Sharia Islam Appears Little

    An innate need of man appears to be having something bigger than himself. Even atheistic communists worshipped their dictators. Agnostic liberals deified Barack Obama upon his inauguration. Last night, I was thinking about what I upheld as bigger than myself. There are so many things like truth, reality, and love. But what was more personal? At first, I thought it was doing the loving thing which is different from Christ's love as I think that turning the other cheek can be wrong. However, if I were in Christ's day and as powerful a thinker as he is alleged to have been, I would probably have seen that the Jews were seething with anger toward the Romans but they could not express it as they would be wiped out as it turned out a few years later they were. Hence, I might counsel turning the other cheek. But my idea of doing the loving thing did not seem manly enough. So I decided on being the best I can as my highest good. That is something a "manly man" as well as any other person can aspire to be.
    I applied the standard of being the best you can be to Sharia Islam as I had to write an essay (this is it) today. I looked at the bombing, the torture, the mutilation, the demeaning, the superior attitude, the authoritarianism, the wish to live in the seventh century, the overwhelming need to control others, and the cast of death over Sharia Islam, and I saw smallness. I saw tremendous constriction, hate, and the pathetic need to control through force. I saw the individual squashed into a mere speck of a life desperately trying to do every little thing and say every little thing as Allah supposedly wanted him to as - and here's the impossibility- interpreted by individuals who resort to force to make us do and say what they say Allah said to do and say. Not only that, but Allah was told by the Archangel Gabriel? I worked full time at a state mental hospital for four years. I heard many people coming into the hospital saying God was talking to them. If they had attempted to use force to make us comply to what they heard God say had to be done, we would have put them in a locked ward or sent them to the maximum security building. Why can't Sharia Islam stand on its own two feet and not demand force to make people comply with what it teaches?
Isn't that an admission that it is no good? Why should you believe someone who says it is for the good of your afterlife? Especially if these things are written for the first time by people 150 years after Muhammad's death. And this is a religion that rejects people by murder and so many tortures ? Why do you trust these people? Because you can use them to further your force  over others? It all seems so small, so little, so pathetic, so unmanly that you can't leave people alone and give them the freedom to choose.
    Peter Nickerson, Philosophy Major, Class of '68, William and Mary.