I saw a video the other day. A guy explaining Islam in a nutshell, confident, well-spoken, crystal clear. The Quran as the final testament. The corrective filter for everything that came before it. The Torah got corrupted. The Gospel wasn’t properly preserved. So God shifted to the Arab side of the Abrahamic family and delivered the definitive edition.
Clean argument. I’ve heard it before.
Every tradition makes the same claim: We’re the final, uncorrupted version. The others went off the rails. This is the real canon now. That’s not unique revelation, that’s every new writer taking over a long-running comic book series declaring, “Ignore the last twelve issues. This is what actually happened.”
I grew up Sikh, though never particularly religious. I was immersed in the culture, the music, the langar, the community, the aesthetics, but the belief part never quite clicked. And I think I know part of why. Guru Gobind Singh Ji declared the Guru Granth Sahib Ji as the eternal, living Guru partly to eliminate human succession, which had become riddled with political rivalry, imposters, and family-based claims to Guruship. He ended the human Guru line so that no single person could ever again hold that power over the community. But the politics didn’t disappear. They just moved into the committee room of the Gurdwara.
I wasn’t on a spiritual quest. I was just curious: what have billions of people organized their entire lives around?
So I did the reading.
I meditated on the Tao Te Ching. Genuinely beautiful. Stop forcing outcomes. Get out of your own way. Flow with harmony. It gave me something practical I still carry with me.
I sat with the Guru Granth Sahib Ji. Radical equality: no caste, no spiritual hierarchy, no “these people are closer to God.” Just the quiet oneness of everything. That respect lingers.
I wrestled with the Bhagavad Gita. Do your duty without obsessing over results. Detach from the fruit of your actions. Solid life advice, honestly.
I reflected on the Quran’s emphasis on community, responsibility, surrender, and mercy. I walked through the Bible’s Exodus, a raw story of people clinging to faith amid desperation and oppression.
These are good books. Serious wisdom runs through most of them. I genuinely recommend chunks of several.
And then I looked around at the actual communities claiming them. Most Sikhs I know couldn’t tell you what the Granth Sahib actually says. Sikh by birth, Sikh by identity, Sikh by the food they eat at Vaisakhi, but the radical equality their own scripture demands? Gone. Buried under the same caste politics the Gurus explicitly came to destroy.
But that’s not a Sikh problem. That’s everyone’s problem. Ask the average Christian if they’ve read Leviticus. Ask the average Muslim if they’ve sat with the Quran in translation, not just recitation. Ask the average Hindu if they’ve wrestled with the Gita beyond the quotes their parents hung on the wall.
The books are often better than the people claiming them. That’s the quiet tragedy of it. But God? I didn’t find one. And eventually, I stopped caring whether one exists.
Here’s my position: If you’re telling me God exists, that’s your claim. The burden of proof is on you. I’m not spending my one finite life chasing disproof of something with zero compelling evidence. That’s not skepticism, that’s just how reasoning works.
And even if God does exist? Honestly, it’s not my biggest concern right now.
We’ve got AI developing faster than anyone. including the people actually building it, genuinely understands, and there’s already documented research on what it does to human psychology when it goes wrong. We’ve got a world war that isn’t coming, it’s arriving, and religion is in the credits whether you want to admit it or not. We’ve got structural unemployment that’s about to get significantly worse in ways no politician will say out loud. We’ve got thousands of other cascading problems, most of them either caused or made worse by religious tribalism, all of them needed solving yesterday.
And a nontrivial chunk of the sharpest minds who could help are instead locked in debates over whose ancient text is the truly final one.
If a God is watching all this and staying silent, then that God is simply irrelevant to the actual problems on the ground. We need to sort this out ourselves. That’s not nihilism. It’s facing reality.
The fan fiction problem
Something clicked while I was reading: Christianity reads like Jewish fan fiction with a sequel twist. Islam treats the whole Abrahamic saga as material that needed a stronger final act. Each says the same thing, same universe, better plot, fixed protagonist, director’s cut incoming.
You know what else began as fan fiction? Fifty Shades of Grey, it started as Twilight fanfic before becoming its own phenomenon that millions took seriously.
I’m not equating religion to erotica. The point is simpler: the move of “we took the existing lore, corrected what felt broken, and now this is the authoritative version” isn’t sacred. It’s what creators do when they inherit a franchise they think has lost its way. Every reformer, every new tradition, same pattern. The prior version was corrupted. Ours restores purity. Trust us this time.
And here’s my actual theory on why.
