A Conversation with Believers and Unbelievers
This English text is a machine translation of the Turkish original and may contain errors.
A Conversation with Believers and Unbelievers
Have you ever conversed with people who say they believe in God? Whether Muslim or Christian; whatever sect they may be of, they have common features in which you will hardly be able to see a difference. Some of these people are also sincere. More accurately, these are people who force themselves to believe. That is, they make an effort. To converse with these people becomes terribly boring. Why? This is, anyway, our subject. Most of the time the faith, the knowledge they speak of has no source whatever. They have believed by rote, in what they heard by ear, and they defend it. And at that with great heat, scattering foamy spit from their mouths. The things they tell and defend, however, are unfortunately just as full of absurdities. Without lengthening the talk, let me give examples, so that my writing may be more lively.
A conversation with Muslims:
God first created Adam's height as 300 m. Then Adam said: “My God, what have You done, this height is too long for me, please make it a little smaller so that I can pick and eat the fruit more comfortably”! This conversation between God and Adam, and God's bringing Adam to an ideal size only after many times, came about only with Adam's pleadings! Some animals too come with the same problems and plead, and God too does according to their wish and relieves them! This probably rests on the logic of the creatures being more intelligent than the creator!
Some time after Adam was created, he felt the need to relieve himself, and curiously fingering and fingering his excrement, he smeared it on his body, and in the places he smeared it, hairs began to grow. In short, according to them, Adam's body is hairy because he played with his filth!
The women of these people generally often see in their dreams men with radiant faces and white beards! According to them, every detail of every dream they see also has a meaning! Is he drinking water in his dream, did he go to the toilet, is he sitting, or whatever it may be, all of it must have a completely separate meaning. For this there are books of dream interpretations. Thick, thick volumes. They do not read those holy books that are God's word, but every day they are delighted to look at the interpretations of their dreams. If the conversations thicken, what more comes out, what more. Telli fathers, Nafi grandfathers, shrine-tombs, saints, the religious philosophers they have deified… To these they make vows, hold intentions, throw money. They have tied their lives, their hopes, as it were, to these.
In the very center of Istanbul, among famous shops, there was a coffin wrapped in a green cloth inside iron bars. I was a child in those times. I say a place — I could not find a name for this place that is between Sirkeci and the Egyptian (Spice) Bazaar. Every workplace had a name, but this one with no name or identity, with iron bars, empty, glassless, and a coffin inside the room! Right next to what I am describing there is a lottery-ticket seller, on its left watchmakers' shops, baklava sellers and so on. And on the coffin, money! Paper and metal money, but a time too when metal money was valuable. The glass is open — there is none, anyway. Some of the passersby throw money inside. True, I never saw anyone throwing it, but I did not stand and wait there either. There must surely be those who throw it, since that money had filled the top of the coffin. But there are iron bars in between. There are so many hungry, poor people that they are clearly afraid that a passerby, his eye reddening, might just grab that money. Even I, in my hard situations, have given a glance at the money there and passed on. If, when I stretched out my hand, I could definitely have taken it, perhaps I would have taken it. Of course I am not the only one who thinks this way, since the men made iron bars. Who collected that money, with what aim it was collected, for what they collected it, how the state permitted it, I have no idea. Perhaps it is still standing there. The shop with the empty coffin wrapped in green cloth. Of course, with the child's mind of that time, I used to suppose there was a dead person inside that coffin. I used to pass by it with sorrow.
It is easy to understand the one who collects the money there, but the one who throws the money there — believing in what does he throw it! To understand this, this is what is thought-provoking. But for a person who believes he was created with the kind of knowledge above, throwing money there too is quite normal! What other tales there are resembling those tales above — all the internet pages, the books would not suffice to tell them! And do not suppose this belief is only of the ignorant common folk. Its doctor, its engineer, its watchman, its garbage collector are of the same belief. More or less. In the Quran, in the 62nd verse of the surah An-Nahl (16):
“They attribute to God the thing which they themselves do not even like” — was not written in vain.
