Sujit Das

The Allah Delusion Sujit Das

Islamic faith is a blind belief in a supernatural divine power that controls human destiny. Prophet Muhammad claimed to have communicated with Allah in a prophetic trance, but in the cold-eyed view of a trained psychiatrist his religious ecstasy was very similar to an epileptic seizure and schizophrenia hallucination which manifested itself by convulsive attacks and clouding of consciousness. Hallucinatory drugs can also cause misperceptions of reality. Hence, the people who are under the influence of drugs can also claim to communicate with Allah. When Allah revealed the Qur'an to Muhammad no one shared his experience so that anyone who believed in him had to take his word. But even if a great number of people put blind trust in his claims, sharing beliefs with many people does not prove that Allah exists. The strength of a blind faith cannot materialize or give life to the creature of a fantasy. When many people shared his false beliefs about reality, it became a mass delusion - THE ALLAH DELUSION. Our commonsense says if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck and swims like a duck, then certainly we are dealing with a duck. When it comes to Allah's religion however we change our perceptions. If it acts like a lunatic, if it often hallucinates like a schizophrenic and if it has all the symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy, it must be the Holy Prophet of Allah! Scientific advance of human civilization and the theological retreat of Allah are interlocked. Even though science had not specifically disproved the existence of God, science has thrown such a flood of light upon Allah and his Qur'an that now Allah can be regarded as a paper tiger - a harmless, spineless scarecrow - a figment of Muhammad's private fantasy. Without context and chronology, the Qur'an becomes a meaningless and disjointed rant of a schizophrenic. Islam is clearly a losing cause. Though THE ALLAH DELUSION is the main theme, this book addresses another important issue - militant atheism, if emerges as a blind faith in the godlessness, is equally dangerous like Islam. Though moral values can be separated from the belief in a God and atheism does not necessarily lead to moral bankruptcy, fanatic atheists are just as capable of moral atrocities as are theists. Militant atheism is an intellectually bankrupt fallacy very similar to Islamic theocracy.