part two:
Mosouka:
I guess it all started in high school, back then, when I started reading, see in highschool I had two main phases:
the one where I was spending my day playing video games and the part when I saw that there is a life outside that sweaty room with a 3-day old spaghetti and a big ass screen that kept my eyes occupied.
And when I came out of my cocoon, I started doing whatever I could set my eyes in, all kinds of hobbies you can think of;
I wanted to be the most talented, coolest, most successful man in the world; a professional NBA player/ hip hop dancer/ runner/ writer/ that guy who knows everything… But no human can be all that at the same time, so I said to myself: “my mom told me I could be anything in the world, so I’m going to be a unicorn! It can do all that probably.
Hahahaha, Nah, I’m just kidding. That’s not it.
Like I said, one of the things I wanted to be is the guy who knows everything. To do that, I had to read I had to research.
And so I started with the subject of religion, it sounded like a good start since religion covers the whole scope of life plus I’ll probably learn some social skills since it’s the syllabus for our society’s morality.
Now religion is a vast subject with endless sub religions, and the best way to cover such a topic it’s to move slowly from one sub-subject to the other. Thus Christianity was my first choice since a Christian environment surrounded me, I bought the Holy Bible and divided it into a day’s read that’ll help me finish it in 3 months ~ about thirty minutes a day.
But to read the book alone surely isn’t enough, I had to read interpretations, talks, discuss with professionals and of course, try to live that way, after all, Christianity like any other religion is a lifestyle. Hence one of the most remarkable things I’ve been through at that time was “Fresh” (A modern-Christian international organization) intending to spread a better way to have a healthy life with the help of God and Jesus-like way of life to school-kids mainly high schoolers.
One of the ways they used to share it with us would be for the ‘guides’ as they called themselves would to come to our school, interact with us giving us the friendliest experience, and at the end, inviting us to their meetinghouse every week. Good marketing strategy.
The crowd there was entertaining and active, filled with ice breakers. It gave room to school kids that didn’t have a place to go (because of course back in Wahum, there is nowhere to go for some). It was a social scene. But the essential part at the end was the talks they gave about God. The organization based in “Al Motahashera,” the most powerful country in the world, but of course, you’ve heard of it.
Back there Fresh would have a much more active experience because they had all the tools they need,
The guides from our house meeting would pick ten kids each year to travel with and show them the whole experience, this all, of course, to present to us how good it is to live in the way of God. So one year I was lucky, and they offered me a ticket, but, I had trouble with my dad back then because it was costly and because Ashlyn and I did some bad things in school, but with the help of my friend Solomon, we convinced my dad that it’s a good idea to let me go. It was pretty much like any other sleepover camp that I’ve been to in my country but with much more fun stuff to do because they had the resources. But I still loved it, I mean who wouldn’t it was the dream life, you have everything at your disposal food, community, and most importantly a clear path that lets you know where to go. No need to search for any meaning or question what’s right and what’s wrong; it’s all there. Everything was perfect.
But it would always get interesting when you start looking behind the curtain when you start asking a question that you shouldn’t ask.
Now they would never say that they didn’t like these questions; in fact, they had these people who were there to answer every question you have, but is that what you want?
I mean some questions we don’t already know, and maybe we should look further to answer them, some we shouldn’t even know and most importantly in a subjective fast-paced changing deceptive world like this how can we stick to a scripture that is a thousand years old that couldn’t be proven right.
Even if it did, what if the world had changed, what if the spirit theory that we believe in is something else entirely.
But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
I can’t deny that this life that I’ve experienced over the years, the Christian one, is phenomenal. I mean the fun we had the easy ways it was to get to know people and make friends, the moralities we had like I said it is perfect, but It’s too perfect, see after reading the scripture I’ve discovered that it’s not all rainbows and sunshine.
This life, if you had to live by the book, you’d have to do terrible things (in the eyes of our modern society) to showcase your true belief. It was okay back then to be a slave and be enslaved, sacrifice animals or humans on some occasions, and the rules, some of the rules were just baffling.
I’m not going into that, into the fact of how God works through punishments~sacrifices to save humanity, because who am I to question God. In the end, that was in the past, the son of God rescued us from such horrors and the wrath of God:
Deuteronomy 29:22-28
And the next generation, your children who rise after you, and the foreigner who comes from a far land, will say when they see the afflictions of that land and the sicknesses with which the LORD has made it sick – the whole land burned out with brimstone and salt, nothing sown and nothing growing, where no plant can sprout, an overthrow like that of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim, which the LORD overthrew in his anger and wrath – all the nations will say, “Why has the LORD done thus to this land? What caused the heat of this great anger?” Then people will say, “It is because they abandoned the covenant of the LORD, the God of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt, and went and served other gods and worshiped them, gods whom they had not known and whom he had not allotted to them. Therefore the anger of the LORD was kindled against this land, bringing upon it all the curses written in this book, and the LORD uprooted them from their land in anger and fury and great wrath, and cast them into another land, as they are this day.”
In the end, both new and old testaments provide excellent order to those who need it and a great way of living which no one has the right to object to, and if you’re the type of person who lives for his happiness and health with no critical thinking involved I strongly advise you to live that way.
Sid: “Well, you surely have a strong opinion over Christianity, but don’t you think what you just told me could be a bit disrespectful?”
“No, I don’t because as stated before I didn’t and still don’t have any problems with the community but with their scripture, the origin of their belief and how it evolved to adapt with society’s new ways of living with complete denial and most importantly the amount of critical thinking that is needed in this type of life.
Well, mostly, I could go on this all day, but we have much more to cover, but not much time to.”
So after I finished the bible, I started reading the Quran, and of course, with interpretations (much more), talks, questions, and experience the life of Islam.
Retroveens 