As you have probably heard by now, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, former Muslim, former atheist, is now calling herself a Christian.
Her critique of radical Islam is accurate. She was brutalized when she was young by Islam (female genital mutilation, among other things). Then, for over ten years in America, she has had to live with the fear of being killed by Muslim extremists. She even had to have bodyguards. This takes an emotional toll on a person.
So she turned to atheism, which she found philosophically justifiable, but it evidently did not give her the emotional support she was looking for. She doesn’t mention secular humanist groups, which might have provided that. She also appears to have bought into the religious lie that god-belief is necessary for civilization and to live an ethical life. She also claims “Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage.” Is she unaware of the Christian Nationalist movement?
In the end, she appears to have turned to Christianity for emotional reasons. I say this because nowhere does she offer any evidence for anything supernatural. She also thinks Christianity is the best way to counter radical Islam, evidently not realizing that when most people leave their religion they go to agnosticism or atheism, not another religion – because the same critiques that can be used against the supernatural beliefs of one religion can be used against all of them.
Christianity is dying in America, but it still has enough clout to stop its logical replacement: secular humanism. So we are in a confusing middle ground for some people. The plight of Ayaan Hirsi Ali reminds me a lot of that of Sinead O’Conner. She has my sympathy.
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