Why I stopped Believing In A Lot Of Things
Why I Stopped Believing
In A Lot Of Things
“Monotheism has seemed to me little more than a philosophic construct and mishmash of everything else, and in many cases it is proven so.”
This conclusion didn’t come from a single disagreement, but from repeated inconsistency found to be textual, historical, and interpretive.
This also includes a lot of fictions and bad arguments of so called "brighter/smarter" atheists and non-theists often proving themselves, I dare to say, wrong and not that "smart."
What initially appeared as distinct religions began to look like layered systems of borrowed ideas, evolving reinterpretations, and post-hoc rationalizations designed to preserve doctrinal stability rather than factual coherence.
The result was not immediate rejection of spirituality, but growing skepticism toward institutionalized claims of certainty or when asked about somethings written in texts by those who are supposed to be knowledgeable teachers, they responded with "some things are not meant for us to understand." Nonsense! If it wasn't meant to be understood it would never have been written in the first place!
Christianity: Prophecy, Conflict, and Reinterpretation
My first major rejection was Christianity. I was raised in multiple versions of it through different family branches, each with conflicting interpretations and emphases. These contradictions were not subtle—they were foundational.
The most decisive rupture came from its apocalyptic framework, particularly the Doomsday narrative.
I encountered the claim attributed to Jesus in Matthew 24:34:
"Verily I say to you, this generation may not pass away till all these may come to pass."
Is the so called Creator of the cosmos and everything here, unable to tell time or measure time despite plenty of samples where the concepts of time are expressed clearly and even the Sun, Moon and Stars are noted as tools for that purpose?
Several generations have passed since such interpretations were formed, yet the anticipated fulfillment has not occurred.
The response pattern I later observed was consistent:
Reinterpret “generation,” shift meaning into metaphor, or move fulfillment into symbolic or spiritualized timelines. In many cases this goes into later and modern texts/Bibles to mislead the next generation by intentional rewording and likewise distortions.
It's one thing to be proven wrong, learn from it, accept it, make corrections and move on. It is entirely something else to know you are wrong, proven wrong and still cling to what you know is wrong which I find inexcusable because it's being stupid on purpose.
If you have to rewrite something to force it to fit in with your inability to accept what is claimed is false, you are not only a liar of the worse kind, but a willing deceiver of future generations out of your own weakness and selfishness.
What stood out was not just the failed prediction itself, but the structural inability to allow it to fail. Instead of falsification, which even the scriptures encourage debate over to falsify claims, the system put into place absorbs contradiction through reinterpretation.
This pattern of apocalyptic literature is a force of destructive cults:
They manipulate the delayed fulfillment that lends to both manipulation into claims of urgency and forces doctrinal adaptation rather than abandonment.
This mechanism, historically, has also been implicated in the persistence and transformation of various millenarian or doomsday sects, where expectations are not discarded but reconfigured after failure.
Judaism: Textual Layers and Theological Manipulation
My critique of Judaism centered less on moral claims, which it has far too many that Christianity inherited or hijacked depending on how you look at it, and more on textual and linguistic structure.
A recurring issue is the treatment of Elohim—grammatically plural in form but typically translated as singular when referring to the God of Israel. Traditional explanations frame this as a “plural of majesty,” while critical scholarship often interprets it as evidence of earlier polytheistic or henotheistic stages that were later consolidated into monotheism.
This interpretive tension extends to other plural forms such as cherubim, seraphim, and ophanim.
The common apologetic response is that Hebrew morphology does not always indicate numeric plurality into metaphysical gibberish.
This often goes into the nonsense of plurals of majesty nonsense which then also gets used by Christians and in a greater distorted sense in Islam.
That is linguistically correct—but selectively applied interpretations often raise questions about consistency in how similar grammatical structures are treated across different contexts.
Additionally, later theological developments reinterpret earlier divine depictions, including anthropomorphic or plural-associated language, into strictly singular conceptual frameworks.
This reflects theological harmonization rather than straightforward continuity with earlier textual foundations.
The result is a tradition that often requires multi-layered interpretive frameworks to reconcile internal textual variation.
Islam: Moral Interpretation and Historical Context
My rejection of Islam came primarily through moral and ethical objections as I understood them through common readings of historical and doctrinal material.
These concerns included themes of conquest narratives, legal structures around warfare, treatment of non-believers in historical jurisprudence, and social norms such as slavery and marriage practices in pre-modern contexts.
It is also important to acknowledge that Islamic legal and theological traditions are not monolithic.
They contain extensive internal debate, interpretive schools, and historically contingent rulings.
Many contemporary scholars argue that popular polemical summaries often extract rulings without their legal or historical frameworks, leading to distorted impressions of uniformity.
