r/DebateReligion

I am Oussama, a Muslim of Moroccan origin. I am writing to share my personal perspective as a Muslim, on the stance of Islam regarding other religions.

I am not a professional writer, but I hope the following text conveys my understanding and vision.

God created the world, the galaxies, the stars, the planets, and all flora and fauna, as well as us humans, but for what purpose did He create us?

Simply to worship Him.

Yet today, if I were to ask people from diverse cultures and backgrounds, "Which is the true religion?", I would receive varied answers shaped by their origins; for them, the heritage of their ancestors represents the right path to follow.

Today, I ask you: why do you consider your religion to be the true one?

For my part, I have reflected deeply on the origins and authenticity of Islam. I reached a very simple conclusion: the true religion must offer proof of its divine origin and distinguish itself from all others.

Personally, I view any religion lacking evidence in its scriptures or what might be called a "divine imprint" as questionable, because one cannot verify the reliability of its source.

The world today holds a multitude of religious beliefs. So, how does one identify the true religion?

To identify the true religion, one must look to religious texts to bear witness to their own authenticity.

When compared to other faiths, Islam stands out as the religion containing the most evidence within its texts, specifically regarding their mysterious origins. These texts emerged at a time when such information was inaccessible due to the lack of technology and when science was still in its infancy. Take embryology, for instance (one must be careful with the translation here, as it is necessary to look up the precise meaning of the terms used in an Arabic dictionary). Embryology which, thanks to technological progress, has been proven accurate after 1,400 years of scientific advancement along with the expansion of the universe, the Big Bang, the movement of mountains, and the "sending down" of iron (symbolizing that iron originates, in part, from space). These Quranic texts constitute irrefutable evidence that elevates the Quran above the scriptures of other competing religions.

For example, suppose I am someone searching for the true religion; if five religions are presented to me and only one is the correct one, how do I choose among them?

The method is simple: choose the one that offers evidence and distinguishes itself from the others through texts that demonstrate a divine origin or, quite simply, texts that bear a divine signature, such as a miracles. The texts of the Quran, by virtue of their origin, exhibit this characteristic.

Based on what I have explained, Islam stands out above other religions, thereby proving irrefutably that Islam is the true religion. For God is superior to all His creation, and the Quranic texts demonstrate this superiority through the imprint God left within them an imprint intended to be discovered by the current generation through scientific and technological progress, thereby proving that Islam is indeed the true religion.

If the prophet muhammad was truly meant to be an example for ALL of mankind being the final prophet, why would god make a child his wife? yes the times may have been different back then but surely god knew that there would come a time where these were not the customs in society anymore. seems ill fitting. AGAIN, this is NOT a a comparison between a 7th century marriage and modern society. this is about what it means to set a precedent for the rest of time. i’m not christian but jesus is a much more timeless example. not muhammad.
for goodness sake, the constitution of america was written with more foresight. mere humans could anticipate change and create a framework for future generations.

With science eg evidence of evolution, I think “falling victim” to a cult mentality and devoting oneself to an existence that will never be proven is frankly irresponsible, naïve, and misguided.

In times before we understood the world and one that punished individuality more so I can understand why people gravitated towards religion. But when presented with plausible proof of how our world operates and you choose to attribute it to some unknown sky being or many years old scripture that has been lost to time and translation anyway, I think there’s a lapse in someone’s judgment. The inability to question or perhaps willing ignorance to new ideas alone is a sign of lower intelligence

You could argue that everything is subjective, sure, but adding “context” to ones own experience or revelation isn’t proof. We never will have proof of anything really unless it’s tangible- even then there are no words for it other than those we have constructed with language. I’m saying, it could be God or it could just be the wind. You can’t assign your biases to everyday living, and then construct your life around it.
In science we create a reality but it’s one that is developed and relies upon each other. With a God, it is simply trust, he does not reveal himself.
Before you say- “well that can be applied to anything! So everything must be meaningless!” I guess you could argue we can truly never ever know the real version of something only what we assign to it, but I still do feel with science there’s links that can be made and you still can prove generally some ideas.
God’s earthly actions happen to occur in random, isolated instances from my understandings

And please don’t bother to question the use of intelligent quotient as a measure of intelligence because it’s just an easy metric tool and comparative that has correlations studies that actually support this. I am aware that intelligence extends beyond that. Nonetheless I’m sure non-religious people could arguably possess more EQ than average people in some ways given the senseless killings that can and do arise from religious turmoil. (and again in defense or protection of their ideology which is just hearsay)

I’m all for wanting something to look forward to I just feel like it’s wasteful and counterproductive to hope your favoured by your divine daddy for being a good little follower .

