Wow, two of my old threads have surfaced up lately, how strange.

Bubbles I feel quite similar to how you feel. Or I did... Totally different journey than what you're going through, but I understand where you're coming from. It's so hard to find TRUTH. It is so hard! I never really had any sort of feeling that God existed, but I recently have begun to feel he does... Somehow. But about Islam and religion in general, I have been learning for years, and I had no sense of what might be true (I only have very few things I feel are truth now, and they're not even necessarily part of Islam). You probably have learned a lot from the Internet and it's hard, confusing, frustrating because you hear the more extreme views of all sorts of Islam's "sects". I know that here on Free-Minds, people stay away from sects and just want to be Muslim, but somewhere, we can feel that there's division even among them (the ones who follow Code 19 and those who don't for one), and obviously between them and the ones who follow Hadiths. And it's as though there's no "less extreme" way of fully submitting to God. I mean, it feels as though to fully submit to God, you need to find the ultimate truth about every possible issue, something that is impossible. It's as though it's impossble to fully submit to God.

I'm not sure quite where I was going with this, but I guess it was just to say that I feel what you feel. I feel that all this information is sometimes bringing me further away from God rather than closer.

Thanks for all the replies. Lobster, you wrote basically what I actually feel. That the most important thing is to focus on being good, following what I know is good, staying away from what I know is bad. And I do feel that if there's a God, he will understand. But this sentence shows that I'm not even fully convinced there is a God. My situation has improved since I first started the thread, however, and I think I do have some sort of connextion with God.

I focus on following these innate feelings as a way to submit to God right now (as I always did, but in an even more active way). But I want more. This is what I have figured out is truth, but I want to know more. I still need to figure out if I believe in the Qur'an as the word of God. If I do, then it's something I will need to use as a guide in addition to my innate feelings. And I could only become closer to God. If not, then at least this will have been eliminated from my life. It's quite a journey.

I think a person should be abstaining from cigarettes on any (every) day, considering it is harmful to his body. That would be the best thing to do. If not, then I feel it's in the spirit of Ramadan to abstain from smoking during Ramadan at least.

Thank you for all the responses and sorry for not replying sooner. I had been busy and hadn't returned to see most of the responses until now. I will think more about all of what has been written, and will read the articles suggested. Thank you very much. And I do feel a bit enlightened )

Thanks, rsw. I love the verses that you pulled out and really enjoyed that. I try to read the Quran when I can because I figure that if it is the truth, by reading it, it will really just jump out at me, but I have been quite busy and can hardly find enough time to myself to get to really reading the Qur'an.

Wakas, thanks for those links.

pvb, I do know that some Christians are dedicated to God. I just don't know many personally. Religious Christians are hard to find around here. The elderly are the only ones who go to church, and really, half the churches in my city have been sold in the past 2 or 3 years, but it was a long time coming. I have never had any desire to try another church, or even go to my own, which I have been to only for baptisms, weddings and funerals (baptisms and weddings should be singular, it has been one of each in my whole life even though most people I know are Catholic). I have been to more aqiqah's than baptisms and I just recently have had Muslims in my life (my husband is Muslim and we have been married for 2.5 years). To get to the point, I have tried to learn about Christianity in different forms (the beliefs of different denominations) but it's just not what I believe in. The basic beliefs just aren't there.

Sunnis make babies just so that they can be higher in percentage.
Peace.

Hehe! My husband is Sunni and I'm... "searching". He always wanted to marry a Christian (or something) so that he could have kids with her and so prevent her kids from being non-Sunni and getting the number of Sunnis to be higher, as well as figuring she'd probably convert too. What a weird way of seeing things. I'm never going to be Sunni though, and maybe not even Muslim, and I will definitely teach my child to be more open-minded than most Sunnis are when it comes to beliefs. That there exist different interpretations, etc. So she probably won't be Sunni either. I guess he missed his shot with me!

On the show "This Hour has 22 Minutes", which is a Canadian show, Rick Mercer went out to prove how little the Americans knew about us Canadians.

He made them agree with ridiculous statements. It was really hilarious to watch how little they could possibly know about us.

http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_to_Americans

You can check the list of things they did, which includes

• persuading Americans to congratulate Canada on legalizing VCRs or adopting the twenty-four-hour day,

• congratulating Canada for officially joining North America,

• agreeing that the U.S. should bomb Saskatchewan or send ground troops into Gilles Duceppe

But the worst one was when Rick Mercer met George W. Bush (who was then goveror).