Back then, there was no iPhone. No Instagram. No TikTok dances, no Netflix queue, no anime to binge, no KPop fandom to join, no Bollywood, no K-dramas, no console wars. What people had was knowledge, wisdom, culture, and stories. The same things we have now, just in different containers. And just like you get extremists today who are dangerously religious about a TV show, a fandom, an idol, a fictional universe, they had that too, except the only stories available were the ones passed down, written, and collected into books. Out of millions of stories told across centuries, a handful got cult followings. And that’s how religion starts. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just what happens when storytelling is the only entertainment in town and someone’s story hits different.
We didn’t become less extreme. We just got more options.
But the moment it stopped being abstract for me was personal.
People kill for this. Right now, as you’re reading, somewhere someone is committing or justifying violence with God’s name in the justification. I’m not just talking Crusades, Inquisition, or Partition. I’m talking ongoing conflicts, sectarian attacks, and planned actions where devout certainty is often front and center.
That’s the part that breaks the intellectual exercise. If your system includes the ultimate stakes, eternal hell, divine judgment, cosmic accountability, and that still doesn’t prevent the dehumanization, the division, the harm, and sometimes actively fuels it, then what is the fear of God actually accomplishing?
I see more tribalism sparked by religion than by console wars. And console warriors are already unhinged.
Fear makes a lousy foundation for morality. If the only thing stopping you from hurting others is dread of punishment, you’re not good, you’re just risk-averse. And the evidence suggests the aversion isn’t even that strong.
I don’t need hell to refrain from harm. I simply don’t want to hurt people. That’s the whole system.
Yes, some of the kindest people I know are deeply religious. This isn’t about them personally. They’re often decent in spite of the harsher doctrinal elements, not purely because of them.
I’ve taken what the books actually offered me, harmony, equality, duty, compassion, community, and kept those. They’re useful. I just don’t need a deity bolted on to make them stick.
What I’d actually recommend instead?
Tolkien.
If you want epic tales of good versus evil, sacrifice, quiet courage, and ordinary people mattering in a world that’s actively unraveling, read The Lord of the Rings. The moral clarity feels cleaner. The world-building is richer. The reminder that even the smallest person can shift the tide lands harder than many sermons.
And if your male role model is Aragorn, you’ll turn up decent.
In an age of the Manosphere, of alpha male podcasts and red pill rhetoric and men being told that dominance is strength and vulnerability is weakness, Aragorn is a quiet rebuke to all of it. Here is a man who was destined for a throne and ran from it for decades because he didn’t trust himself with that kind of power. A man who follows before he leads, who listens to a wizard, an elf, a dwarf, a hobbit, and treats none of them as beneath him. A man whose relationship with a woman is built on devotion and mutual sacrifice, not possession. He doesn’t demand respect. He doesn’t perform strength. He just shows up, does what needs doing, and carries the weight without making everyone around him carry his ego as well.
Compare that to what we’re actually working with.
Jesus - genuinely good blueprint, radical compassion, eat with the outcasts, forgive your enemies, the meek shall inherit the earth. Beautiful. And then look at the men who claim him loudest. The ones screaming about Christian nationalism, about wives submitting, about God ordaining their dominance. They took a man who washed feet and turned him into a justification for the exact thing he preached against.
Moses led an entire people out of slavery and still spent forty years in the desert arguing with God and losing his temper. Relatable. But the model of leadership he represents, the chosen man, the singular prophet, the one voice of God — is exactly the template that every cult leader, every authoritarian pastor, every “I alone can fix it” politician has been running ever since.
Arjuna at least had the self-awareness to stop before the battle and say wait, something about this feels wrong. That moment of doubt on the battlefield is more honest than most religious certainty I’ve encountered. But then Krishna talks him back into the war. Do your duty. Detach from the outcome. And Arjuna picks up his bow. The Gita is profound. It is also, if you read it a certain way, a very sophisticated argument for why you should do what you’re told.
Edward Cullen. I’m not spending long here. A century-old man who watches a teenage girl sleep and calls it love. The Manosphere didn’t invent possessiveness dressed up as devotion, Twilight had a bestselling franchise built on it. Millions of people found it romantic. That tells you more about how we’ve been trained to read male intensity than anything else.
Thor, at least in the arc that actually works, is the story of a man who had to lose everything he thought made him worthy before he became worth anything. His power, his hammer, his throne, his certainty. That’s a decent story. The problem is most men get the early Thor, the entitlement, the ego, the assumption that strength is enough, and never stick around for the rest of the arc.
That’s not the alpha. That’s a grown man. There’s a difference, and apparently we need a fictional ranger from Middle-earth to explain it now.
And crucially, nobody has launched a war over it yet.
You can’t look at the world right now and tell me with a straight face that God is the solution. From where I’m standing, God is part of the problem statement.
If this resonated, or if it made you want to argue back, both reactions are welcome. That’s kind of the point.
Hahaha good one.
You skipped the Torah? It will return...Torah Datang Lagi!