I’ve never taken an IQ test so don’t ask lol

If God exists, then he is omnipotent. Now, the Omnipotence paradox is well known. If God is all powerful, can he not build a stone he cannot lift?

Now debates can happen over the definition of "omnipotence", but I am not interested in any of those debates. I am more interested in a different aspect. First we need to isolate the root reason why theists say such a stone cannot exist.

The explanation is that God cannot build such a stone, because its a logical contradiction to the state of omnipotence of God. If God builds such a stone, he loses omnipotence, creating a logical contradiction. Hence, such a stone cannot exist.

Notice the word "logical contradiction". It means that God's omnipotence is dictated by Logic. So, God obeys the Laws of Logic. So, God is bound by logic.

Logic predictates God. So, Logic should be the ultimate bedrock of reality. We should all worship Logic, instead of God.

Muslim women being groped during Hajj suggests that maybe the Hijab is not so great in protecting women from sexual assault.

EDIT: a few good points were made by this user against my arguments:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1wwsq5u/comment/pdqjeye/

Muslims claim that the Hijab actually protects women from male advances and that it preserves modesty. In the past I've argued that the popularity of NSFW Hijab subreddits suggest otherwise. IMO that alone disproved Islam once and for all. However, right after my last Reddit post that disproved Atheism, I came across an interesting phenomenon: the phenomenon of rampant sexual abuse of female at Islam's holiest site.

This is such a problem that in 2018 it became a hashtag called #MosqueMeToo. There are also various reddit posts documenting this as well which I will link below in the Works Cited.

If the Hijab doesn't stop people from groping women at Islam's most holy site, what exactly does it do? You basically have every factor that according to Islam, in theory, would reduce the chances of this happening.

This cannot be discounted by saying "this is a small amount of people who don't mean anything" because it is prevalent enough the women going there are legitimately concerned about it.

There continues to be no evidence that the Hijab prevents sexual assault and plenty that it doesn't including this phenemonon and Hijab NSFW subreddits.

Works Cited

https://www.reddit.com/r/Hijabis/comments/1pgsvrd/umrah/

https://www.reddit.com/r/islam/comments/82xd66/i_never_told_anyone_5_womens_stories_of_sexual/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Hijabis/comments/s3v9fb/sexual_assault_during_hajj/

https://www.reddit.com/r/MuslimLounge/comments/mm3wdu/why_do_people_just_accept_the_sexual_harassment/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MosqueMeToo

1. They can't get married without the father's permission
2. They need a mahram whenever they go out
3. They're not allowed in positions of leadership
4. At best they are discouraged from leaving the house, at worst it's forbidden for them to leave it unless absolutely necessary.
5. Muslim women aren't allowed to marry Christian or Jewish men but Muslim men are allowed to marry Christian and Jewish women because children take on the religion of the father and not the wife (this ties back to point 3).

Edit: a few more points

6. Women having to be disciplined by their husbands like stated in verse 4:34. Even if we go with the most charitable interpretation that hitting just means a light tap, the message is still that women should be disciplined like they are children.

7. The followers of dajjal being mostly women, women in Islam are seen as very impressionable, you know, like children.

I want Muslims to explain to me how these rules don't imply that women are essentially children who can't be trusted to do anything themselves without distorting their meaning or straight up denying they exist. I'm very curious. Only trad Muslims will own it and admit the implications. The rest will squirm trying to justify this.

This argument is aimed specifically at forms of religious exclusivism where a person’s eternal fate depends on accepting a particular revelation, prophet, or set of historical religious claims.

I’m not talking about someone who has never encountered the religion. Imagine someone who genuinely seeks God, seriously investigates the relevant claims in good faith, and still remains unconvinced.

A person can choose whether to investigate honestly. They cannot simply choose what evidence ultimately convinces them.

Two equally sincere people can therefore examine the same competing claims and reach different conclusions.

If God is omniscient, He knows whether each person was sincere. If God is perfectly just, it is difficult to see why their eternal fate should depend on which historical revelation they ultimately became convinced was true.

Eternal punishment makes the problem stronger. Human life is finite; eternity is not. An endless punishment for conclusions reached during a finite lifetime raises a serious proportionality problem especially when the “error” was sincere nonbelief rather than knowingly rejecting something the person believed to be true.

This is not an argument that every religion is equally true, that contradictory doctrines can all be correct, or that religions cannot make exclusive truth claims.

My thesis is much narrow:

A universal and perfectly just God is difficult to reconcile with a system in which sincere failure to become convinced of the correct historical revelation can result in eternal punishment.

Thesis: If the brain generates a thought milliseconds before you’re aware of it, “free will” is more plausibly attributed to narrator effect, instead of an objective fact human minds have intuited.

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We don’t choose our thoughts. We become aware of decisions that our unconscious brain has already produced.

To be aware of a thought, neural networks must first generate, process, and propagate that signal into conscious working memory. Because by the time our biology transforms raw sensory input into a conscious, meaningful reality, milliseconds pass. Then your brain generates a thought even a few more more milliseconds later, and you become aware of it.

So conscious perception needs to act like a delayed read-out of memory. Reconfiguring experience to project a model onto reality we can use to predict future action.

Because our biology can’t wait for us to become aware of everything we need to, and decide on how to act.

Let’s be honest. You can’t even decide on what to watch. Your body definitely can’t trust your awareness to decide whether or not stepping off the curb is safe or not.

So if we don’t “choose” our actions, we just become aware of them, it is reasonable to conclude that we rely on an internal narrator effect to understand them in an ad hoc manner.

If we're accusing believers or non-believers of religious claims to be biased toward what they want to be true, how do theists have any leg to stand on? Theists believe they will live in infinite bliss for eternity after death. Atheists generally think their existence ends at death.

What possible motivation would anyone have to want the latter instead of the former? Meanwhile, people who are scared of the idea of non-existence have every reason to want to grab at any flimsy, illogical reason to believe in magic gods and afterlives to ease their fears.

"There's plenty of evidence, you just don't want to believe" is simply what theists came up with to justify their god sending people to Hell for not believing, so that they don't have to consider their god obviously evil for doing so; i.e., "Atheists just didn't want to believe, even though they had enough evidence to, so it's their own fault."

Every description of the Christian heaven I've seen, when asked how we can be happy knowing friends and family of ours who were disbelievers are burning in Hell, or asked about what we even do in Heaven if we have no earthly bodies thus don't need to eat, drink, sleep, have any need for bodies (so there's no playing games/sports/fishing/hiking/anything we did on Earth), etc., it's sort of just "You sit there glorifying God forever and are perfectly content."

That does not resemble any Earthly life whatsoever. If that is what we are in Heaven, then it is no longer "us" from Earth. We are completely different beings having nothing to do with our Earthly life.

For example, if your life on Earth was a stay-at-home mother of five and your entire life on Earth revolved around them from the first child's birth through all of their life milestones until you died, and those 5 kids were non-believers and are in Hell as you are in Heaven, but you just don't give a sht because God is so glorious, what does it even mean to say that it's "you" anymore, when nothing you did on Earth makes any difference to who you are in Heaven, apart from simply being there?

And if everything you did on Earth just goes away and is no longer relevant in heaven, then why not just let everyone in Heaven, regardless of non-belief or evil acts, etc., since they will all end up being these lobotomized God-glorifiers forever as nothing they did or didn't do on Earth makes any difference to who they now are in Heaven?

The teleological argument claims that because the universe is endlessly complex like a pocket watch it must have been designed by a conscious creator. But if you actually look at the systems conscious minds build, the analogy beings to falter.

Everything actually designed by an intelligence software, complex mathematics, human language is heavily riddled with bugs, paradoxes, regressions, and so forth. Intelligence operates on abstractions, conditionals, and symbolic logic. The very cesspool needed to breed contradictions.

If a conscious mind actually "coded" the universe, you would expect to see the fingerprints of a mind. You would find bugs in the physics, rendering glitches in causality, or contradictory laws where the creator's logic failed to compile.

But the physical universe has no contradictions (the exceptions haven't given scientist any reason to believe they a can't be solved) that haven't been debunked. It is a flawless, silent chain of hard determinism. A celestial body doesn't evaluate an if/else statement before gravity acts upon it.

If a system entirely lacks the messy, abstract, contradiction generating properties of a mind, the most logical conclusion isn't that it was built by a perfect mind. The most logical conclusion is that it wasn't built by a mind at all.

Just a random thought. Certainty wouldn't throw a QED over these half-baked thoughts.

When people question the reasoning for Jesus being created by God through a virgin birth in Islam since he isn’t viewed as God’s son in that religion, Muslims generally say it was meant to be a miracle to show how powerful God is, with the capability of doing anything. So he did that instead of choosing a man who was already alive to be his next prophet.

However, this argument has some problems, namely the fact that if it was simply meant to be a miracle, it isn’t one that could be verified by anybody.

It isn’t an obvious visible miracle that anybody could see and not have any natural explanation for. Mary simply becomes pregnant without a biological father being involved. If she had gone around saying that nobody would have any reason to believe it and would just assume her husband Joseph was the father.

The bible even states that they claimed Joseph was Jesus’ father and kept the actual circumstances to themselves. Even Joseph couldn’t be 100% sure that Mary didn’t secretly have an affair with another man if it wasn’t for angels telling him.

Basically the only person that could be 100% sure it was a miracle is Mary herself since she knows she didn’t have sex with a man. It isn’t really a miracle to show God’s power if nobody can see it or verify it. It’s not like the sea being split in Exodus, which had thousands of witnesses who could confirm it since it was an obvious visible event and actually made them realize an all-powerful being existed.

If some woman came around today in 2026 saying she got pregnant despite being a virgin, nobody would believe her. If we saw a sea or ocean being split today, tons of people would witness it and would take recordings and many atheists would start believing in God.

The claim that it was for God to show his power doesn’t work if nobody can actually see the miracle being performed.

a1- It is logically possible that God did not have a sufficient reason for creating the universe.

a2- It is logically possible that the principle of sufficient reason is violated in some cases. (from a1)

∴ Then it is not logically necessary to seek a sufficient reason for the primordial physical state. (from a1, a2)

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The only way to invalidate premise a1 is to show that it is logically contradictory for God to create a universe without a sufficient reason. However, this leads to strange consequences (such as modal collapse).

The only way to invalidate premise a2 is to necessarily show that the principle of sufficient reason is universal. To do this, it is necessary to object to premise a1.

The another way to invalidate conclusion is to show that the principle of weak sufficient reason is necessary. This principle arose as a result of narrowing the main principle. However, it is not necessary to accept this principle.

So here I will be discussing about d'Aquinas 5 ways which are used frequently as an argument for the existence of a god or anything that is related for the contingency of the universe.

-First thing is that we don't have any empyrical proof of anything happening before the Big-Bang since it is the earliest stage of Universe existence where we has proof on it. So we can't conclude if the universe is contingent or not and has a source.

-Also you need an argument or a proof of why you can apply the metaphysical concept of contingency on the Universe. Because by definition the Universe is everything that exist and stating it is contingent is a big claim.

-Then, you can state that you are able of imaginate a different universe, so by definition some will conclude that it is contingent. And it is a really weak point since imagination is abstrait and can't be used as argument for this modal claim.

- On d'Aquinas second way : "Since nothing is the efficient cause of itself, and an infinite regress of causes is impossible, there must be a First Cause that causes all subsequent effects.". Since he is using the concept of infinite, the chain is infact possible because by definition it is infinite so if you take a member of this chain there is always a member prior. (+ if every member of the chain is contingent it doesn't make the chain contingent itself so in this case the whole chain would be the universe)

-Finally, I wanna add that in meta-physics they just has impossible, necessary and contingent. But, I think it is relevant to add possible or crude fact for the existence of the universe. They are not complete different categories but they need to be argued about since the existence of the universe could just be a brute fact -something that exists without any deeper explanation for why it exists.

-So in conclusion, this isn't a refutation but critics that need to be argued about/need more empyrical/metaphysical proof to conclude on the universe contingency or not.

I'm open to any critics or just debating in general just be respectful

“So woe to those who write the Scripture with their own hands, and then say, "This is from God," that they may exchange it for a little price. Woe to them for what their hands have written, and woe to them for what they earn.”(Qur’an 2:79) 👇👇👇

“That is how things turned out for Nicanor. The city of Jerusalem remained in the possession of the Jewish people from that time on, so I will end my story here. If it is well written and to the point, I am pleased; if it is poorly written and uninteresting, I have still done my best. We know it is unhealthy to drink wine or water alone, whereas wine mixed with water makes a delightfully tasty drink. So also a good story skillfully written gives pleasure to those who read it. With this I conclude.”(2Maccabees 15:37-40) / “How beautiful are your feet in sandals, O prince’s daughter! The curves of your thighs are like jewels, The work of the hands of a skillful workman. Your navel is a rounded goblet; It lacks no blended beverage. Your waist is a heap of wheat Set about with lilies. Your two breasts are like two fawns, Twins of a gazelle. Your neck is like an ivory tower,Your eyes like the pools in Heshbon By the gate of Bath Rabbim. Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon Which looks toward Damascus. Your head crowns you like Mount Carmel, And the hair of your head is like purple; A king is held captive by your tresses. How fair and how pleasant you are, O love, with your delights! This stature of yours is like a palm tree, And your breasts like its clusters. I said, “I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of its branches.” Let now your breasts be like clusters of the vine, The fragrance of your breath like apples, And the roof of your mouth like the best wine. The Shulamite The wine goes down smoothly for my beloved, Moving gently the lips of sleepers. I am my beloved’s, And his desire is toward me. Come, my beloved, Let us go forth to the field; Let us lodge in the villages. Let us get up early to the vineyards; Let us see if the vine has budded, Whether the grape blossoms are open, And the pomegranates are in bloom. There I will give you my love. The mandrakes give off a fragrance, And at our gates are pleasant fruits, All manner, new and old, Which I have laid up for you, my beloved.”(Song of Solomon 7:1-13) / “Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.”(Luke 1:1-4) / “When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, and my scrolls, especially the parchments.”(2Timothy 4:13) / “Do your best to get here before winter. Eubulus greets you, and so do Pudens, Linus, Claudia and all the brothers and sisters.”(2Timothy 4:21)

The proof that a compassionate god exists is found in the fact that everybody, regardless of their religion, receives healing from drugs like heroine, depression, suicidal thoughts, anxiety, and more, through prayer and meditation.

I'm going to make the claim that every religion is a path to god, no scripture is truly divine and is instead prone to human error, and that if god happens to be one out of the many religions there are in the world, he still hears and responds to us to cast out our demons, regardless of which name we call.

The people who got hold of writing permissions for scripture projected their own historical, cultural, sexist views onto the pages of each holy text. Virtually all religions show signs that a compassionate and loving god exists that they have encountered, but it's not possible to write it down without butchering what happened.

Picture in your mind a guy sat there with ink and papyri, then saying "god is talking to me" then he starts writing something down. I think everybody would say "whatever he's writing, I'm not seriously going to believe that".

The truth isn't in what he wrote, it's in what he felt, and everyone is capable of feeling that same presence - it's the beam of light that heals us from addictions, depression, anxiety, etc.

As this is a debate sub, I'll be super clear about what I'm claiming: god is just god, and you can find him anywhere; he does not need a label.