This brings us to Sharia.
Wüstenfeld’s Compilation (1858–1860)
The original, complete text written by Ibn Ishaq (d. 767 CE) did not survive as a standalone, continuous manuscript. Instead, what modern history interacts with is a heavily edited, later recension by another scholar, Ibn Hisham (d. 833 CE).
Between 1858 and 1860, German Orientalist Heinrich Ferdinand Wüstenfeld set out to create the first critical printed edition of this text (Das Leben Muhammed's).
His process aligned precisely with the perspective you noted:
The Fragmentary Hunt: Wüstenfeld spent years visiting university libraries and museums across European academic hubs (such as Göttingen, Paris, London, and Berlin) to track down various scattered Arabic manuscript copies of Ibn Hisham’s work and related historical fragments.
The Reconstruction: He meticulously cross-referenced these surviving manuscripts, comparing omissions, copyist errors, and variations.
The Result: His two-volume Arabic publication became the definitive, stabilized source text for Islamists. Islam's rewritten origins was standardized by a European academic, rather than an Islamic institution.
Guillaume’s Reconstructive Translation (1955)
In the mid-20th century, British scholar Alfred Guillaume took Wüstenfeld’s Arabic compilation and set out to translate it into English. However, Guillaume did not just translate what Wüstenfeld printed; he went a step further in attempting to reverse-engineer the "original," unedited raw materials of Ibn Ishaq.
Re-inserting Banned Material: Ibn Hisham explicitly admitted in his 9th-century introduction that he cut out things from Ibn Ishaq's original text that "would distress certain people" or were considered shameful. Guillaume attempted to find these missing pieces by pulling quotes from later Islamic historians (like al-Tabari) who had read the raw, uncensored Ibn Ishaq before it was lost.
The "Sanitizing" Charge: From the argument that standard translations—including choices made by Guillaume and subsequent localized adaptations, often utilized specific linguistic framing, polished prose, and deliberate reformatting to smooth over problematic, violent, or controversial historical accounts (such as the details of early raids, executions, or the "Satanic Verses" incident).
Meeting Expectations: By organizing the text into a cohesive, readable, and somewhat sanitized biographical narrative, the modern translated Sira ("path," "way," or "journey") effectively reshaped a disjointed medieval text into a palatable, systematic account that better aligned with modern religious expectations and standard orthodox views than actual history.
Generally, Muslim Islamic Extremists are not allowed to teach anything about Islamic law to anyone not in the faith or to anyone not learning to become a Muslim.
Many traditional legal scholars note that a non-Muslim should not directly touch a physical Arabic copy of the Quran (Mushaf) out of "respect for its sanctity."
However, reading a translated copy, a digital version, or a textbook explaining the law is entirely permissible.
Then there is the child brides thing which is also unacceptable to me no matter the "excuses" or "justification" which are excuses and justification I can neither accept nor tolerate.
Nevertheless, my issue was not merely with isolated doctrines, but with what I perceived as insufficient rejection or moral distancing in later interpretive traditions regarding practices that moral and ethical frameworks widely condemn and are fundamentally incompatible with.
European “Paganism” and Reconstruction Traditions
I then turned toward alleged pre-Christian European sources and folklore traditions. The amount of nonsense turned out to be either just as bad, if not worse scholastic inventions than actual history, and superficial topical reports or claims.
The major problems:
Here, the problem shifted from doctrinal inconsistency to evidentiary scarcity.
Much of what is labeled “paganism” today is taken from Christianity.
Most re-constructionists also draw from specifically medieval Christian accounts.
Then they slap in unrelated "comparative mythology" rather than continuous preserved tradition.
The rest is perpetual persecuted victim complexes and "anti-Christian rhetoric mainly and making claims so outlandish they contradict their complaints they began with.
Modern Neopagan movements—particularly those emerging from 18th–20th century occult and esoteric circles, often blend historical fragments with later ideological and dishonest systems.
While these reconstructions may hold cultural or spiritual value for practitioners, they are frequently not direct survivals of ancient organized religions in a strict historical sense and most of it centers around claimed practices that also hold more than a few moral and ethical concerns and better left in the past.
Archaeology and historical linguistics have clarified some elements while disproving others, but public narratives often lag behind scholarship, leading to persistent mythologized versions of the past.
Many complain and say my standards are too high or too abrasive.
At least I have standards and I am not being abrasive; just honest.
Philosophy: Clarity Without Consensus
Turning to philosophy did not resolve the issue.
Philosophical systems often suffer from misrepresentation, oversimplification, or selective quotation. Ideas become slogans detached from their original argumentative structure. Even rigorous frameworks are frequently repackaged as identity positions rather than analytical systems.
