Half Jewish, raised a Protestant Christian, long engaged in Islam, and with more than a passing interest in Stoicism and Confucianism, to some I'm a living effrontery to "clarity," but to myself I'm like anybody: struggling to figure out why I am here.
I don't know when and if I'll "take the plunge" and convert to Islam, or to any formal religion. The Qur'an means so much to me, but so does the Song of Songs in the Bible. I practice the salat everyday, but also attend church on Sundays and the Pesach is my favorite holiday of the year. Jesus is my Lord and Savior, Muhammad my Prophet, and Moses my people's Redeemer.
Jew, Christian, Muslim: my three identities make sense to me, they are part of me, and I don't so much move between them as they move within me, like oil paints mixing in a bowl. It's gotten to the point where I think of the three religions as a family, a single monotheism of varying expressions.
I'm a radical when it comes to religious tradition. I question the entire notion whenever it is used to mean a clear and coherent body of information that is static in nature and to which the pious must submit. The sanctity we moderns give tradition is a specious myth we tell ourselves to feel secure in an insecure world. All that the shariah, canon law, and halakha really are is institutionalized custom from eras past; little of it is divine edict.
The traditions that we possess today are the cumulative expression of our ancestors' struggle to adapt and evolve to the vicissitudes of time. If we want to honor our forefathers we must adapt and evolve ourselves. True piety, then, is to re-create our religion and build a foundation for future generations to do the same. Surrendering our lives and souls to dead vocabularies and dead forms, and numbing our minds with historically innaccurate doctrines, is a slap in the face to our God. We risk leaving spiritual ruins for our children to inherit. What greater blasphemy could there be than that?
I believe in God, and I believe in the theory of evolution. In fact, I'm fiercely intrigued by questions of our origins, and our future. I often think of the verse from the Qu'ran, "Mankind is destined to march from state to state" (N.J. Dawood).
Some of my favorite books:
The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski;
Lost History: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers, and Artists by Michael Hamilton Morgan;
The Ancient Orient: An Introduction to the Study of the Ancient Near East by Wolfram von Soden;
The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans by G.J. Sawyer, et al;
The Meaning of Others: Narrative Studies of Relationships by Ruthellen Josselson, et al;
Thinking Through Confucius by David Hall and Roger Ames;
Before and After Socrates by F.M. Cornford;
The Master and Margarita by Mikail Bulgakov;
Solaris by Stanislav Lem;
Contact by Carl Sagan;
Earth X by Alex Ross and Jim Krueger;
"Hymn" and other poems by A.R. Ammons.
When all is said and done, I want to die a cool old man. In the meantime, my dream is to get my PhD from a significant university, and to become a kick-ass scholar and professor. Even if I have to sell a kidney to do it, one day I'll scrounge together the money to pay for training in archeological methodology.
