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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

I read with great interest your statement that " You cannot be a Muslim

AND an Atheist.

I could easily imagine some progressive, reform-minded Muslims creating

the equivalent of the Jefferson Bible, by taking the Qur'an and

extracting only the moral-ethical portions, and creating

a Masjid in which the form and feeling of Islamic worship

is preserved, but Allah and the Prophet Muhammed are omitted,

and replaced by an ethical humanism and existentialism.

I watched a documentary about one group of Jews who are so

progressive that they have rewritten all their prayers to omit

reference to God, and, in effect, to practice an atheist form of

Judaism which celebrates a kind of existential humanism.

Such a movement was motivated in part by the disillusionment

that many Jews felt over the German holocaust. They felt

that there cannot be a God if such a thing as genocide is

allowed to take place in the world.

Also, one may see such human-centered, humanistic religious

movements, in Christianity, with Jefferson's Bible, where

Thomas Jefferson took scissors, and cut away all the supernatural

and miraculous passages, and left only the moral and ethical

passages.

I am quite certain one might also find such human-centered

(as opposed to God-centered) forms of practice in Hinduism

and Buddhism.

I certainly feel that the Unitarian Universalists are an example

of such a human-centered theology. I feel that terms

such as human-centered, humanist, activist, are more fair than

than terms such as atheist.

I have seen documentaries of Mainland China during Mao's regime

where the youth preached an atheist gospel of humanist

morality, and they were just as pious and zealous as any religion

and they EVEN made up a fictitious peasant saint, who was totally

selfless, and worked tirelessly for the good of society as a

perfect Communist.

See the book "Religion Without God"

http://atheism.about.com/od/bookreviews/fr/ReligWithoutGod.htm

by Ray Billington

and also

http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/dietrich.html

JOHN H. DIETRICH: RELIGION WITHOUT GOD?
1878-1957

The Father of Religious Humanism

by Mason Olds, Unitarian Universalist Minister

John H. Dietrich was born on January 14, 1878, on a farm near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. His family had descended from some German-Swiss who had emigrated to Franklin County, Pennsylvania, in 1710 from the vicinity of Berne, Switzerland. Dietrich's parents were simple, uneducated farm people, his father being a fairly successful sharecropper. His family professed the Reformed faith, which had originated with Ulrich Zwingli, the Zurich reformer in the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation. It was a rural minister who suggested that young John, who was a good student, become a minister.

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