re: #345 American Sabra

“Experienced Islam” doesn’t make him a Muslim. He lived in Indonesia. He experienced it.

It sounds like you agree that he claimed he was never a Muslim, but you disagree with the idea that he ever really was a Muslim. I’m gonna stop posting on this soon, because I’ve now written so many posts with the word “Muslim” in them that it must seem like I think it’s bad that he used to be a Muslim. I don’t. It’s fine. As I said, it could actually be a good thing in a president.

But here’s the deal: even while he was in a Catholic school in Indonesia, where presumably identifying oneself as a non-Muslim would not bring discrimination, he was identified as a Muslim in school records, where selecting a religion was required. There are accounts of him attending Muslim religious classes, studying the Koran, and praying in Mosques.

Maybe he did all that without really believing what he was practicing. Or maybe, like many kids, he just kind of did it because he was told he was a Muslim, and that’s what Muslims do, without having any deep feelings about it.

My point is this: let’s say, when I was little, I went to Hebrew school every weekend, attended Shabbat services at the temple, told my friends I was Jewish, and had a bar mitzvah. But then later, when I was an adult, I converted to Christianity, and decided that I had actually never really been all that happy with Judaism the whole time, and never really had any deep feelings about it. I would not then go around telling people I had never been Jewish.