Let us come to our conversation with the Christians in the very center of Europe:
God is not one but three! God looked at the earth and could not understand people at all, so He became a human and came to the earth! And this is Jesus the Messiah! Yet if Jesus is the Almighty God Jehovah, why, before being killed, would he pray to God and say: “Let not my will but Yours be done”? (Matthew 26:39) Does God pray to God? According to these tales called the Christian faith, He does! According to them both are the same, but the prayer is out of “politeness”! It is not surprising to hear those in Christian logic who make such interpretations.
They also give examples. The ants began to attack, with their tiny bodies, a person who wished to help the swarm of ants. The man thought, “Yet I want to help these, but these do not understand me; so, to help the ant, one must be like an ant, must think like an ant, so that you can help!” The one who thinks thus is, according to them, God! Their knowledge in knowing God is not much different from the Muslims' God. Did a human create the ant, that they give such examples! These explanations are called demagoguery. The aim in demagoguery is to strive to make a wrong thing appear as if it were right. If we go by this logic; people invented the car, invented the engine, the spark plug. When it breaks down, we go to the mechanic for him to repair it. Until now I have not come across a mechanic who is a spark plug in order to understand that the spark plug is broken! Or, when the engine breaks down, a mechanic who is an engine in order to understand it! The one who invented these can know the reason anyway — and the one who does this is we humanity, and nothing can be compared with God — why should God, who created us, enter human form in order to understand us? Yet how clearly David tells of our creator's knowledge and ability in his psalm (the book of Psalms). In Psalms 139:13;15-16:
For You formed my kidneys; You wove me in my mother's womb… When I was created in a secret place, when I was wondrously fashioned in the deep places of the earth, my body was not hidden from You. Your eyes saw me when I was an embryo; and while none of them yet existed, all the days appointed for me were written in Your book.
What truths David voices with God's spirit, while we — what things do we believe! In chapter 139;17 it continues:
How precious are Your thoughts to me, O God.
Astonishing! While David finds God's thoughts about us precious, the Christian world believes: “God became human in order to understand humans.” And those who believe what I write are the most advanced scholars in religion. They believe thus and make others believe. And this is only one example of the most famous of thousands.
To commemorate the time Jesus was killed — though again none of them knows its true meaning — they put rabbits and eggs. It is still unknown what kind of relationship this rabbit and egg have. If they put a rooster and an egg together, then, though it would still be hard, a connection could be made. The connection between the rabbit's laying eggs and Jesus' death I, who have been among the Christians for 40 years, have still not been able to learn. While some interpret it in the sense of abundance, others believe that in that season the human body needs eggs. Even if it is so, what connection do these have with Jesus' death and God's will? Again it is unknown!
And the day Jesus was born they celebrate with men in red clothes, with white beards, giving gifts. Let us not forget the decorated pine trees! Yet what kind of connection is made in the Gospel between the pine tree and His birthday when Jesus was born in Israel is mysterious. Even if you read the Gospel a thousand times, you will not find such a thing.
And as for the reason while the evils on earth are happening: “Because God does not know what we are going to do, He looks on like that and wonders what we are going to do”! And thus God comes to possess knowledge and experience! This, supposedly, is the reason for the evils. Even those who puff themselves up saying “we are the most correct in Christian knowledge” hold this and similar belief. Is all this happening to be a lesson for God or for us humanity? According to them, it is most of all a lesson for God!
Yet in the book of Job 36:14:
Even when you say that you do not see Him, your case is before Him, wait… it says. In Isaiah 65:24 God again:
And it will come to pass that before they call I will answer; and while they are yet speaking I will hear.