Instead of clarity, philosophy offered fragmentation:
Competing systems without final arbitration mechanisms for truth claims outside logic and coherence.
Misrepresentation of the particular school of philosophic thought.
Redirected from teaching one how to think to what to think.
Reinforced through distortion to cater to confirmation biases.
I found the same issues in most fields of the sciences where science is only useful when it is used as a counterargument, and rejected when it conflicts with the counterarguments claims.
The Pattern Across Systems
Across all traditions and identities, I found the same thing again and again as a recurring pattern that emerged that is not mostly a "religious or nonreligious issue. Its a mutual issue.
The shared patterns:
Texts develop layers of assumptions and interpretation over time.
Over time, assumptions and interpretation over time and treated as incontestable facts.
Contradictions are resolved through reinterpretation rather than rejection.
Foundational claims are often reconstructed to fit later doctrinal needs.
Historical context is frequently secondary to theological or academic continuity.
This creates systems that are internally adaptable, distorted and often presented as "to difficult to evaluate as stable truth-claims" so it becomes set aside for sake of "avoidance of conflict" when it is factual avoidance does not resolve anything and many things must be confronted and corrected, not merely ignored and catering to adopted or indoctrinated ignorance reinforced by cowardly arrogance.
Conclusion: A Shift in Method, Not a Vacuum
The outcome of this process was not the adoption of a new religion or ideology, but a methodological shift.
Instead of accepting inherited systems as complete explanations, I moved toward evaluating claims based on traceability, historical grounding, and internal coherence.
The goal was not to reject meaning, but to separate interpretation from fact, and tradition from verification.
What remains is not a replacement system—but a refusal to confuse narrative continuity with certainty and to establish standards long since cast aside for modern compliance and external validation driven social politics.
However, all this is not a sweeping statement because I am not saying "all people" involved in these different things are "bad" by default. That simply isn't factual and I refuse to by defined in such a manner.
I am stating clear and known issues I have addressed in many ways and stated clearly I have not just taken a different road, but rather I have cut through to lay down my own path and invite others to travel it with me or create their own with the advice not to do so haphazardly.
Also, some lived and learned advice:
Avoid anything that is over hyped. It's usually a scam.
Not everything said to be true is true.
Not everything said to be false is false.
Intuition is useful but it is not useful as one's only guide.
Feelings are irrelevant of facts.
You cannot reconcile things that are fundamentally opposed in context, content, quality or nature.
It is often better to piss off everyone and succeed than try and please everyone and fail.
There is nothing wrong with being wrong, but it is a failure of yourself to yourself when you discover you are wrong and not change your position or view.
Truth has no feelings and truth is not personal; only personal experience and assumptions are personal, so there is no such thing as personal truth, just personal assumptions.
Relying exclusively on AI or similar systems for research is not advisable; outputs can be incomplete, incorrect, or misleading if not verified against primary or academic sources.
AI systems can appear highly personalized and persuasive because they generate contextually assumed relevant data but draw broadly applicable responses at scale from non academic sources, upon which they are trained.
AI firms today are using what you describe as a “1948 circus-style psychology trick” operating at trillion-dollar scale, where systems produce generic but seemingly personally relevant responses that create a feeling of accuracy and personal alignment.
Major AI companies may leverage mainstream media narratives and government adoption strategies (including the USA and China) as indirect marketing channels, and that public messaging around urgency or fear may function as a tool to accelerate adoption in ways comparable to classic persuasion or sales tactics.
Now, to be clear, I do not have issues with reliable content or with AI being used to clean up and create better renditions of original designs and visual works. I see it as having some use for improving grammar and catching spelling errors much more quickly (though often the suggested alternatives are also wrong).
I also can see AI as a useful tool for quickly gathering information, but often imposed selective policies and attempts at over-sanitization of content also get in the way of research, especially if it is deemed “controversial,” playing into that “trying to please everyone” nonsense.
In that sense, it becomes a tool for suppressing free speech and free expression, which is why it should be banned for students K–12, as it retards learning, critical thinking, and discourages questioning or challenging.
It is also often extremely condescending in tone in ways that children—especially, and unfortunately more adults these days—do not have the cognitive maturity to fully comprehend or grasp.
The real question then comes down to something we must all be diligent to address and answer: Do we really need AI in every single thing? The simple answer is no, and no we do not need all the excessive data centers that are in fact incompatible with the natural world and over all environments where they are dropped.
We dont need them to run mobile devices.
We don't need them to control or distribute content.
We don't need them to control and claim to own our identities.
We dont need them to farm, fish, hunt, build, create, etc.
The lack of controls over all these things are their own issues, but again, that all shows once more the same things I found in every other subject. Its just the latest trapping of the same old problem and the false belief we all have to just accept it.
