The Issue of Islamic Conservatism

[Alan V]

The issue of religions is not that different. In the 1982 movie called Gandhi, you can hear Gandhi say “I am a Muslim, I am a Hindu, I am a Sikh, I am a Christian”. What he means is that all these religions have this “basic message” I am talking about.

That's a nice hope, and it is similar to what the Sufis sometimes say.  But I don't think it is realistic.

I am not a Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Christian, or any other variety of religious person.  Those are all out-dated systems of thought in my opinion.
 

The Abrahamic God says “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me”. So where is the solution when the conservative ones love dollar bills more than religious scriptures?

Here's the way I see it.  We all share a common human nature, a psychology which was evolved over thousands of years so that we adapt to our immediate circumstances.

This means that people adopt one religion over another primarily to integrate socially, to gain the benefits of that social integration in terms of surviving and thriving.  In other words, in most cases we do not do it because we are convinced of the truth of our religious beliefs.  We are, in fact, behaving opportunistically just as we were evolved to do.

Only a certain number of people spend the time and efforts to really examine their belief systems critically.  Many of such people abandon them altogether.

So the opportunists are in the majority, by far.  Only a few are able to really cash in because of it, but they are supported by all of those who have been trained to think they are good people.