If only I could capture the looks on people's faces when they see me around town. Although my Muslim friends say that they don't notice the stares and the general feeling of alienation that I am feeling on Day 2 of my 30 Days of Islam, I find it hard to imagine getting used to this.

Getting gas, a man dressed like a homeless person and driving an Acura stared at me for a full minute before walking around the gas pump to get a better view.

At the costume shop with my best friend, the cashier noted the irony of my "looking for a costume" when my religion comes equipped with one.

At lunch, the waitress conspicuously avoided eye contact, and the manager talked to the window above my head. Actually, that may have been polite, since technically Muslim women shouldn't make eye-contact with men anyway.

And the looks when I'm riding Clementine? Well... as you can see above, I stick out anyway riding an orange scooter, but with my hijab I'm followed like a rock star! Rock on!

Day 2

After my initial conversation with my boss (pre-day 1), we had a follow-up conversation. I asked the obvious questions:
"Are you telling me that we wouldn't hire a Muslim who wore a head covering?"
Well, I'm not saying that exactly, I'm saying that we would have a choice if they wore a headcovering to the interview, and we would know if we hired them what they would be wearing to work. Its the same with people who don't shave their beards for religious reasons. We have a choice when we interview them, and if we know they won't comply with our policy, it is our choice not to hire them.

"So, if I converted to Islam? I couldn't wear my head covering to work?"
Well, I guess if you converted, there's not much we could do about it. I just don't understand why you can't just change your project. Do it on aging and femininity or something.

Really. Not much you could do about it? I'd say so. This IS 2010, after all! And changing my project because you feel uncomfortable seeing me in a hijab after six months of planning? I don't think so.

Respectfully, however, there are obvious inconsistencies in your ruling:

• Every year, we have an office Thanksgiving and Christmas party. You say a prayer before the meal at both occassions. Most of the time you end that prayer with "in Jesus name, Amen."
• We line up an employee or employee's wife to pray before our Company-wide convention every year.
• We set up a Christmas tree in our office every year the day after Thanksgiving.
• You send out messages to employees every day, and many times those are religion-related.

What I see here is a duplicious attitude. I am not allowed to wear a head covering which does not distract from my job performance, and does not impede my productivity. However, celebrating Christian holidays, wasting company time praying and setting up a Christmas tree - these things do indeed distract the office and impede productivity. I am not opposed to these things myself, but I am opposed to the attitude of discrimination you are portraying  as our company policy. The thing is, Mr. Boss Man, I am part of the majority. I have spent my life calling myself a Christian. But that doesn't mean that I can prohibit the rights of others to practice their own beliefs!

On another note, I went to lunch today and noted an interesting phenomenon. People don't make eye-contact with me. Not that they are mean to me, or rude, or anything, but they won't look at me. In a party with my two co-workers, the waitress looked at them, but not at me. I was wondering why that is and the only thing I came up with is the fact that they are overcompensating for not staring by not looking at all.

My friends and family have had mixed reactions. I come from a military family, both my brothers are Marines who have served in the current War on Terror, and have been shipped overseas to Iraq three times each. I am myself former military, although I never served overseas. I come from a Patriotic family, and I am very Patriotic and supportive of our military. I expected the worst when I told my brothers, my mom and my dad about the experiment. Their first reaction was rather what I expected: disbelief, anger, incredulity, thinking I was crazy. However, when I explained the project, my family understood and came around to my perspective. They are very supportive of me.

My friends have had mixed reactions as well. I get alot of well-meaners telling me that Islam treats women poorly, Islam is responsible for 9/11, Islam is evil... and I understand their perspectives. I have some of the same questions, and have been asking my Muslim friends the same. However, I know, as an educated Christian, I have seen scriptures in the Bible that directly promote violence toward other religions. Taken out of context, they promote murdering homosexuals, killing people of other faiths, and enslaving women and children. This is in the Christian Bible. Is it surprising that the Qu'ran has a few of its own "violent" scriptures?

But these are all pre-conceptions I will be studying as I learn more about this religion and immerse myself into its culture.