Muslims and Christians who don’t believe in God? Whatever next?

"8 percent of Christians in India do not believe in God." (Pew Research, 2021)


What do I think


Given our diverse interests, our dinner conversations are generally very lively and interesting. When we really get into a topic, one person, generally the one who starts the topic, will also use their phone at the table. Here’s why. I grew up without internet or cell phones, my parents couldn’t instantly validate, correct, or elaborate on anything we discussed. Our discussion was limited to what we already knew or believed. Now, though, we can dig deeper in real time.

Take a recent dinner conversation: my child mentioned hearing about Jehovah’s Witnesses in India. The questions flew across the table. Was that for real? How many Christians are in India? One phone came out. 2% of Indians are Christians, which equates to roughly 28 million people—almost the population of Texas! 

But any search gives multiple answers. This one also told us that 98 percent of Christians in India do not believe in God. We forgot about the proselytization and instead focused on this seemingly bizarre statement. Some of us doubled up with laughter. How can one identify with an organized religion and not believe in God? 

I could understand the opposite scenario —I can be faith-minded, believing in a higher power, but not ascribe to a particular organized religion. But does it work the other way? 

Curiosity piqued, someone asked about Muslims in India. Thanks to the phone at the table, we learned that that 15% of India’s population—or about 200 million people—are Muslim, giving the country the third-largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia and Pakistan. Then came another surprise: 6% of Muslims in India don’t believe in God. That’s 4 percentage points more than the Christians.

This caught me off guard. I have a bachelor’s degree in Islamic Studies and experience teaching religion to both teens and adults. I’ve always understood the central tenet of Islam to be the declaration of faith. It unites all Muslims across a plethora of interpretations and sects. Muslims are united in their conviction that “there is no God but God and the Prophet Muhammad is the messenger of God.” At least so I thought until this dinner conversation and internet access. How could one possibly be a Muslim (or a Christian for that matter) and not believe in God.

Why You Should Care

Religion, when layered with spirituality, faith, agnosticism, and atheism, is complicated. It shapes our identity and gives us a higher purpose. But when we start finding fault with an organized religion, we can drift away, perhaps searching for another path, adopting an undefined spirituality, or abandoning belief altogether. As Lesley Hazleton points out in her TED Talk, faith isn’t about certainty; it necessarily requires some form of doubt. 

But to abandon faith in any form of higher power entirely is different. It brings a certainty that unfortunately could strip away notions of kindness, stewardship of God’s creation, and our connection with each other through a universal soul. We stop listening to each other, trusting each other, and eventually helping each other as we lose the one higher purpose that we all have. God.

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/06/29/religion-in-india-tolerance-and-segregation/ 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ORDQFh0Byw Lesley Hazleton on Faith and Doubt

Comments

  1. BryrNovember 6, 2024 at 6:41 AM

    I am fascinated by a statement you make here, and it almost flew by me, that the key danger of losing faith in god and the thing that brings about those subsequent calamities is CERTAINTY. I’ve heard the idea of faith requiring some form of doubt before, but the idea of doubt as a spiritual virtue is new to me. As an intellectual virtue, of course. But spiritually, I understood doubt as a condition rather than a FEATURE of faith. So your idea that loss of faith must bring about the opposite of doubt is fascinating. As someone who has struggled but mostly failed to believe in an interventionist god, certainty is hardly how I would describe the product of that failure. But I’m interrogating that experience because of this post. Also, as someone who was not raised in a religious home but whose parents were themselves raised in powerfully devout households, I know and am related to many Catholics who no longer believe in god, although I doubt they would self-identify that way. I wonder if the census that generated the data from India asked what religion a household was and then asked that individual if they believed in god. Those two bits of data could together result in the statistics that made your dinner guests laugh. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Liz TarquinNovember 7, 2024 at 12:19 AM

    I don't really equate atheism with a loss of faith - perhaps I am naive, or just haven't cross examined enough atheists to understand them. I am not particularly religious (decided not to join the Presbyterian Church when I was 13 after delving deeper into what that section was all about). I am wary of religion in general, mostly due to my feelings that people who profess to be very religious tend to also be a bit single minded about their invisible friends. However, I do think of myself as spiritual - call it faith - and open to different ideas that span modern religions. Like broken clocks which ring true twice a day, each world religion is right about a few core things. Ironically, they all talk to tolerance and yet inspire the opposite in their most extreme and cultush form.

    No great conclusion for me here - just thoughts welcoming comment and tolerant of shared and different viewpoints.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousNovember 8, 2024 at 10:47 AM

    Here it is: I am an atheist and I'm trying to be kind to people, honest, and thoughtful of others. I apply the same approach to animals (maybe not snakes and bugs that I'm not very fond of, haha). My 'higher purpose' stems from the idea of humanity/humanism. The world of humanity, despite of it's etymology, also includes flora and fauna, or rather, all living beings. Your conclusion in the last paragraph made me think, always welcome, since I don't see God as an answer. For me the connection comes from the self-awareness and general awareness or consciousness of how destructive are greed, hypocrysy, selfishnes, power hunger, degrees of lunacy, narcisism, and their poisonous effect on societies.

    ReplyDelete
  4. EhsamuddinNovember 14, 2024 at 10:50 PM

    Very nice reflection and in-depth analysis. There are many atheists' in other countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan as well who don't believe in God. But real statistics is not available. Further, there are different type of atheists in the world as per their belief. If you also shade some light on those will be very helpful.

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