"The most famous segment, aired in 2000, featured Mercer asking then-presidential candidate George W. Bush ? who had previously stated that "you can't stump me on world leaders" ? for his reaction to an endorsement by Canadian Prime Minister "Jean Poutine", as well as to report the "traditional visit to the US" of the "King of Canada", Lucien Bonhomme.

Bush said he looked forward to working together with his future counterpart to the north, praised his support of free trade, and looked forward to the King's visit. That said, Bush never actually used the name of Poutine and only failed to correct Mercer on the name. A few years later, when Bush made his first official visit to Canada, he said during a speech, 'There's a prominent citizen who endorsed me in the 2000 election, and I wanted a chance to finally thank him for that endorsement. I was hoping to meet Jean Poutine.' "

For sure there were some Americans just joking around when they agreed and some of them didn't agree, but it's still nuts to imagine how many probably did believe everything. And George Bush with Jean POUTINE! Looooool. I miss poutine, to be honest. It's delicious.

Thanks for the replies.

I think I might start praying soon. There really isn't any good reason to wait until I'm sure of everything since that could take a while. The sooner the better, alterations can always be made later when I learn more.

I still have the issue of my husband, who does not support Qur'an Only at all. Maybe not even enough to let me practice it that way. And he is impossible to discuss with. He sees Qur'an Only as hating the prophet and doesn't seem to understand the simple idea of not trusting the people who compiled and collected the hadiths. And he uses hadiths to try to support hadiths. It's all very weird and exhausting and frustrating, really. I feel like I'm talking to a child who doesn't understand rules of argumentation...

He keeps on trying to prove something by saying that on God's throne, it's written that there is no other God than God and that Muhammad is his Messenger.

Any tips on how to deal with him? I've tried everything, but there is a very thick barrier there that prevents him from thinking about things in different ways or even accepting that different ideas exist. Must be the way he was educated.

I don't know what to believe about God. I was raised in a non-religious Catholic family and I never had much of a sense that there was a Jesus/God. I never believed in Christianity and wasn't too shy about it... It was when I was introduced to Islam that I began to think that there might be a God. I think it was just the way that Muslims are dedicated to God, and how clear the religion was/seemed (I realize now that it's quite complicated to figure it all out).

But what I'm still struggling with is "feeling" God. I see some people really feeling that they want to worship God and want to please God. They feel a love for God. I don't have any of these feelings towards God. I am amazed by a lot of things in life and I think that there must be some sort of all-controlling "force", but does that mean it wants to be worshipped?

I really don't know what to think about it all... And I want to find this connection to God that so many people have. It's like having some sort of reason for life... But I don't feel it...

Any ideas/thoughts?

I'm trying to find a way to understand something that doesn't seem to make sense to me. It's about free will. I don't feel like we have free will like we think we do. I mean, we are all born different biologically, and that includes the way we think and our temperament... and even more than that, we are all born in different circumstances and experience different things which shape us. Put those two things together and they determine a lot of the actions we make, thoughts we have, etc. I'm sure most of you believe that God determined these things (our height, our skin colour, our temperaments, our place of birth, our parents, our general family income, etc. etc.) and considering that all this will have an effect on the things we decide to do, how free are our "decisions"?? And if we don't have the free will, how can God punish us for doing what we did?

I really hope I can find a way to accept the concept of free will... and of people deserving punishments for sins, because I just feel now that we don't all have the same chance to be good and obey God, and if we don't start with the same chance, then it's unfair, basically, and that's not a characteristic of God.

So who is fasting this month?

I am not Muslim yet, but I have been learning a lot over the past year or so, mostly about Sunni Islam, until recently, and I feel as though I may have found the true path. I have been having ups and downs about if I feel Islam is the right religion. Hadiths have confused me, which is why coming across Qur'an Only Islam on submission.org really got me excited about finding a true path; something that really made sense to me.

There are still a few things that I am unsure about. Mostly, the praying... It's such an important part of a Muslim's life, and yet the Qur'an doesn't describe it in a very specific manner. From what I have read, I could probably not manage to find a suitable way to pray without guidance from someone else, which makes me think Who better than the prophet? but then... How accurate is the tradition of praying?

The question I set out to ask in the first place is

Do you think I should become Muslim now, following a certain way of praying and observing rituals until I am able to research more and figure it out fully for myself or should I wait until it has all been figured out until I convert?