Introduction: My Spiritual Background

I was raised in a purely secular household. My father is a staunch atheist and materialist, rejecting mysticism and the possibility of deities and spirits; my mother was raised a Baptist but seems to be more or less an atheist now. As a child, I attended Sunday School for a little while, but not for very long, and I remember very little about it, mostly just the routine of colouring pictures of Noah’s Ark and the like.

I participated in Beavers, Cubs, and Scouts, which constituted the bulk of my religious participation. The Boy Scouts of Canada is a Christian organisation. Each meeting concluded with the Lord’s Prayer, and the troop participated in community events which sometimes occurred in this or that church. But I did not attend church services otherwise.

I began to be curious about religion in high school, but didn’t explore it in much depth. I did try praying to God a few times, but saw no results and abandoned prayer.

It was not until I was 21 and dropped out of university due to chronic headaches that I became more seriously intrigued by religion and spirituality, perhaps because my illness forced me to question the world around me and the value of supposedly scientific medicine. My room-mate at the time was dabbling in neo-paganism, but the first thing I explored was LaVeyan Satanism, for reasons I cannot now recall. I read the Satanic Bible and The Devil’s Notebook and felt a flash of recognition. It didn’t take me long, however, to discover that LaVeyan Satanism was shallow and that once you’ve read The Satanic Bible and a handful of other things there’s not much left to do. It’s a short path and offers no opportunity for advancement, and as it is atheistic it offers no connection to spirituality.

At the same time, I began to be interested in magic and witchcraft. I experimented, but found myself incapable of sensing the magical energies that were supposedly involved.

I happened to be working on a short story set in 10th century Viking Iceland, and in the name of verisimilitude I began researching the religion of pre-Christian Scandinavia. I became intrigued by the mythology, symbolism, and customs of the reconstructed religion known as “Heathenry” or Asatru, and began to experiment with it. I made offerings to various deities such as Odin, Thor, and Frey, but–as in my experimentation with magic–could not sense the “presence” or acknowledgement of the deities. I became discouraged.

Over the next few years I read much on the subject of spirituality, mostly in the domain of neopagan and reconstructionist religion, including Wicca, Druidry, Heathenry/Asatru, Kemet (Egyptian religion), Roman religion. I experimented with all of them but remained incapable of feeling a connection to any of these systems. I also attempted to learn Buddhist meditation, which met only with frustration because I could not still my mind.

Sometime in the last few years I became aware of Diane Vera’s website on theistic Satanism. I explored the writings there, and attempted a few times to communicate with Satan, to no avail.

I encountered the Quakers, a Christian sect who often take a sceptical approach to the Bible, who focus on finding “that of God” within each person and on charitable and social work and advocacy. Some Quakers take their inspiration from sources beyond Christianity, even to the point of calling themselves Pagan Quakers or Buddhist Quakers. The idea seemed appealing but I had no beliefs on which to base a Quaker approach.

In January 2007, upon seeing the first few episodes of the new CBC comedy Little Mosque on the Prairie, I suddenly, to my great astonishment, became interested in Islam. I began to research the religion as best I could via the internet, and bought a copy of the Qur’an; I became concerned by the vehemently conservative attitude of the overwhelming majority of Muslims and Muslim websites. An acquaintance at university who is a Sufi from Dubai knew of my interest and directed me to a few websites by and for “progressive” Muslims. On one such discussion forum I met Muslims who are not puritanical, but who are nevertheless mostly unwilling to entertain much scepticism about the Qur’an or other founding narratives of Islam.

(When I was in junior high school, I read Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses for the first time, which takes a sceptical and humanistic approach to the Qur’an and Islam. It has formed a large part of my attitude toward sacred texts, namely that they are written by humans with political concerns and are anything but infallible documents. At the time I began researching Islam, I was writing my honours thesis on the novel.)

Through the same forum I met a local progressive Muslim convert, and met with her in person. While she wears the hijab (head scarf), she is otherwise just as liberal as I am and takes a similarly sceptical approach to the Qur’an. She is married to a Catholic (despite the frequent assertion by Muslims that marriage outside the faith is against God’s law). She too has explored various religions. We have had many stimulating discussions. With her I attended the university’s Muslim students’ association’s Friday prayers a few times and was welcomed warmly–more warmly, in fact, than she was when she joined.

I found Islam elegant in the simplicity of its theology and its profound respect and reverence for God. I found the form of the prayers easy to do and not something that felt forced. In the spirit of the theology, I found the popular worship of Prophet Muhammad slightly disturbing, as Muslims are not supposed to worship anything or anyone but God Alone. I found the obsessive-compulsive legalism off-putting and the narrow-minded literalism repulsive. I became concerned by the way Muslims treat women, apostates, non-Muslims, and gays. The Qur’an is a text in the same vein as the Old Testament–violent, xenophobic, and tribal. While many Christians in the West have moved beyond a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible, Muslims have not. Muslim exegesis is in fact more strictly literal and draconian now than it was in the Middle Ages.

Reacting against this puritanism in modern Islam, I have recently turned my attention back to Theistic Satanism. At the same time, however, I find myself unwilling or unable to abandon Islam entirely. I wonder whether I might in fact practice both religions simultaneously.