My parents are muslims and as a child they've always indoctrinated me that non-muslims are going to hell no matter how kind they are as a person. Now i am a closeted atheist, about to kill myself which is a huge sin even for a muslim. I know that religion feeds on peoples fears, but i was raised religious and i can't help but to worry about hell. What if i'm wrong and the afterlife actually exists? This has stopped me many times from attempting, which is a problem. How do you guys convince yourselves that this is it, there's no such thing as an afterlife?
Hi blueclover! That sounds really difficult. I'm not Muslim, and am darn naive even though I've tried to learn about it. Locating myself, my understanding from those who know better is that, because the Qur'an is the received holy word, those who aren't properly trained and studied should not be making interpretations of it nor other received Words. I want to state my awareness of that, and to defer absolutely to those who know better, but my want to offer some solace currently outweighs that religious regard. So here are a few things I might say, while leaving myself fully open to correction.
1. Because the Qur'an is understood as the Holy Word, human attempts at interpretation have often led to conflicting views, and most received versions seem to contain in them what we would understand as contradictions. On one understanding, this means we just cannot comprehend what is there, and so it reads like contradiction. On another understanding, it means we really cannot be certain of quite a lot. And on a third interpretation, it means that things have changed between different revelations. What your parents believe is not necessarily the only way to understand Muslim faith and received Word, and part of why there have been changes to Shari'ah over time.
2. In the Qur'an and other received Word, what we currently call Hell is given a lot of different representations; Allah is too. I want to share a few things I've heard selectively in case it helps. I'm focusing on Muslim beliefs just in case it's hard to reason away all your background, so you know even if your parents are right in some ways, there's leeway here.
a. Not everyone thinks that Hell is eternal. On some interpretations, we hear that Hell is eternal but that claim is modified by "except as the Lord wills it." Because the Muslim God is (despite our focus on hell here) one of grace, benevolence, some scholars have interpreted this as suggesting that God will release sinners from hell in accordance with his merciful nature once their sins have been punished proportionately. On my own naive reading, I've found appeals to "not burdening/taxing a soul beyond its capacity" or similar translations when discussing punishment and reward, and I might think this too suggests that punishment is not without its limits. In the stories we know well like of Moses, many prophets were sent to guide people back to Allah when they weren't believers, and the Word regularly discusses this in terms of grace and graciousness that those astray may be brought back. If we are wrong together and end up in a level of hell, this does not mean it's permanent, and there might still be time and chance through that graciousness and our paying our dues to leave that place. One thing I found again for example:
https://www.alislam.org/quran/app/2:287
b. Revealed word makes many suggestions of what can land us in Hell, and like with Christian interpretations of old testament sins in the Bible, some of these sound quite difficult to live by today, such as avoiding certain kinds of dinnerware, not getting tattooed, never shaving, avoiding braces (when done for aesthetics -- based on my own interpretation of claims about teeth gaps, but young people are also exempted from having their sins recorded in their book, so mostly adults with braces? I'm off track here). Check out some claims in these ahadith:
https://www.iium.edu.my/deed/hadith/bukhari/072_sbt.html If there is a hell, it would be very heavily populated by many folks today. So if we interpret literally, even converting back as a Muslim would require some stringent changes on a more literal read. Reading less literally, we might wonder if the gracious Allah the Word tells us about would measure us against all the same standards that we once were.
This is already too long so I'll end here, and so I don't risk saying even more things about stuff I know basically nothing about. But you are seen and heard by me, and I wish you the peace you deserve