Do these verses not emphasize that God possesses a feature of seeing beforehand even what we will call for before we call? In fact how happy we ought to be. God created the whole universe, what is inside it and what is outside it, and is one who is almighty over all. His power suffices for everything. He possesses understanding and is the source of wisdom. We, on the other hand, with our tales, teach our children: “How God had created Adam defective, and bless him, Adam gave the idea and we were saved”! Comparing the human with the ant, we make likenings by putting the human who cannot understand the ant in God's place. There are also those who liken God to a gardener and put the worthless weeds in the place of bad people. For this reason, just as a gardener would not want to know anything of those weeds, so God too, supposedly, does not always see the bad people and everything! (The official teaching of the Witnesses about God. They had thrown Bernd out from among them for this reason.) According to them, who the bad people are too is clear. Everyone who does not belong to them is bad! While we place these absurdities in our children's brains, do we, without shame, ease our conscience saying “I gave them the knowledge of God”?!
And especially if we begin to read God's words! Every time we read and get up, we look for a sign in everything, in every movement. Secretly we begin to see ourselves as if we were in the place of a prophet, a saint, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad. Whichever of them we find sympathetic by now. We cannot say it openly — because we know what people will say, how they will mock. But if we knew they would believe a hundred percent, we would at once proclaim that we are a prophet, an apostle, a holy one. Is there anyone who, having begun to acquire knowledge about God, does not possess these feelings? In fact, after a time we see these feelings as normal. If we do not cross the limit, of course. And to want to be a prophet is not even a bad thing. As Moses said: “Would that all the Lord's nation, everyone, were prophets.” (The book of Numbers, or in the new translation: chapter 11 verse 29 of the book of Numbers in the Wilderness) All these can happen, and even if in most cases we cannot call it bad, I wish to point out that to tell a lie is fraud and is not from God.
“If someone, while being nothing, shows himself or supposes himself to be something, he deceives himself,” says the apostle Paul in the Gospel, in Galatians 6:3.
Not only its Muslim, its Christian, its Jew — unfortunately our earth is full of such absurd information about God's truths. The things they present as God are only made-up things. Gods they have created according to their own heads, but they are not the real God. And especially the works called worship that they do in God's name are a complete disgrace.
Muslims are circumcised because God wants it. Just as it is written nowhere in the Quran, Muhammad too was not circumcised. But they make up and comply with Jewish tales, saying “Muhammad was circumcised from birth.” The feasts, ceremonies they make up according to their own heads are not few either. As I said, pages will not suffice to write them all.
The Christians, on the other hand, are even more interesting. The date they made up as Jesus' birthday and that form of celebration. Again nowhere in the Gospel did Jesus say: “Celebrate my birthday.” Let alone saying it, who said to bind oneself as if worshiping to December 24, known as “Christmas,” whose month and day are not even exactly clear and not written, and which besides they made up out of their heads, is uncertain. It is certain they do not walk in the way of the person whose birth they celebrate. And to collect votes they boastfully say in their parties “we are Christians.” Those who give that name to their parties shout at the top of their voices, for the wars that are the wish not of Jesus but of Satan: “Why do we too as a country not join those wars!” And when they come to power, they resort to every kind of way that will make humanity enemies of one another.
Missionaries who forbade marriage, saying “we want to be closer to God,” who put into people's hands the Holy Scripture and also a whip so that they might whip themselves when they sinned, and who lopped off the heads of non-Christians, are not few in history. The abominations behind the closed doors of those high, thick-walled medieval churches are by now strange to none of us. Those who burned people because they were reading the Holy Scripture in their own language were again these same ones.
And in the Muslim orders, those who skewer themselves, those who whirl round and round, those who walk on fire… what more, what more. If you look at all these religions from a distance, you would suppose you had entered a circus. And this, supposedly, they call “worship of God”! How many of us have worshiped in this way until now, I ask you? Which of you can walk on fire and whirl like a top for days? Or is sticking swords into your body and pulling them out what it means to be close to God? Is there no such person at all among you? According to this logic, so then, we are not at all close to God and will not be able to draw close!
