First, start with watching the video “2011 حماده هلال أنا مصرى ” below or on YouTube. It is about the 2011 Egyption uprising and is underlaid with a song repeating “Allah Akhbar” (Allah Almighty) over and over.
If you are from a non-Islamic culture, read on. What was your impression from watching this with an analytic mind from a non-Islamic culture (the latter is just to avoid prejudice)? To me, it was astonishingly self-evident that the authors’ faith in Allah is motivated by wishful thinking: they use a notion (idea) of God to promote unity, a hope for protection and victory, motivation etc. among people who have nothing to do with each other in the first case. (Note that this sharp judgement does not relate to the Egyptian revolution itself … I wish freedom to all people in all the world, in every sense of the word … .)
Using this “idea called God” serves as a surrogate for other non-existing bonds (cultural or family), and can be used to create a nation or nation state. And all that without there being any real background behind this particular idea: God as an idea works even if there is no God, simply by people believing there is, and having unity and bonds because of that. This is not the only thing for which “God as an idea” can be used: in other cases, like in Hinduism (read the Vedas!), God is a philosophic idea: thoughts that came out of human philosophical thinking and likewise can exist without being grounded in external reality.
So what. As somebody who immersed myself in natural science for a prolonged time, I am not willing to believe in a God that is an idea only. If there is no substance to my God (Yahweh), I would stop believing. And further, I have the hypothesis that the faith in the one true, existing God (if there is one) can clearly distinguish itself from believing in idea-only Gods, and can justify itself when being compared to them. Ok and that’s the reason I search for what God does today.
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