Tree of knowledge

Tree of knowledge

Extracted from Ali Sina's autobiography

(From) The treacherous passage to enlightenment

AFTER bitter experience with the Quran I found myself traveling on a torturous road riddled with torments. I was kicked out of the blissful garden of ignorance, where all my questions were answered. There I did not have to think. All I had to do was believe. Now, the gates to that garden were closed to me forever. I had committed the unthinkable sin of thinking. I had eaten from the forbidden tree of knowledge, and my eyes had been opened. (Bible, Genesis 2:17). I could see the fallacy of it all and my own nakedness. I knew I would not be let into that paradise of oblivion again. Once you start thinking, you don't belong there anymore. I had only one way to go and that was forward. …
For the first time, the Internet has changed the balance of power. Now the brutal force of the guns, prisons and death squads are helpless and the pen is almighty. For the first time Muslims cannot stop the truth by killing its messenger. Now a great number of them are coming in contact with the truth and they feel helpless. They want to silence this voice, but they cannot. They want to kill the messenger, but they cannot. They try to ban the sites exposing their cherished beliefs, sometimes they succeed momentarily, but most of the time they don't. I created a site to educate Muslims about true Islam. I hosted it at Tripod.com. The Islamists forced Tripod to shut it down and they cowardly complied to appease them Muslims. I got my domain and the site was back again in a couple of weeks. So the old way of killing the apostates, burning their books and silencing them by terror does not work. They cannot stop people from reading. Even though my site is banned in Saudi Arabia, Emirates and many other Islamic countries, a great number of Muslims who never knew the truth about Islam are being exposed to the truth for the first time, and are shocked. …
Doubt is the greatest gift we can give to each other. It is the gift of enlightenment. Doubt will set us free, will advance knowledge, and will unravel the mysteries of this universe. Faith will keep us ignorant.
One of hurdles we have to overcome is the hurdle of tradition and false values imposed on us by thousands of years of religious upbringing. The world still values faith and considers doubt as the sign of weakness. People talk of men of faith with respect and disdain men of little faith. We are screwed up in our values. The word faith means belief without evidence; gullibility also means belief without evidence. Therefore there is no glory in faithfulness. Faithfulness means gullibility, credulity, susceptibility and easy to fleece. How can one be proud of such qualities?
Doubt on the other hand means the reverse of the above. It means being capable of thinking independently, of questioning, and of being a skeptic. We owe our science and our modern civilization to men and women who doubted, not to those who believed. Those who doubted were the pioneers; they were the leaders of thought. They were philosophers, inventors, and discoverers. Those who believed lived and died as followers, made little or no contribution to the advancement of science and human understanding.

Compiled by Apt