They suppose that thus they are serving God, drawing close to Him! They also make changes in these forms of worship according to fashion. A time came, the age changed, and Christianity conformed to that time, that age — more accurately, to fashion. In some places Islam too, living the Middle Ages of Christianity, since it has seen that the times have changed, is trying to conform itself to the fashion of now. The religionists who once lopped off Çelebi's head because he flew now talk on the cell phone, which they called an infidel's invention, while in the toilet! But how many of them think of conforming to the wishes, the expectations and the truth of the real creator? Let us look at the words God said about this type of humanity. The Torah — Micah 3:5 and 11-12:
The LORD says, “O prophets who lead my people astray, you wish peace to those who feed you, and declare war on those who do not feed you… Its leaders rule by bribe, its priests teach for a wage, its prophets divine for money, and then they presume to lean on the LORD, saying, ‘Is not the LORD with us? No harm will come upon us.’”
Do these words fit these people or not? Again, what do I mean? In fact my purpose is easily understood. After conversing with such sincere believers, those who say they do not believe at all appear to us more level-headed, more logical, even more correct and trustworthy than those believers. Jesus once emphasized a truth in the form of a warning for sincere and indeed correct believers:
“…Truly the people of this age, in their dealings with people like themselves, are wiser than those who walk in the light,” he said. (Gospel — Luke 16:8b)
My words are to those who wish to know God sincerely — but the real God, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, of Jesus the Messiah, of Muhammad — and to live according to His will. Do not let them strangle God within you with tales. For they work for the fulfillment of the following prophecy and strive to lead people astray. In 2 Timothy chapter 4:3-4:
For the time will come when they will not endure sound teaching. To hear words that caress their ears, they will gather around themselves teachers in keeping with their own desires. They will stop their ears to the truth and turn aside to tales.
Let us not throw God's warnings through His prophets behind us. Perhaps someone may claim to us that he read these tales from the Holy Scripture. Speaking snakes and donkeys, staffs that become snakes, bread raining from the sky, seas that split, rivers that become blood, daughters who lie with their prophet fathers… etc. (which were not all God's will. We must not read every event in the Holy Writings in the sense that God supported it)… All these do not belittle God; on the contrary they exalt Him and were set down in writing for that. But the things people tell with their own made-up inspirations, their foolishness, their corruption, are things that belittle God, accuse Him, and insolently do not accord with the truth. Yes, there is no guarantee that we will solve the true meaning of the writings written in the Holy Scriptures right at the first reading. But God gives this guarantee to those who seek Him:
If you seek Him as you seek silver, and search for Him as you search for treasures; then you will understand the fear of the Lord and you will find the knowledge of God. Proverbs of Solomon chapter 2:4-5
Which of us says that money or gold is easily obtained? Is searching for treasures easy? Our creator too knows that these are not easy. He says that if those who seek Him also have the will to show the same effort, then they will find. Let us think only of how, for our daily livelihoods, we go to work every day and how much effort we give. Although in most countries our earnings suffice for more than our essential needs, we work even excessively in order to fulfill more of our desires and pleasures, to put ourselves under guarantee. Whereas death is, as it were, ready in all of our pockets at every moment. Without asking any material wealth of us, for an eternally happy life, why should making research for the sake of knowing the Lord, our creator, our owner, our God, seem meaningless to us? At the very least, would a person not do this out of curiosity? Even if we say of changing our life into a way of living as He wishes, “could all this be for our benefit, our happiness?” — is it not still at least worth trying? Have we not made such changes in our life for such empty, meaningless and wrong things? I gave examples, even if few, from the religions, their teachings and their practices; you read them. Indeed, most of the time they disappointed us. Whatever the religions, nations, the whole of the earth that I indicated in the subject above may do, we should wish to be as God's prophet Micah said. In the Holy Scripture, in Micah 4:5, it is written thus: